Subtraction.com

The Adventures of You and I

2012-02-03T08:03:46-05:00

If you really care about printed media and want to see it succeed, then you’d probably acknowledge it must change in some way. The husband and wife team of Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio seem to understand this better than most; they remain passionately devoted to paper goods but also embrace the possibilities of digital technology. (Full disclosure: they’re friends of mine.)

Their latest project, “The Adventures of You and I,” is a great example of this. It’s a beautifully illustrated and imaginatively written children’s book that you can customize for the special child in your life. That doesn’t just mean you can add the child’s name to the cover or even to the title, though both are possible. No, more than that, you can configure the central character of the book, changing his or her hair color, hair style, skin color and clothing color. The child’s name gets seamlessly integrated into the storyline too, making the whole thing uniquely personal.

This is a hint of what a healthy marriage of print and digital can be, not just in its configurability, but in the fact that “The Adventures of You and I” is a thoroughly indie affair, too. No big publishing house was involved in this production, both because no big publishing house was necessary and because no big publishing house could have done this so well. Find out more here.

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Vintage Vogue

2012-02-02T22:09:26-05:00

Scans from five decades of Vogue Magazine dating back to the 1920s.

Over 1,600 images. Amazing. See them all here.

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The HTML & CSS Book

2012-02-02T15:17:15-05:00

A friend is a contributor to this primer on HTML and CSS, but even if that hadn’t been the case I think it would have caught my eye. From the preview images, it’s easily the most elegantly designed technical book that I’ve ever come across.

It could probably have used a more distinctive title, though. Find out more here.

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Déjà Vu Feed Sponsorship

2012-02-02T00:00:00-05:00

Déjà Vu is your visual memory. Use the app by taking pictures of things you would like to remember. For example, products you see in a magazine, recipes you read in a cooking book, wine labels in a restaurant, Newspaper article, DVDs, CDs or event flyers. Each picture is a visual memo. A regular camera app doesn’t distinguish those photos of stuff from “regular“ photos. Déjà Vu helps people organize and structure their visual memos in an easy and effective way. It does this by a tailored interface for tagging and categorization and integration of image recognition technology.

Features

Quick shot camera (allows faster picture taking)
Image recognition integrated
Syncs with cloud account
Easy search (find your visual memos by keywords and tags)
Map location (locate your visual memos on a map)
Available on iPhone and Web

Free for up to 30 visual memos/month. Learn more at Kooaba.

Flying People Stunt for “Chronicle”

2012-02-01T09:51:06-05:00

This promotional video for the upcoming movie “Chronicle” is neat. The marketing team built three remote controlled airplanes that were human-like enough in shape to fool the eye from a distance and flew them over the East River in New York City. The effect is surprisingly effective. Watch the video here.

While entertaining, the video is probably more interesting as an illustration of how to capture “super-human” feats believably on film. The motions in this video are seen from the ground, from the vantage point of a ‘normal’ person.

It’s always surprised me that I’ve never seen this perspective in any of the countless super-hero movies that Hollywood can’t stop making. The norm seems to be to shoot super-human leaps and flights from impossible and therefore intrinsically unbelievable angles, traversing vast distances at mechanically unfeasible speeds, and capitalizing on the limitless and often superfluous agility of the CG ‘camera.” As this video proves, shooting from the perspective of a regular person would be much more convincing.

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Rambling Thoughts on Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous, Pinterest and Blogging

2012-01-27T14:28:59-05:00

We just relaunched the Mixel blog yesterday along with a refresh of our main Web site. The main goal was to bring the look and feel of both in line with one another and, specifically for the blog, to create a more editorial-friendly presentation. As I explained in this post, the Mixel blog turned out to be a more text-intensive product than we anticipated, and so we needed a design that would accommodate that. We also needed to switch to a publishing tool that was more suitable for that kind of content. Tumblr wasn’t doing it for us.

I wrote about Tumblr a while ago with great admiration in this blog post, and I still think it’s an amazing company and one of the best social content products out there. As a ‘traditional’ blogging tool though, I’m more ambivalent about it.

The Writing Kind of Blogging

It’s true that many folks, like my friend Cameron Moll, use Tumblr to publish their text-heavy blogs and are very happy with it, and so I don’t argue that it can work great for this purpose. But we found it to be less reliable than we’d like; the editing interface is unpredictable, to put it politely.

To be fair, we were also using it in a way that wasn’t a truly good fit for what Tumblr is good at; the first rule of digital content is that it must be true to the native characteristics of its delivery channel, and we weren’t doing that. We’re not giving up on Tumblr though; its network effects are truly amazing, and we have some ideas for a different editorial product that will hopefully be a much better fit for that network.

In place of Tumblr, we’re now using a WordPress blog hosted over at Page.ly. The theme was developed by my friend and amazing WordPress guru Allan Cole. In spite of having developed a premium WordPress theme of my own (Basic Maths, which was designed and developed with Allan), I’ve never been a heavy WordPress user until now. I have to admit, its most recent version is full of the fun, geeky features that I like as a blogger, stuff that allows designer-editors to fully tweak the way content is output. It’s great.

Other Stuff Posted at Other Places

All this fooling around with hosted publishing solutions has reminded me that Subtraction.com is getting long in the tooth, and very much represents an old school way of thinking about blogs. (It’s published with ExpressionEngine, which is quite powerful but has been trying to rejuvenate itself after some recent stumbles.) In fact, I’ve always wanted to fold Tumblr-like features into this site, and have played on and off with both Tumblr and Posterous for several years to see what those modes of blogging feel like.

My Tumblr experiments have largely been for naught, but I took to Posterous pretty well and have kept two blogs there for some time, more or less privately. I’ve been writing a log of really short (and, be prepared, somewhat stuffy) reviews of movies I’ve recently viewed at delayedreaction.posterous.com. And I have an ongoing image blog at Subtraction.posterous.com, where I collect a bunch of somewhat Subtraction-y images that don’t quite fit into this main blog.

The latter blog has been really interesting to curate, because it bleeds over to the stuff I’ve been keeping at Pinterest too. My boards at Pinterest are not a form blogging, necessarily, but they’re very similar to the image collecting and curating that I do at Posterous, yet even further afield from what I would normally post on Subtraction.com. (By the way, we’re collecting lots of really amazing work from Mixel on these Pinterest boards.)

Of all of these third party services, I feel least inclined to bring the activity from Pinterest back under the Subtraction.com umbrella, mostly because it’s the least blog-like. But what I’m doing on my two Posterous blogs, as well as what I would theoretically do at Tumblr, is very much the stuff that I would like to integrate into this site, if I had the time. Ultimately, I think I’m just the kind of user who will always want everything blog-like to be clearly a part of this blog, hosted on my own server, customized just the way I want. It’s not the trend of things in the world at large now, I know, but even bloggers get old.

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The New Yorker: The Man Who Owns L.A.

2012-01-26T13:58:35-05:00

Writer Connie Bruck wrote this piece that ran a few weeks ago in The New Yorker about the men behind a plan to build a new NFL stadium in downtown Los Angeles. One of them, Phillip Anschutz, is a politically conservative billionaire seven times over, who made his fortune in oil and gas, real estate, railroads, telecommunications, and sports and entertainment. It’s a fascinating article, even though I’m not particularly sympathetic to his agenda or that of his compatriots. But I did really like this quote from him:

“It helps to have your back against the wall. Adversity is a huge advantage — as long as you think of it as an advantage — because it helps you do things you never thought you were capable of doing.”

Words to remember. You can read the full article here — but unfortunately, only if you’re a subscriber.

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MindNode Feed Sponsorship

2012-01-26T00:00:00-05:00

MindNode is an elegant, easy-to-use mind mapping tool for Mac and iOS. Whether you’re brainstorming for your next project, organizing your life, or planning your vacation, MindNode lets you collect, structure, and expand your ideas. And thanks to built-in Dropbox and WiFi sharing, even your biggest ideas can go anywhere your iPhone does.

MindNode is easy mind mapping for your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Try out Mindnode Pro and MindNode touch today!

Jorge Chamorro

2012-01-24T16:24:30-05:00

This Madrid-based designer has a stunning portfolio that uses a contemporary, intricate take on modernism. He’s also apparently a collage artist, as suggested in this poster he designed for what looks like a show of his collage works.

He seems like someone I would like to meet. Visit his site here.

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Airport Runway Screenprints

2012-01-23T15:26:48-05:00

Architect and designer Jerome Daksiewicz of Nomo Design has produced these beautifully matter-of-fact poster designs that capture the runway designs of various American airports.

You can see them in more detail at this link, or buy prints at their shop.

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