Subtraction

FREITAG am Donnerstag is “a breakfast lecture series” organized by the bag and accessory designer/manufacturer FREITAG in collaboration with my good friend Tina Roth Eisenberg, better known as swissmiss. The series is meant to highlight their new Reference collection of media-inspired messenger and city bags, and they’ve invited a few speakers — including myself — to give talks about the state of journalism and the media. The first event is next Thursday morning in Zurich, Switzerland in FREITAG’s very cool-looking Reference Editorial Space.

Zurich is a bit far for many of my readers, I know, but if you’re in Switzerland next week and can make it, you can read more and sign up here.

I came across this interview I conducted in 2008 with former Guardian design director Mark Porter and realized that I had never linked to it here. It ran in the December 2008 issue of Print Magazine (where I now write a monthly column) but that site is notoriously difficult to navigate. The interview is a bit of a relic of history now, as neither Mark nor I are still helming the design groups at our respective news organizations, but I thought it was still interesting enough to post here. Mark recounts his experience acclimating himself to the digital environment after spending most of his career as a print designer, and has some illuminating things to say about where the two schools of thought overlap. Read the full interview here.

The publisher of the once well-regarded media cataloging application confesses that feature creep and a lack of follow-through subverted their ambitions for its second major release, leaving many customers frustrated and disappointed where the company had intended to wow them.

“Let’s say, for instance, 80 percent of these features worked great. I’d think, ‘Yay, I did good, I added a bunch of great stuff to the new version, it was definitely worth US$20 to existing customers.’ But, that’s not how the customers see it — they see the 20 percent that’s buggy, and they think, ‘This is crappy… he released software that didn’t work.’“

This is an object lesson in how success, ambition and even good intentions can lead to a bad product even when the business is fully aligned with the customer experience. It’s also a clever bit of mea culpa-style media spin. Not that I think it’s dishonest; I just find it very savvy. Read the full article

No one’s happier than I am that Apple hasn’t thrown in the towel with its living room efforts. After much neglect, the new Apple TV, announced today, is a step in the right direction: sleeker in size, more capable in content access, network savvier in its diskless approach to media, and — the clincher — more wallet-friendly at US$99. That’s a winning combination, I think.

On the other hand, this new generation of Apple TV doesn’t appear to do too much more that I can’t already do with the older Apple TV and the Netflix Instant Watch-capable Blu-Ray player that I currently have in my living room. In fact, it’s telling that it’s still called just “Apple TV” without some new suffix indicating that it’s a second generation product. For all intents and purposes, it’s the same as what I already have.

That’s fair. I’ve always thought the core Apple TV feature set makes for a device that can do well in the marketplace, and its new price point and other alterations give it a fighting chance.

However, when rumors of an Apple TV reboot first started gaining momentum, what I hoped for was that Apple would undertake a bigger challenge than just making it a more attractive device for consumers. Much in the same way that they fixed the mobile space with the iPhone, and much in the same way they’re trying to fix the problem of true consumer computing with the iPad, I hoped that they would also try to fix the living room. This is a challenge that I wrote about in a general way a year ago in a blog post called “The Living Room Problem,” but luckily for those reading now, I’m going to revisit those sentiments here.

Last week I asked my followers on Twitter if they could recommend a good application to help me track the billable time I’m spending on various client projects. Reaffirming the power of tens of thousands of similarly geeky compatriots, I was quickly deluged with answers, for which I’m very grateful.

I had originally asked for suggestions for software both on the desktop and on the Web, but most of the replies focused on the latter. Which is kind of amazing to me. I remember entering work hours in a hoary old package called Timeslips when I started working as a designer; it ran on one Macintosh in the design studio where I was employed, and the staff had to take turns with it to enter our project hours. It was poorly designed and really painful. Of course that was a long time ago but even five or six years ago, when I was researching time tracking solutions for my old design studio, the pickings were slim.

Now time tracking software is available pretty much anywhere and at any time; a number of the packages suggested to me have iPhone components as well. That’s a lot of progress.

In my cursory review of the links sent to me, I definitely feel that I’m more attracted to a Web-based app, mostly because I think the short-term economics are better for me. I haven’t really settled on which is the best fit, but several folks on Twitter asked me to reflect back on the suggestions I came across, so here we go in no particular order.

I’m so thankful for the day that someone had the idea to combine blogging and comics. For instance, for the past several months I’ve been really enjoying 4CP, a tumblelog-style site that examines vintage comic books — or parts of them — with a curatorial eye. Each post is a detail from a decades-old comic book panel, shown in a kind of extreme focus that reveals the beauty of the ink lines, the textures of the paper and of course the distinctive color halftone screens that are the hallmark of cheap four-color printing.

The images are cropped with great artfulness, and manage to find moments of quiet and restfulness within a style of artwork that has always been about frantic motion, kinetic energy and physical action. Some of the pieces look downright still, as if they were somehow captured from the hidden moments that occur between panels. Even better: clicking on the images reveals high-resolution versions of many of them, where you get an even closer look at the fine details of the substrate and the effect becomes even more immersive.

The Panel Picker for 2011’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival has been live for a few weeks now, soliciting feedback from the general public regarding the many, many fascinating sessions proposed for next year’s big digital meetup in Austin, TX. I’ve been remiss in not pointing out earlier that among the proposals is “Ordering Disorder: Grid Design for the New World,” a solo panel by yours truly.

Graphic design studio Dowling Duncan created this attractive entry to The Dollar Redesign Project which proposes a Modernist take on U.S. currency. Some nice usability considerations have been factored into these designs: the bills are varied in size, with the larger denominations being longer; and the designs are oriented vertically. “When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically.”

Notwithstanding the fact that American popular taste has moved so far away from the International Style for design of government collateral that these proposals haven’t a prayer of being implemented in the real world, they’re nice works nevertheless.

A friend of mine, comedian and writer Todd Levin, has an article in the most recent issue of G.Q. about his experiences writing for, first, “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and then, after moving to Los Angeles, O’Brien’s brief tenure on “The Tonight Show” from its launch to its very public demise. It’s a fascinating and personal peek behind the scenes at one of the more bizarre incidents in television history — and very well written, to boot, which you can tell from this excellent kicker:

“If you’ve ever seen a criminal standing before a firing squad and felt jealous of all the attention he was receiving, then you would have loved writing for Conan O’Brien.”

And then this bit from when it became evident that the network had decided to bring Jay Leno back to late night:

“[Conan] entered the studio unceremoniously, dressed in a leather jacket and baseball hat — like someone getting ready to leave — then slumped into the guest couch and fixed his gaze on the far wall as he addressed us, never really making eye contact. It was a sight that shook your faith a little, like seeing your dad on crutches.”

Read the full essay here. By the way, Todd has also just co-written a book called “Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk,” which he describes as “a parody of all those cringe-inducing sex manuals our parents had lying around, and featuring charcoal illustrations of hairy hippies getting to third base.” Mmm.

Since I left my job at The New York Times in July, I’ve been working with a few companies in various capacities, and each of these relationships has in their own way required me to sign paperwork of some kind. Non-disclosure forms, independent contractor agreements, tax forms and the like.

The thorniest ones have been the contracts, which require not just my signature but a counter-signature too. This stuff typically comes to me via email attachments. I’ll print them out, initial each page and sign on the dotted line. Then I’ll run the whole document through my indispensable Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M document scanner, which creates a PDF version in practically a blink of the eye, and send it back to the other party as an email attachment. If that party has scanning capabilities, then they’ll send me back a new PDF with their signature; just as often as not, they’ll have to put final copies in the mail or defer the handoff until we next meet face-to-face.

Moviegoers who saw Pixar’s “Toy Story 3” in theaters will surely remember the studio’s delightful animated short “Day & Night,” a typically brilliant lead-in to the feature that has now been adapted into a hardbound children’s book (already available for sale on Amazon.)

To my mind, this is the kind of thing that separates Pixar apart from all other film studios, whether producing animated or live action fare: they respect the stories and characters they create enough to find appropriate expressions for them in other media even when, as is the case here, there’s probably not a lot of money to be made. Compared to the large-scale public appetite for Buzz Lightyear tie-in products, there were probably very few who were clamoring to see the “Day & Night” characters get their own book, yet Pixar went to the trouble of making it happen anyway.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of my favorite authors and I make no apologies for being yet another of his countless fans who considers “The Great Gatsby” to be my favorite book of all time. In fact, I own, in some form or another, most of Fitzgerald’s works, but these new editions from Penguin Classics are so aesthetically striking — and smart in their execution — that I would seriously consider buying them again. In fact, the new packaging for “Gatsby,” is in my mind such an improvement over the original, iconic yet highly imperfect cover illustration that I would gladly own it just so I don’t have to look at that old one anymore.

From the age of five to the age of seventeen, I lived in the D.C. metropolitan area, where I spent a lot of time riding the Metrorail subway system. In retrospect, I have to credit the repeated exposure to the system’s beautiful modernist architecture and typography for influencing my design sensibilities. It featured a distinctive pylon-based signage system that was originally designed by Vignelli Associates, though it had already been somewhat corrupted from its original form with additional wall signage by the time I was riding it. (I actually found the wall signage helpful, I must admit.)

After a few months of owing it, I keep finding more and more uses for my iPad, many of them not possible on my Mac or my iPhone, and my affection for it keeps ratcheting up accordingly. At the same time, there are at least a handful of irritating shortcomings on the platform that I’m impatiently waiting for Apple to address. I know it’s been less than a full year since the iPad debuted, and perhaps there’s a significant upgrade due soon, but for now, I find that using the iPad is more frustrating than it needs to be.

In large part this is owing to the fact that iOS 4 is so good, making its current unavailability for the iPad feel particularly vexing. In the few short months since I’ve owned my iPhone 4, I’ve become thoroughly reliant on the iOS 4 unified inbox within Mail, for instance — I’m amazed that I ever lived without it on my iPhone and annoyed that I have to live without it still on my iPad. Also, the major efficiency gains that iOS 4’s multitasking makes possible have become second nature to me on the iPhone. Meanwhile, switching between apps on the iPad and having to wait for each app to load from scratch every time I access it seems like an archaic custom leftover from the first decade of the century.

Among features that the iPad does share with the iPhone, the ability to undo actions seems more rote than useful. As a gesture to invoke the Undo command, shaking a handheld device the size of an iPhone is clever and workable. Shaking a much larger device like the iPad is awkward at best and violates one infrequently violated but nevertheless important law of good user interface design: don’t force the user to look like a fool [original euphemism deleted in deference to British sensitivities] in order to use any given feature.

Last week I tweeted this eye-opening guide to spotting an ATM skimmer published by the invaluable Snopes.com. Like a lot of people, I’d heard of ATM skimmers before — duplicate card readers and wireless cameras surreptitiously attached to cash machines with the intent of stealing your card number and PIN — but I had no idea what form they actually took. The visual evidence was striking; skimmers are uncanny mimics of the visual language of ATMs. The colors, shapes and peculiar plasticity that we’re all familiar with are faithfully reproduced in their ersatz forms. I had no idea they could blend into a cash machine’s hardware so expertly.

On the thirtieth anniversary of “The Empire Strikes Back” — the high point in the trilogy — producer Gary Kurtz talks to The Los Angeles Times about his participation in the films. Kurtz was the producer for the first two installments and parted ways with creator George Lucas on the third over differences on its narrative direction.

“I could see where things were headed… The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It’s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.”

That explains everything, including the sense of tedium that hung over large swaths of “Return of the Jedi” and the miserable pall that hovered over all three of the franchise’s miserable, pathetic prequels.

Illustrator Adam Sidwell is creating a new illustrated portrait of a (usually) fictional bad guy once a week. Some of my favorites include Tyler Durden and Locke from “Lost”. He’s also selling limited edition prints of the illustrations.

A mathematician from Kent State University, an engineer at Google, a math teacher from Darmstadt, Germany, and a programmer from Palo Alto, California arrive at some definitive conclusions regarding the thirty-six year old Rubik’s Cube puzzle:

“With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik’s Cube, and shown that no position requires more than twenty moves… There are many different algorithms, varying in complexity and number of moves required, but those that can be memorized by a mortal typically require more than forty moves. One may suppose God would use a much more efficient algorithm, one that always uses the shortest sequence of moves; this is known as God’s Algorithm. The number of moves this algorithm would take in the worst case is called God’s Number. At long last, God’s Number has been shown to be 20.”

A great blog from artist Cole Pierce, designer and Twitter pal o’ mine Able Parris, and my friend and former design colleague at The New York Times Jeremy Zilar that collects recordings of “sound from the field.” The Chicago Reader recently voted it “best amateur music blog” and describes it this way:

“That means several posts a day that range from performances of music by little-known contemporary composers to video of oddball circuit-bent instruments and elaborate mechanical ensembles that play themselves, along with the occasional dude-and-guitar clip or actual music video. The blog is ecumenical in its tastes, though it leans a little toward the electroacoustic and ambient — and there are absolutely no reposts of clubby remixes of popular indie bands.”

It’s a nice little project, plus it uses Robbie Manson’s nicely done Vignelli theme for Tumblr. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony that, just a day after I posted about Tumblr’s propensity for shallow identity that I’m citing two instances where that’s not the case.) Read the Chicago Reader write-up here or visit Field Mic here.

A superficial but well-executed student project that plays with typography, architecture and vantage point. I like it.

The micro-blogging service Tumblr is among the most impressive startups I’ve seen rise in popularity over the past few years and yet when I look at it, I’m filled with ambivalence. On the one hand, it makes me mad as heck because I feel a sense of personal failure for not having thought of it. Its essential formula is so obvious as to be nearly banal: make the act of blogging absurdly simple. Not ‘make the act of blogging simpler,’ or even ‘much, much simpler,’ but rather ‘make the act of blogging as absurdly simple as it can possibly be made.’

And in the execution of this idea, there is great beauty. Throughout, Tumblr is intoxicatingly easy to use, to peruse and to participate in. A surprisingly high percentage of its templates are uncommonly attractive, thoughtfully assembled and worthwhile. And the gentle, effortless satisfaction of its “reblog” feature is a milestone in interaction design. In fact, I’d go so far as to say Tumblr’s central innovation is its design. The technology is relatively mundane, with seemingly very little of it being particularly new or interesting. Nevertheless, it weaves these pieces together into a transcendently superb user experience. More than nearly any other new venture in recent memory, Tumblr seems like one of the great new design companies.

A handful of simple, beautifully designed and helpful primers on great typography — free for download.

Just a note to say that as of Sunday, I’m officially back in the fold with Jim Coudal’s excellent ad network, The Deck. Once again, in the right column of this site, you’ll find small, hopefully unobtrusive but nevertheless effective and worthwhile ads from one of The Deck’s many well-vetted advertisers. You can find out more about the network here. I was a member of The Deck a few years ago but, in compliance with justly cautious ethics policies at my former employer, I removed the ads. I’m indebted to Jim for reaching out to me almost as soon as I announced my resignation to ask me to rejoin.

A reporter from Manhattan’s upper crust weekly interviewed me last week for this short article about my recent departure from The New York Times. Its contents will be mostly familiar to most readers of this blog, but then again Observer readers probably don’t read this blog.

Photographer Peter Belanger took a picture of Apple’s new iPhone 4 with another iPhone 4. He also restricted himself to using only the output of the camera, with no retouching or Photoshop trickery, techniques almost invariably employed when shooting with more capable and more professional cameras. The result is impressive, though speaking from personal experience I find the camera inside the iPhone 4 to be challenging to control: if you have just the right shooting circumstances — or an aggressively managed lighting environment as Belanger does — it can of course produce remarkable images. But given more realistic and random lighting situations, I’ve only been able to produce mediocre pictures.

The director of the excellent documentaries about design “Helvetica” and “Objectified” plans to complete his trilogy with a film about the design of cities. Alissa Walker writes:

“While ‘Urbanized’ will feature the signature superstar architects and city planners and politicians and commercial developers, Hustwit says he will also feature non-designers who have had a role in shaping their communities. ‘People take it for granted that they have to wait in traffic or that a certain part of the city will always be run-down,’ he says, noting that it’s those empowered citizens who often originate ‘really creative, modest but brilliant solutions.’ Hustwit stresses that ‘Urbanized’ will focus on getting people to understand that they can change their cities themselves.”

Read the full Fast Company exclusive here, or follow Hustwit’s progress over at the official site for the film.

I’ve gone on record with my general lack of enthusiasm for magazines on the iPad, at least the way they’ve been imagined so far, but I think the self-described “social magazine” Flipboard shows a lot of promise. It’s a smart idea but like a lot of the smartest ideas it’s not a particularly ingenious one on its face: the app aggregates recommendations and links to content made by people within your social network. The beauty is in its execution, which happens to be gorgeous and an example of truly superior user experience design (from what I’ve seen so far). Flipboard’s developers have built an impressive mechanism for automated layout intelligence, and the pages within the app winningly transcend the paradigm of digital templates as aesthetically unremarkable, one-size-fits-all showcases for content.

This project has been up for quite a while but I’m only coming across it now: Tyler Thompson undertakes a hypothetical redesign of flight boarding passes. His original proposal is quite interesting, but what’s even better is the round-robin of alternative designs proposed by readers. Some of them are quite smart. My favorite is this “human boarding pass” from Graphicology.

See the whole lot of them here.

There’s bad news for those of you who like to actually have conversations with your movie-going companions. At least one company is looking to monetize your free time, especially if you get to the theater early to secure good seats.

“Screenvision, which sells and programs in-cinema advertising, wants to spice up the preshow experience. Last week, the company unveiled its plans for a redesigned 20-minute ‘advertainment’ block to marketers in a private presentation in New York. Consumers — Screenvision says it reaches 45 million moviegoers a month — will start to see it at local cinemas in September.”

For me, the central lesson of this age of modern media is that anything can be advertised anywhere, and it’s no use fighting it. Still, the pre-show advertising reel — the ads that come before the trailers — have always struck me as an invasion of privacy. The time that I spend before the trailers belongs to me; the only reason I get to the theater early is because I have to work around the theater’s inability to guarantee me a good seat. To have that time intruded upon by loud, obnoxious advertising is infuriating.