Subtraction.com

Font Hunt

2009-11-18T18:26:36-05:00

Giving back to Twitter department: earlier in the month I asked people who follow me on Twitter for recommendations for new typefaces.

What I was looking for was an alternative to the typeface Klavika, which I quite like; it’s among the very best fonts that have been released in the recent past, in my opinion. Inconveniently for me, I somewhat subjectively regard Klavika as having been ‘claimed’ by a friend of mine who uses it more consistently and more effectively than I do.

So I wanted something of my own, something similarly contemporary and similarly strong in its forms, a real workhorse of a typeface that I can call to duty during those times when Helvetica won’t do. I got back tons of replies, and I thought I’d present my favorites here for those who might find themselves on a similar hunt.

Two Lists

Among the many helpful replies, Stephen Coles (tweeting under the handle @typographica also provided two helpful lists of typefaces that he maintains over at Fontshop. The first is a list of Alternatives to DIN, the estimable German typeface that is a spiritual ancestor of Klavika and many similar modern sans serif faces like the ones shown above. The second list is an excellent survey of Sans Serifs from Very Square to Fairly Square, which is entertaining on its own.

Finalists

Along with the ones shown above, I might have gotten about a dozen other suggestions. Of all of them put together, I’ve narrowed the field down to two favorites.

Section

Recommended by Dan Kletter (@soundclamp).

Aside from its clean, solid forms and its somewhat adventurous sense of proportion, it’s actually not much of an accident that Section is so appealing to me. The typeface originates from Lux Typographics, one of eleven young foundries selling their type designs through a co-op called Village — which also happens to be where I first came across another favorite of mine, Apex Serif.

Titillium

Recommended by Matthew Anderson (@ampersanderson).

Finally, just the other day I came across a font of a different breed altogether: the brand new design Titillium is actually an open source project being designed by students at Urbino Accademia di Belle Arti in Italy. The project was first presented a year ago and was updated as recently as late last month; the source files for all of the fonts are freely available for anyone to download and manipulate.

It bewilders me a little how practical it would be to manage the design of a typeface through open source means, but it’s hard to argue with the results. Titillium is gorgeous. Best of all is it’s free; it’s not just the development files that are available, but early ‘builds’ can be downloaded and used right now.

Thanks to everyone for their help with this search, especially to Matthew Anderson, who turned me onto this terrific open source project that I would have otherwise missed entirely. See, Twitter is good for something useful after all.

The Pencil Factory Has ”Fifteen Uses for Newsprint”

2009-11-18T17:07:51-05:00

Fifteen Brooklyn illustrators reminds us of various other useful applications for newsprint. On sale for US$10.

Introducing Basic Maths, a Theme for WordPress

2009-11-14T10:58:57-05:00

Things that have been keeping me from blogging: raising a brand new baby, having grown-up time with my girlfriend, walking my dog, holding down a day job and, now finally revealed: working on Basic Maths, a brand new theme for WordPress that I designed with my friend Allan Cole.

After months of plugging away at in during whatever free time we’ve been able to find, we’re finally releasing it into the wild today, to coincide with WordCampNYC 2009. (In fact, I’m heading over to that conference later today, and Allan will be speaking there early this afternoon, so if you’re there, be sure to say hello.) It’s available right now for purchase at this link — for a limited time only, it costs just US$45, which is less than half the price of other, far less awesome WordPress themes, if you ask me.

But Wait, There’s More

You can head over to Basicmaths.subtraction.com to play with a live demo of the theme, peruse the documentation, and read just about everything you need to know about what makes it special (be sure to click on the VIEW buttons), but here’s are just three of its coolest aspects:

1. Grid Classes in Session

This theme is all about displaying your content in the most stunning way possible, and the core of that is a flexible layout grid that informs the layout of every element. We put a tremendous amount of effort into engineering a suite of CSS classes that work with the grid to make image placement painless. You can see for yourself how flexible this infrastructure is on this blog post, which painstakingly details how to assign classes to images to get the placement you want.

2. Magic Grid View

To make placement of images even easier, be sure to hit CTRL+SHIFT+G on any page within the demo to automagically reveal the grid view — incredibly handy for positioning content!

3. OMG, Color!

Basic Maths is an evolution of the design you see here at Subtraction.com, but it makes a dramatic departure in at least one way: color! The sensibility is still very minimalist, but users can enter any hex color value into a simple theme option within WordPress and change up the color scheme for the theme instantly. It’s pretty neat.

Theme Park

Allan and I started this project almost a year ago, so I’m incredibly happy to see it finally launch. I can’t say enough how much its very existence is a direct result of Allan’s tireless perfectionism; it got designed because of me, but it got awesome — and real — because of Allan. Also, I have to thank my good friend Erin Sparling for helping us out at the last minute when we ran into bugs with the grid view toggling feature mentioned above. He re-wrote the entire feature for us in record time, and really helped us preserve what was for us one of the most unique and critical parts of the theme.

As I mentioned, Basic Maths is a pretty good representation of what this site might look like if I were to redesign it today. When Allan and I got it up and running for the first time, I nearly didn’t want to package it up for public consumption, because I like it so much. All of which is to say that I think it’s really, really special, and if you’re in the market for a blog theme, I think you’ll agree.

Watching Yankees Spending

2009-11-08T23:21:21-05:00

Last Wednesday The New York Yankees beat the Philadelphia Phillies to win their twenty-seventh World Series. After a nine year title drought, the victory predictably thrilled Yankees fans like myself while also re-igniting the old complaint that the franchise is a bully in the baseball market, that the team uses an obscenely resourceful payroll to effectively and unfairly buy championships.

Actually, the pilot light for that particular criticism never goes out, whether the team has won or lost its most recent bid for the World Series (or even when they make no post-season appearance at all, as happened in 2008). For almost a decade, the Yankees have consistently maintained the highest payroll in Major League Baseball while failing to bring home a World Series title, and during that time the grousing took the form of ridicule. What Yankees fans heard then was: “See? You Yankees can’t buy championships, even with all of your money.” What we hear today is: “See? You Yankees just buy championships with all of your money.”

This is not a coherent line of argument, but then again it would be naïve to look for any motivation here other than envy, because the logic at work is so suspect. It’s pretty safe to say that a good number of those who hate the Yankees because of their payroll are unabashed capitalists, too; they’d be very unlikely to begrudge the fact that the highest valued, best performing organization in any given market also led that market. That’s not just capitalism, it’s the way capitalism is practiced in America.

Big Fish, Big Pond

I’ve always thought, too, that vilifying the Yankees payroll was a perspective that lacked dimension. Yes, it’s a consistently stratospheric number, but isn’t it significant, too, that by making their home in New York the Yankees are at the epicenter of the biggest baseball market on the planet? The team franchise has a payroll that’s commensurate with its huge valuation, if nothing else.

However, as a counter-argument, declaring the team a victim of its own incredibly lucrative circumstances seems equally one-dimensional. So I wondered recently if it might also be true that the Yankees are not just big spenders, but big investors, as well. Anecdotally at least, I knew that their single-minded dedication to winning championships year after year no matter the cost stands in contrast to the perpetual inefficiencies I’ve heard about at other clubs, where owners routinely pocket revenues from the so-called “luxury tax” that they receive from free-spending teams like the Yankees, rather than re-investing the money in talent.

So I dug around a bit online and compiled some figures, dumped them into Excel and found that, relative to the value of their franchise, the Yankees actually invest a fairly high percentage of their revenues directly in their payroll. Of the US$375 million in revenue that the club generated in 2008, in 2009 they dedicated US$201 million of it to talent, making for a 54% investment rate. That ranks them fourth amongst all major league teams.

That says at least something, I think, about the fact that the Yankees aren’t just rife with cash, but that they have the wherewithal to put their money to work, too. As the dominant team in such a large market, they could easily invest at a much lower rate, pocketing significantly more cash while still outspending their competition.

Their 54% investment rate certainly compares favorably with their division rivals, the Boston Red Sox, who invested just 45% of their revenues in talent, ranking them right in the middle of the pack — the average investment across all ball clubs is in fact exactly 45%.

While this investment rate may suggest that the Yankees have not just money but dedication, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the team spends that money wisely. In fact, there are some teams who invest a similarly high percentage of revenues in their talent and have little to show for it.

The New York Mets and the Chicago Cubs, for example, both rank higher than the Yankees on this scale, and yet their dedication produced thoroughly miserable results this season. What’s more, the Colorado Rockies, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Minnesota Twins and the St. Louis Cardinals all managed to make it to the fall playoffs while spending even smaller percentages of their revenue on talent than the average. In the case of the Twins, their paltry 41% investment rate was still able to overcome the MLB-leading 62% investment rate of the Detroit Tigers; in a dramatic one-game playoff at the very end of the season, the Twins knocked out the Tigers and prevented them from advancing to the post-season altogether.

If anything, these results may prove only that payroll doesn’t matter, that just as neither large nor small payrolls can guarantee a team a post-season berth, so too is it true that a team’s investment rate has no bearing on its path to the playoffs.

On the other hand, there’s the post-season. As is true with the post-season in general, the numbers tell a very different story once all of the teams are whittled down to just eight contenders for the crown. At least in the 2009 play-offs, looking exclusively at those clubs that advanced shows a very close correlation between a team’s investment rate and how well it did in the last weeks of the season.

Ranking those eight teams by their investment rate mirrors very closely the results of the race: four of the five teams with the lowest investment rates — all below the 45% average — were eliminated in the first round; the fifth team, the Dodgers, was dispatched easily in the second round. All of the teams with higher investment rates gave their opponents a run for their money, at least, even if none of the series came to a seven-game head. It’s also worth noting that the Phillies, in spite of carrying a payroll of almost less than half of the Yankees’, nearly matched them in their investment rate and came reasonably close to being world champions. Now that says a lot.

Conclusion

Of course, an amateur analysis of one year’s worth of data is too small a sample size to suggest that this simple calculation can be a reliable predictor of a team’s performance. As a belated disclaimer, I should also add that I’m really, really bad at math.

Still, I won’t be shy about suggesting one lesson: it matters how much a club is willing to put on the line to win a championship or achieve a goal, especially in the post-season. What made the difference with this year’s Yankees club was not really how much money it commanded, but rather how far the organization was willing to go to win once the prize was within grasp — further than twenty-six other teams, at least.

Admittedly, having the fattest wallet on the block is a fact that can’t be ignored, but it would seem to me to be less important and less of an advantage than most critics contend. What’s more, it occurs to me that what we want is more teams investing like the Yankees, not less. If the criticism is that the Yankees are too rich, even those who hate the team can’t really be arguing that the team should spend less on talent and take home more money, could they? There’s just no logic to that.

For my part, I’m now more convinced than ever that it’s a hollow statement to say that the Yankees simply bought their twenty-seventh world championship. As with everything in life, while it matters how much you have, what’s more important is how you use it.

Hey Oscar Wilde, It’s Clobberin’ Time!

2009-11-06T16:44:59-05:00

Various comics artists interpret their favorite literary figure/author/character. Pretty entertaining.

Twenty-seven

2009-11-05T00:41:02-05:00

The Visual Language of Herbert Matter: A Documentary Film from Reto Caduff

2009-10-26T13:00:30-05:00

“The film is currently in production with a scheduled release date of spring 2010.”

NYT: James Dyson’s New Blade-less Cooling Fan

2009-10-14T13:36:34-05:00

The Times’ T Magazine interviews the inventor of the bagless vacuum on his latest invention.

Bruce Tognazzini Proposes a Redesign of the iPhone Home Screen

2009-10-08T18:04:41-05:00

The noted interface and usability expert identifies and solves the creeping problem of iPhone users running out space for all of their apps. “I have purposely made this new design compatible with the old, both so users wouldn’t face a sharp new learning curve and so that it might better pass the ‘Steve Test’: This new iPhone Springboard, unless and until such time as a user chooses to invoke the new features, could continue to look exactly the same as the app looks now.” I’m not entirely sure it would really pass the “Steve Test” though as it’s a little inelegant. Still, it’s smart thinking.

Personal References

2009-10-07T21:32:40-05:00

I get a very minor mention on page fifty of Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio’s new book, “Graphic Design, Referenced,” but that’s not why it’s worth blogging about. Rather, this book is notable as an ambitious and largely successful attempt at capturing the current state of graphic design, or at least its current state as seen through the uncommonly thorough gaze of two young, talented and already influential designer-editors.

Vit and Gomez-Palacio, operating under the name Under Consideration, were responsible for the now shuttered but once widely-read design criticism site Speak Up, where they played a key role in shaping the graphic design conversation over the past decade. Now, in “Graphic Design, Referenced,” they’ve capitalized on their rather breathtaking ability to pull off massive editorial feats with a kind of contemporary history of their chosen field, a beautiful, page-turner of a tome that aims to be “A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design.”

I received my copy in the mail not long ago and was frankly astonished when I opened it up. I was vaguely aware that they had been working on a book, but I had no idea that they had aimed so high. So I felt compelled to find out more and struck up an email conversation with Armin, a friend of mine, to find out more.

Interview with Armin Vit, Co-Author of “Graphic Design, Referenced”

Full disclosure: though as mentioned my work does appear in the book briefly, I have no financial connection with Armin — or with the book. That is, unless you buy your copy through this link, in which case I’d see a little Amazon kick-back.

Khoi Vinh

This is an ambitious book — almost 400 pages and over 2,500 images surveying more or less all of graphic design. Why did you feel that you wanted or needed to tackle something of this scale?

Armin Vit

To be honest, we didn’t feel this was something we were dying to tackle. It was a case of blissful ignorance. Rockport Publishers approached us with the idea of an ambitious book but neither they nor we really grasped the extent the book could reach. The book started relatively simple, but the more we started to fill in the blanks of things we thought needed to be covered the more blanks we created that needed to be filled. It was only after two or three months of just focusing on the outline of the book that we realized how ambitious the book really was and how hard we were going to have to push ourselves to get it done. Luckily, we “only” had 400 pages to fill, otherwise we would still be working on it.

;

K.V.

As that ambition grew and you started to form a vision of what the book would be, how much did you intend it to be an authoritative, definitive reference work and how much did you intend it to be a personal survey of the field?

A.V.

It became a combination of both, although it was definitely first intended to be more personal than authoritative or definitive. Philip Meggs’ “A History of Graphic Design” is simply the most authoritative and definitive. That’s what he did. He was an historian and an educator. He put in ten or fifteen years of research into it. We put in 18 months. So we made sure to build on his work — and that of Richard Hollis, Steven Heller and Rick Poynor — and provide our own personal view, as 30-year old practicing designers. We looked at the work and the designers that have influenced us so far and assumed that if it did something for us it could be inspiring to others. With that in mind, we wanted to make sure it was as authoritative as possible, with a lot of facts and more information than most people are willing to read through. I don’t think it’s definitive as there are too many points of view on graphic design. We prefer to think that our book contributes to helping establish that definitive history along with others.

K.V.

It seems that one of the book’s unique contributions to that definitive history is that you’ve captured a ton of stuff that’s out there today and that’s fairly new. Much of it surprised me, not because I think these things don’t deserve to be captured in a serious history of the field, but because they’re so fresh that I haven’t seen them mentioned between hardcovers before (e.g., the podcast and conference show Typeradio). It feels sort of sneaky and daring to include them, though they do feel quite comfortable next to the old stalwarts too. To what extent were you looking to write an alternative history, or a contemporary history — or some combination thereof?

A.V.

That was one of the benefits we saw, and wanted to exploit: having the opportunity to do a survey that looks at the beginning of the twenty-first century along with what has come before. New editions of Meggs’ book and even the latest historical survey, “Graphic Design: A New History,” treat the new material as an appendage, almost as a kind of burden. It’s risky to take something like the Obama ’08 campaign identity or someone like Daniel Eatock and pile them up next to the IBM identity and Massimo Vignelli, but it’s empowering to be able to take some stances on what we felt were the most important contemporary subjects. Especially with Web resources, which have played a huge role in the way we see and learn about graphic design today, it was imperative to acknowledge them.

One little side story that we haven’t shared much is that in the Practice chapter, where we show the most relevant work of different categories, we were supposed to have a Web section, but after much analysis we simply could not arrive at even a handful of Web sites that were on par with the rest of the work in that chapter, so we scrapped it. This discussion on Speak Up was triggered by this “problem.” A lot of Web designers weren’t too happy.

K.V.

Without getting into whether design for interactive media is as aesthetically accomplished as design for print media, I think it’s worth asking: is any contemporary history of graphic design really complete unless it documents how design is practiced online? After all, the Web and digital media of all kinds are profoundly changing the way people think about graphics, typography, layout, information delivery, communication — they’re changing the very meaning of the word design, even if the work doesn’t superficially measure up to the standards of the print design canon. Shouldn’t such a book as “Graphic Design, Referenced” account for that?

A.V.

Yes, definitely. It would have been a great opportunity. We just didn’t feel confident (or, more importantly, comfortable) in making any assertions about which Web work should enter the proverbial canon. Part of it was the overwhelming nature of the book so we had to pick our battles and at that moment, because of important and unanswered questions like whether interactive media is as aesthetically accomplished as print, we chose other battles. Perhaps in a second edition, where we have a thousand less things to gather, we can take a good look at this.

K.V.

When you talk of a second edition and updates and additions, it makes me wonder: should this book have been a Web site? Which also brings to mind another of your Under Consideration projects, The Design Encylopedia. Where is the overlap if there is any?

A.V.

It could easily be a Web site, but this brings up again the thorny question of which medium is more accomplished or even more worthy.

Had this been a Web site, I am certain we would have not made the same effort as we did with a printed book that bears our names on the cover. There is something much more official and authoritative in a book that a publisher put in thousands of dollars to produce, market and distribute than in a Web site that, even if took the same amount of dollars (it wouldn’t), would be too “flimsy.”

Also, more people would have been hesitant to contribute their work — almost anyone is thrilled to have their work printed in a book, but few find it an honor to have it in a Web site.

Lastly, the work can easily be swiped. Text and images are grabbed freely and propagated all over the Web. Sure, you can scan and transcribe a book, but it takes five more minutes that anyone who needs to update their Twitter account just doesn’t want to spare.

And, indeed, there is overlap with The Design Encyclopedia project but, at this point, it’s more in theory than in practice, since we have slightly ignored that poor Web site for the better part of two years. The site actually broke and decayed to the point where, as admins, we can’t create new entries and people can’t sign up anymore. Our next big project is rebooting The Design Encyclopedia and we are in the process of figuring out what crossover, if any, it could have with Graphic Design, Referenced. But it’s nice to know that we now have this incredible amount of knowledge not just written in a book but painfully lodged in our brains.

K.V.

Of all that knowledge now lodged in your brains, what’s the most unexpected, surprising or just plain fun bit that you learned while researching the book?

A.V.

That there is an arrow in the FedEx logo! Kidding. There wasn’t anything particularly groundbreaking, it was more a number of things that caught my attention: Tiffany & Co.’s blue is PMS 1837 which, if you know your PMS’s, is in the red range, so the number relates to the year it Tiffany was founded; legendary designers like Ladislav Sutnar and W.A. Dwiggins were into puppetry; Otl Aicher died in a car accident while crossing from one side of his property to the other; Campbell’s soups’ red and white color combo comes from an executive who liked the way Cornell’s football uniforms looked; Rick Valicenti worked at a steel mill, hard hat and all. There is not much use to this information. It won’t gain us clients and I won’t be cooler for it (maybe even dorkier than I already am) but the sense is that this information is empowering, it gives you insight into what makes great designers relevant and great designs memorable. If others can benefit from this knowledge in this way or another, we’ve done our job. All 400 pages worth.

Subtraction.com

Font Hunt

Fedra Sans

Metroflex

Politica

Scout

Stainless

Two Lists

Finalists

Section

Titillium

The Pencil Factory Has ”Fifteen Uses for Newsprint”

Introducing Basic Maths, a Theme for WordPress

But Wait, There’s More

1. Grid Classes in Session

2. Magic Grid View

3. OMG, Color!

Theme Park

Watching Yankees Spending

Big Fish, Big Pond

Conclusion

Hey Oscar Wilde, It’s Clobberin’ Time!

Twenty-seven

The Visual Language of Herbert Matter: A Documentary Film from Reto Caduff

NYT: James Dyson’s New Blade-less Cooling Fan

Bruce Tognazzini Proposes a Redesign of the iPhone Home Screen

Personal References

Interview with Armin Vit, Co-Author of “Graphic Design, Referenced”