Archives

Hollywood Killer

CollateralUnfortunately, I don’t make it out to the movies on opening night as much as I used to, so by the time I get around to seeing a new movie — in the theaters or, if I’m really behind the times, on DVD — and then actually to writing about it here, the point seems lost. My movie reviews have never been the most popular posts anyway, but I do get a kick out of writing them because I still get a kick out of cinema. Anyway, all of this is by way of excusing this glaringly untimely review of “Collateral,” which I just saw last week.

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Citizen Daddy

Citizen ChangeA few weeks ago I mentioned that Behavior helped Sean “P. Diddy” Combs launch Citizen Change, his voter registration initiative with an extensive, Flash-based multimedia show that accompanied his press conference. Today, I’m happy to say that we’ve just re-launched CitizenChange.com too. It just went live, like, this morning — after a ton of blood, sweat and tears from our design team (I wasn’t a part of it, but it was easy to see that those folks worked their tails off, and with terrific results). Go check it out.

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Painted into an East Village Corner

Howl!The epicenter of the second annual Howl! Festival of East Village Arts is directly across the street from my apartment building on East Ninth Street, in Tompkins Square Park. Along the west and south fences on the park perimerter, the festival organizers have hung a series of makeshift canvases, which, starting yesterday, have been hand-painted and decorated by locals. It’s a democratic idea, but it yields perhaps the most clichéd artwork imaginable — a plethora of artistic bombast and political rants, few of them executed with all that much in the way of imagination.

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Talking Points on Keynote

KeynoteI’m beginning to think that I’ve given up the world of Web design for a career in business presentation graphics. For five weeks now, I’ve been making a regular Friday presentation using Keynote, Apple’s would-be PowerPoint killer. By now, I feel like I have a pretty decent understanding of the ins and outs of both this program and its Microsoft-published competitor. Everyone knows how frustrating PowerPoint can be. But switching to Keynote is more like trading in a bag of a hundred problems for a bag of about fifty — it’s an improvement, but it’s not a solution.

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No One Likes a Cheat

I’m cheating a little bit this evening, because I had written most of this post before I headed off to dinner and then to the movies to see Michael Mann’s “Collateral” (a review to follow soon) — so I’ve back-dated this a bit. Please don’t sue me. In any event, I wanted to say thanks to the very nice response that’s come over the transom to my post from Monday, “New Boxes, Same Arrows.” I really hadn’t expected it, but I was more than happy to see incoming links from the nice folks at Mezzoblue, Airbag and Waxy.org. The traffic and kind comments are very much appreciated.

Chris FaheyAlso, I wanted to correct one point on which I feel that I’ve been unduly clear or on which I’ve been unintentionally misleading: these comps aren’t mine, at least not in their entirety — they were a joint effort. I’m a hundred percent sure that there wouldn’t have been an entry at all without the help of my good friend and Behavior co-founder, Chris Fahey, who provided at least half the brainpower that went into the comps… and really, I think the brains are what makes them. It was also his idea to enter the contest in the first place… so he’s really the one responsible for that fourteen-hour working stretch of my life that I’ll never get back. Thanks, Chris.

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IE, That Is

Internet ExplorerInternet Explorer users: you have my pity, first, for using the worst modern browser available on the market today, and my apologies, second, for insufficiently ensuring that all of my posts render properly in your browser of choice. It appears that some of the div classes I’ve been using to include illustrations, which render competently in Safari, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, Opera and OmniWeb, refuse to show up in Microsoft Internet Explorer, for some reason. I guess it’s a measure of how few of the visitors to my site use IE that no one has complained to me until today. On the other hand, it might speak more loudly to the size of my audience… and not necessarily in a flattering way. Heh. At any rate, I think I’ve fixed most of those entries (they don’t look perfect, but they work) so the 95% of Web users who were staying away from Subtraction.com due to Internet Explorer incompatibilities — y’all come back now, hear?

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New Boxes, Same Arrows

Boxes and ArrowsWell-respected online information architecture magazine Boxes and Arrows announced an open redesign contest last month, the deadline for which was extended until just this morning. I found this out last Friday, when my Behavior colleague, Chris Fahey, suggested that we try to put together a submission.

Initially, I resisted the idea of taking part in this, mostly because of all the work that it was going to involve. The I.A. documents they provided were appropriately high-level for an audience of devoted, would-be contestants ready to finesse every little detail for themselves. For me, on the other hand, they were sufficiently lacking in detail that I knew it would take me a huge chunk of my weekend to sift through all the brain challenges required to get a coherent set of comprehensives designed.

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Square Dancing

Five BoxesHerewith, five boxes drawn with Microsoft PowerPoint on a document Slide Master. All of the boxes are .25-in. square, according to the program’s Format AutoShape dialog box, which allows users to specify these values precisely — in theory. The boxes are also all spaced exactly a quarter of an inch apart from one another and they all reside exactly .3-in. from the top edge, again using Format AutoShape.

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