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.
Mockup of my book (just a mockup—the book itself is available in PDF, iBooks and Kindle formats only)
As I wrote when I announced it, the book features fourteen interviews that I conducted with digital designers of prominence—many of the names will be familiar to readers of this blog, while others are up and comers or have built fantastic careers outside of the main spotlight. I talked to studio designers, agency designers, startup designers, designer entrepreneurs—I worked hard to get a diversity of folks who have done meaningful work “online” in recent history. Here’s the full list:
Dan Cederholm of Dribbble
Alex Cornell of Firespotter Labs
Nicholas Felton of Daytum
Agnieszka Gasparska of Kiss Me I’m Polish
Cemre Güngör of Branch
Erika Hall of Mule
Naz Hamid of Weightshift
Karen McGrane of Bond Art + Science
Wilson Miner of The Factory
Jill Nussbaum of The Barbarian Group
Evan Sharp of Pinterest
Geoff Teehan of Teehan + Lax
Justin Van Slembrouck of Digg
Marcos Weskamp of Flipboard
The book has already gotten some great buzz from folks like Jason Kottke, Michael Bierut, Jeffrey Zeldman, Jessica Helfand, Cameron Moll and others.
This book is special to me in that it’s the book that I wanted to be able to read when I was starting out in my career. And even as I conducted the interviews, I found lots of sage advice to consider as I think about what’s next for my own career. I think you’ll get a lot out of it too, regardless of whether you’re new to digital design, you’re a longtime veteran considering a career change, or even if you’re an executive trying to understand what motivates the very best designers in their careers.
The full price of the book is US$30, but for a limited time, you can get a discount for just tweeting about the book and helping to spread the word. (If before today you were a subscriber to my mailing list here at Subtraction.com you get an even bigger discount—sign up for future sales if you haven’t already.) Find out more and buy your copy (you get PDF, iBooks and Kindle vesions all in one) at howtheygotthere.us.
