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.
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Hi Khio,
Would you mind explaining what “printed blind” means?
Thanks! Great looking calendar.
Pat, glad you like the poster. “Printed blind” simply means that there was no ink applied to the area of the printing plate so all you get is a “blind” impression in the paper. You can see an example here:
Link
Am I the only one who thinks this is a total snooze? I love grids and Helvetica (and Antonio’s sites) as much as the next guy, but this just seems formulaic. I wonder at what point our MЧller-Brockmann worship stops being influenced homage and turns into creepy pastiche. I’m a card-carrying member of the JM-B cult, but lately the starry eyed retro-Modernism has me thinking that as designers we should stop reminiscing and “go back to inventing the future” (as Mr. Keedy put it).
It does seem like its utility is diminished for use as a calendar. I guess if you need a poster to tell you what year it is, then it is useful. For any other purpose, not so much.
ChЯo anh KhЗi.r?t b?t ng? khi bi?t anh lЯ Designer ng??i Vi?t Nam
R?t vui ???c lЯm quyen v?i anh
Ryan (above) is on to something (although I don’t know about quoting Keedy as a point of reference – he’s a total snooze too, and his re-inventions in the 90s were mindless dead-ends, weren’t they?)
It’s definitely pastiche / parody. There can sometimes be clever parodies or pastisches, but this doesn’t seem to be one of those times.
GG (ha) —
Thanks. Keedy was named only for attribution, not because I consider him exemplary of the idea in practice. Khoi, do you have an opinion on all of this? I’m particularly interested since there’s such an obsession in some circles (e.g., the Grain Edit, ISO50 crowd) over “new” work that does its best to look like it was made 30-40 years ago.
Ryan: That’s a great question. Or rather, a great topic for a blog post. If I weren’t so short on time these days I’d write that blog post, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Anyway, in a nutshell, I would say that while in many ways I’m a traditionalist, I do prefer to design for the now rather than design in a retro vernacular. That said, it really does take all kinds, and as a design consumer I enjoy the Grain Edit/ISO50 school very much. Design is big enough for everyone.