Wireframe on Ice: Live at On Air Fest

If you’ve been waiting for the second season of “Wireframe,” the podcast I host in which we tell deeply researched stories about the world of design, well stay tuned, it’s in the works. Meanwhile, … | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

Life without Google (Fonts)

Privacy and technology journalist Kashimir Hill is in the middle of publishing a fascinating series of articles called “Goodbye to the Big Five,” in which she reports on her experiences trying to f… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

Travel Tips from a Guy Who Travels Kinda Often

Plenty of folks are more prolific globetrotters than me but but according to Google Maps I logged over ninety thousand miles across twenty-three trips in 2018. That’s enough to circle the globe 3.6… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

Movies Watched, December 2018

So many great movies come out in December, so I went to the theaters five times—that’s easily my record for any month last year. The best of the films I saw was Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The Favour… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

What Everything Costs in a Hospital, Sort Of

As of January 1st a new price transparency law now requires U.S. hospitals to publish a list of their standard charges on the Internet, something they had not typically done before. Over at Quartz,… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

How Google and Chromecast Won at Our House

The bad news is that for some reason Google’s excellent Chromecast Audio adapter has been discontinued. The good news is that while supplies last, you can get one for just US$15—a steal. For those … | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

The Perfect iPad Keyboard (Has Not Been Invented Yet)

Brydge, longtime makers of laptop-like keyboards for tablets, has stirred up a lot of excitement (at least among those who care about this kind of thing, and I count myself among them) with its lat… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

Wine, Spirits and AR Inevitability

Over the holiday break, I had what I’m pretty sure was my first “civilian” encounter with augmented reality. At a New Year’s Eve party, a friend of the family showed me a bottle of wine from Rabble… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

Movies Watched, November 2018

I’d watch just about anything Steve McQueen directs, so mesmerizing has his past work been. Like “Hunger,” “Shame” and “Twelve Years a Slave,” his latest feature, “Widows,” is imperfect, but McQuee… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

Movies Watched, October 2018

Expectations can make all the difference when you walk into a movie theater. For instance, when I went to see Damien Chazelle’s new Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man” last month, my expe… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

Wireframe Episode 6: Inclusivity Is a Recipe for Good Design

Here it is, our last episode of the first season of “Wireframe,”” the podcast that tells the stories behind good interaction design. This installment tells the story of the shift from d… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

Wireframe Episode 5: Is Good Design Good for You?

Our fifth episode of the “Wireframe” digs into the intersection of design and ethical practice. In it we trace the origins of Facebook’s famous Like button back in time to a frenzied ha… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

Goodbye to Filmstruck

This graphic gathers together just about all the posters for the sixty or so films—most of them amazing, wonderful experiences—that I’ve watched over the past two years on FilmStruck, the indie, ar… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

Wireframe Episode 4: Why You’re Not Wearing AR Glasses

Two things that I highly recommend today: first, go vote. And make sure everyone you know at home and at work goes to vote, too. This essay from the legendary Roger Angel sums it up nicely: “What w… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 5 years ago

Wireframe Bonus Episode: Good Design According to You

Bad news: We’re already halfway through the six episodes planned for this first season of “Wireframe.” Hopefully we’ll be back—if you want another season, be sure to let us know. Good n… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

The Ride to Vote

Earlier this month I was pretty hard on Uber and Lyft in a blog post about the deleterious effects of ride hailing on, well, everything. But credit where credit is due: this Election Day, Tue 6 Nov… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Demoing Voice Live at Adobe MAX 2018

For the record, here is the entire keynote address from last week’s Adobe MAX 2018 conference in Los Angeles. Jump to about forty minutes in and you’ll see the demo that I gave of what’s new in Ado… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Wireframe Episode 3: Good Design Is 💩

The other day, a designer who I admire greatly described my new podcast “Wireframe” as something “like investigative journalism crossed with UX/UI case studies.” That is a r… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Movies Watched, September 2018

Late summer 2018 was a huge breakthrough for Asian-Americans in film and I was there for it. Sort of. First, “Crazy Rich Asians,” became an instant hit and a cultural touchstone despite a late-Augu… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Wireframe Episode 2: Good Design Is Good Civics

If you enjoyed the inaugural episode of “Wireframe”, you’ll love this second installment, just released today. The title is “Good Desgn Is Good Civics,“ and it looks at how the city of Boston tried… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Designing and Prototyping with Voice in Adobe XD

This morning, during the keynote address for Adobe’s MAX 2018 conference, I demoed the latest enhancements to our Adobe XD design tool for UX/UI designers. One of these enhancements is something th… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Wireframe: A High-quality Storytelling Podcast about Design

Today marks the debut of “Wireframe,” a podcast about user experience design brought to you by Adobe and Gimlet Creative—the host is yours truly. You can listen to the first episode emb… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Uber, Lyft, Taxis, Design and the Age of Ambivalence

The massive disruption that ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft have visited on the taxi industry stirs up so many conflicting feelings for me. I use these services all the time but the larger imp… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Movies Watched, August 2018

I try to post these roundups as soon as I can after each month closes but I’m barely getting this one in before October. And it does seem like a long time ago that I saw Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKl… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Adobe Design Summit and Cultural Bias

There are literally hundreds of designers working at Adobe in offices all over the world. Back in July we got all of them together for four days of lectures, workshops and discussions from both Ado… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Your Public Library Is Where It’s At

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg in an op-ed piece for The New York Times: Libraries are being disparaged and neglected at precisely the moment when they are most valued and necessary. Why the disconnec… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Movies Watched, July 2018

In spite of all the high-minded cinema fare I profess to care for so deeply, the movies I get most excited about are usually popcorn action thrillers. That explains why, if I’m honest, “Missi… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Designers Are Defining Usability Too Narrowly

To our own detriment, designers prefer to think about “how” much more than “why.” This was demonstrated in my blog post from earlier this week but here’s another good example—or perhaps it would be… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Why Designers Don’t Want to Think When They Read

Designers Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga are the publishers of UX Collective, which they claim is the “largest Medium publication about design and UX” with some 200,000 readers. It’s a terrific r… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

What Is This Thing Called Design?

Sometimes you need to explain what design is to people who don’t understand it, but need to. This is the situation I found myself in this week: I’ve been collaborating on a project with some incred… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Movies Watched, June 2018

Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” does not itself fully stare into the abyss of human callousness, but it’s enough that it shows us what happens when someone does that, how it consumes t… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

On the Democratization of Design on The Voice of Design

A few weeks ago I was invited to appear as a guest on the second episode of Mule Design’s new podcast, The Voice of Design with hosts Erika Hall and Larisa Berger. It was a great discussion that sp… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Movies Watched, May 2018

Jason Reitman is one of those journeyman movie directors who can pass as an auteur. Usually, as in the case of “Thank You for Smoking,” “Up in the Air” and “Young Adult,” it’s pretty easy to see pa… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Automating the End of Movies on Physical Discs

No one pays attention to Netflix’s discs-by-mail business anymore but for those who are curious, the subscriber base continues to decline steadily and the company’s operations have shrunk from a pe… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Automating the End of Movies on Physical Discs

No one pays attention to Netflix’s discs-by-mail business anymore but for those who are curious, the subscriber base continues to decline steadily and the company’s operations have shrunk from a pe… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

LEGO and Augmented Reality

There’s no doubt in my mind that augmented reality is going to be amazing and that people will build incredible new experiences with Apple’s ARKit, version 2 of which was announced earlier this wee… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Update: Recycling Isn’t Working

Here’s an update on a post that I wrote at the beginning of the year about how China has upended the way recycling works. In short, Americans recycle as much as 66 million tons of would-be waste ea… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Illustration in the App Store

Apple’s dramatically redesigned App Store got a decent amount of attention when it debuted last year with iOS 11, but its unique success as a hybrid of product design and editorial design has gone … | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Illustration in the App Store

Apple’s dramatically redesigned App Store got a decent amount of attention when it debuted last year with iOS 11, but its unique success as a hybrid of product design and editorial design has gone … | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Valuable Lessons from Pointless Machines

Most people think of Rube Goldberg machines—devices which intentionally perform simple tasks in indirect, unnecessarily complicated ways—as examples of ingenious engineering. But the work of “kinet… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Adobe XD: Ten Million and Zero

This morning there are two major announcements for Adobe XD, our new end-to-end design, prototyping and sharing app, and I’m proud to say that I’ve played a bit part in both of them. The news can b… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Movies Watched, April 2018

I really didn’t know what to make of “Avengers: Infinity War” when I walked out of the theater. It’s such a weird mess of a film, frequently incoherent and often absurd. At the same tim… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

The Secret to Writing (Is Writing)

A16z board partner and Microsoft alum Steven Sinofsky continually proves that he’s one of the smartest minds in tech with Medium articles like this one, called “Writing Is Thinking.” It… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Get More LEGOs in Your Life

You need to be careful where you step at our house because my twin five-year old boys are crazy about LEGOs and they’re underfoot everywhere. Which makes us ideal customers for Stüda, a smartly des… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Email Is the New Email

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@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

Immersive Media and David Bowie Is

The extensive and ambiguously titled exhibition “David Bowie Is,” which originated at The Victoria and Albert Museum in London but is now running through 15 July at The Brooklyn Museum in New York,… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

What Happens When We Recycle?

Even those of us who try to be conscientious about our waste would be hard pressed to answer the question “What happens when we recycle?” This exceptionally informative episode of the podcast 1A fr… | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago

107 Years Doesn’t Feel Like Such a Long Time

Amazing footage from the archives of The Museum of Modern Art of the City of New York in the year 1911. It starts on what appears to be the Staten Island Ferry, docks at Battery City, then goes on … | Continue reading


@subtraction.com | 6 years ago