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.
It’s already Thursday and I haven’t gotten a chance to tell you yet about the fourth season of “Wireframe,” the design podcast hosted by yours truly. The first episode came out on Monday; you can listen to it above or find it in your favorite podcast player right now, where you’ll also see our spiffy new show art:
Yep, that’s me. If you’ve listened before, you know that this show digs deeply into all kinds of stories about how design impacts the world around us. This season we’re expanding the scope of the show beyond even UX/UI design to an even wider range of design and creativity, and our first episode dives into the world of branding—inspired, like much of the best investigative design journalism out there, by fast food.
When the creative agency Jones Knowles Ritchie launched this rebranding for Burger King earlier this year, it immediately caught my eye. First, because it’s so elegantly executed and entertaining; it’s a ton of fun. But I was also fascinated by its obvious retro vibes, and the slightly unnerving implications of design looking forward by looking backward. And that’s what this episode is about: what does it mean to design something that’s meant to evoke what is invariably an imagined past? Why do designers use this approach, and when does it go wrong? To find out, we talked to the team who worked on this Burger King project, as well as the team at Berlin’s Koto Studio who followed a similar approach under very different circumstances for a brand new company called Meatable. And finally, we got some time with Bobby Martin, Jr. from Champions Design, one of the coolest guys in the industry, to talk about the perils of nostalgic design.
You can subscribe to “Wireframe” in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can find out more about the show, and look back on our three prior seasons of episodes all about design, at adobe.ly/wireframe.