is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
I’ve worked on more projects in the past seven months than I have in a long time, and as a result, I’ve designed more logos than I have since my early, dark days as a print designer. I thought I’d share two of them.
Here is the brand new logo for Wildcard, the startup where I’m leading user experience design. I designed this with the amazing Stephen Meszaros, with whom I share design duties there.
Hopefully it’s obvious that the mark is composed of three cards forming a W shape. But on a more subtle level, it’s also meant to represent the promise of what we’re trying to do at Wildcard: build a “third way” between today’s mobile browsers, which offer great breadth but poor user experiences, and native apps, which offer rich user experiences but poor breadth and relatively cumbersome access. The middle card, the gold one, is meant to represent the Wildcard alternative. The typeface is Chester Jenkins’ versatile and remarkably underused Galaxie Polaris, which we’ve adopted as our official font family.
Late last month I announced Kidpost, which was so early in its life that my partners and I had selected the name just days before. Well in the weeks since, we’ve made lots of behind-the-scenes progress on the backend, and I managed to cook up a logo, which looks like this:
As a reminder, Kidpost will be a simple service that aggregates your kid-related pictures, status updates, tweets, videos etc. from any of your social networks, and bundles them into a weekly, private email that gets sent to friends and family members. In designing this mark I tried to evoke a family’s refrigerator door, where lots of kids’ drawings, photos and other ephemera might be posted. The dot in the letter I doubles as the magnet, with the tile shapes beneath representing all the things the service will gather together.
By the way, we’ll be seeding previews of Wildcard in the coming months, so if you’re interested you can sign up at trywildcard.com. And sometime in the next few weeks, we’ll be looking for a small number of users to help us test Kidpost, so sign up for that at kidpost.net.
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