Archives

Very, Very Soon

Now Christmas is past, what’s left to look forward to but a long and lonely winter? A new Subtraction.com, that’s what! I’m getting very close to finishing this redesign. Right now I’m shooting to relaunch on Mon 03 Jan 2005. If I haven’t lost you completely, please come back then!

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Design into Production

Most of the look and feel is finished. Now I’m rebuilding the templates in Movable Type from scratch, both to correct amateur errors I made the first time around and to take advantage of some of the new features in MT 3.1x. Tonight, I made big progress when I got a rickety version of the home page publishing properly.

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Gobble Gobble

A long holiday like this one would have been the perfect time to get lots of work done on redesigning Subtraction.com, but I’ll be heading out of town this afternoon to spend Thanksgiving with Joy‘s family, then we’re off to the Jersey shore through Sunday afternoon. We’ll be taking advantage of the off-season quietude to relax and take Mister President onto the beach. So, the redesign goes on hold, at least for a few more days. Have a nice holiday!

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Boxes, Arrows, Results

Lots of very, very generous people have written to me to say that we was robbed, that our entry in the redesign contest for the noted information architecture magazine Boxes and Arrows deserved better than to take the bronze in the final judging. I really appreciate all of those comments, so thanks to everyone for your kind thoughts. Thanks too, to Boxes and Arrows for holding the contest, and congratulations to the top prize winners. I can’t wait to see the finished product. By the way, if anybody out there is looking for a new design for their information architecture-focused online magazine, drop me an email. I’ve got one handy.

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On Hiatus

Between balancing my personal life, my office responsibilities, my blogging schedule and my attempts to redesign Subtraction.com, something had to give. So I’ve decided to cut out the blog posts and concentrate instead on implementing a redesign that’s been brewing for months on my hard drive. These interim posts will keep you up to date, but they’ll be narrowly focused on the redesign’s progress only. With luck, I’ll be done in a few weeks

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Blue Boy in a Red State

Guess what, I think I’m going to become a Republican! Just kidding. But right now I’m in Nashville, TN for the first time ever, and in a red state for the first time since whatever it was that happened way back on 02 Nov. No time for a full-length entry right now, but a couple of observations: everybody is really freakin’ nice here and I actually get a really good vibe from the place. Also, last night we stayed in the Opryland Hotel which is like a little bit of Las Vegas served up with some Southern hospitality. It’s a hotel that aims to be a self-enclosed reality — when we checked in, they handed us a map to our room, and we followed the trail through faux roads, past tons of fauna, across a huge courtyard, and beneath a magnificently huge glass ceiling. It has a touch of absurdity to it, but it’s easy to forget (and dismiss) from the limited square-footage living of Manhattan that this is America too.

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Deliciously Indulgent

Delicious LibraryOver at Ars Technica, there’s a terrific review of Delicious Library, the hotly-tipped new media collection management software just released last week. It’s actually a fantastic review, the kind that manages to give a larger context to its subject, and shows how Delicious Library is a testament to the dramatically different mindset of Macintosh programmers. I wish I could find the time and the skill to write that kind of review, but in fairness to myself, John Siracusa’s many other articles for Ars Technica clearly demonstrate that he has a singular and probably God-given talent for ambitious, far-reaching essays on technology. Some geeks get all the breaks.

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That’s “Incredibles!”

The IncrediblesThere’s a lot to like in “The Incredibles,” which I just got around to seeing last Thursday night, and there are a lot more people than me who have the time on their hands to cogently explain what’s so good about this latest movie from the egghead animators’ trust at Pixar. So, rather than try and hobble together a half-baked review that’s little more than the sum of a series of random comments, I’ll offer up just the random comments here.

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Picture Books

Last night I took about 180 snapshots with my new Nikon D70, trying to get a handle on the way the thing works. It was a blast; I was up until 2:00a tinkering, experimenting and poring through books. The books themselves have been a revelation, too. On Naz’s advice, I went looking for an older photography reference that would help me get up to speed on the basics, rather than something brand new off the shelf at a mega-sized bookseller.

He said there were some brilliant layouts to be found among the forgotten photo texts out there, and he was right. I’m enamored with one that my girlfriend took out for me from her school library: the first edition of Barbara London’s “A Short Course in Photography.” It’s a masterful example of traditional design in the modernist school, featuring a page grid executed with a gritty, low-level genius. Though I have a bias towards all things digital, there is a warmth to this book — the black ink on these pages is blotchy and malformed, and the typography and diagrams all lack the inhuman precision and passionless perfection in their edges that can be had effortlessly with today’s design and production techniques. Sometimes it’s nice to see that.

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