Category Archives: Subtraction

I Was a Twenty-something Print Designer

The RopersWay back when I had no idea how cool the information superhighway really would be — this was the mid-1990s — I was trying to make my way in life as a print designer. I did some lamentable work at a small advertising agency in McLean, Virginia and then at a slightly more glamorous design studio in downtown Washington, D.C., basically graduating from real estate advertisements at the former to stylistically fickle marketing work at the latter. Neither position was particularly satisfying for my creative aspirations.

For a while, I took refuge in freelance work, mostly doing work for the small army of independent bands hiding out in the outer-reaches of Northwest Washington. This meant designing album covers, CD covers, tee-shirts and posters on little or no budget, but getting a fair amount of creative license. I only did this for a few years and, because my day job at the time was so time intensive, I never became particularly prolific, producing only a handful of pieces during my four years in D.C.

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Away from My Desk Right Now

A quick housekeeping post before I head out to Newark International Airport: as mentioned earlier in the week, I’m leaving for Viet Nam this evening. I’m bracing myself for the day-long plane ride that it’ll take to get my feet back on the ground in Saigon, but it’ll be worth it. Like a dutiful digital dork, I’m toting along my digital camera and my PowerBook, so if I find the time and the Internet connection, I’ll post pictures on Flickr and updates here. Otherwise, I’ll be back in New York in early December. Happy Thanksgiving!

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New Interview at Design in Flight

Design in FlightThe November issue of Andy Arikawa’s resurrected Design in Flight magazine is up. Until recently, I had missed its relaunch this past summer, which transformed it from a PDF-based, pay-for-download publication into a Web-based magazine with free access to its content, but I’m glad it’s still around.

This newest edition also happens to feature a new interview with me, and for those tired of me talking about Behavior’s redesign of The Onion, rest assured that topic is never broached in this piece. Instead, I fielded several tough questions from Justin Goodlett about grids, practicing design in New York City and the nature of opposing factions within the profession, among other topics. It’s probably my most articulate interview yet about my thoughts on design in general, for what that’s worth. Go read it.

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Interview at The Weekly Standards

The Weekly StandardsTo faithful readers of this weblog: if you stick with me, you have my pledge that you will not have to read about Behavior’s redesign of The Onion in perpetuity. At least I hope not. Looking forward, I hope to get famous (or at least infamous) for many more projects as interesting and as influential as this one, but in the meantime, I’m humbled by the fact that at least some people continue to find it interesting.

One of them is James Archer who, aside from being the founder of Fortymedia, is the publisher of The Weekly Standards, an online magazine focused on the real world practice of standards-based Web design. He’s just published an interview with me which discusses at length — you guessed it — the redesign of TheOnion.com.

But wait! That’s not all you get with this article because, for absolutely no extra money, James has thrown in a major added bonus: a very thoughtful, fair and insightful critique of the redesign as a whole by none other than Garret Dimon. Even if you scroll right past my own rambling answers to James’ questions, don’t miss Garret’s comments.

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Fame and Infamy

Any publicity is good publicity, I keep telling myself, after getting unceremoniously Slashdotted for an editorial I wrote about Slashdot itself — my article went online this morning over at Publish.com. I thought it was a thoughtful opinion piece on Slashdot’s pending redesign and the seductive tendency of CSS to focus purely on aesthetics to the exclusion of architecture, but CmdrTaco disagreed, apparently. The comments thread quickly turned to excoriating the work I proudly did on redesigning The Onion, which is unfortunate and unfair, I think, but if the worst problem I have in life is raising the ire of Slashdot readers, then I’m doing pretty good. Anyway, I still think the editorial is worth a read; please let me know what you think.

In a more positive bit of notoriety, Dave Kellam of Seal Club asked me to participate in his 5Q project, in which he asks “designers, artists and other Web-monkeys five questions on earth-shattering topics usually unrelated to their field.” This was the easiest and funnest interview I’ve ever done, and it will take you less than five seconds to read if you’re interested: it appears here. Dave also did a nice job of throwing together a design expressly for my questions and answers — how can I not dig the Rauschenberg-esque use of Mister President as a design element?

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The Write Stuff: Paragraph

ParagraphIt was always a mystery to me why people spend so much time hanging out at Starbucks. Notwithstanding the fallacious reality of sitcoms in which beautiful people spend all day cracking wise at their local coffee houses, the idea of committing more than thirty minutes to a visit to any retail outlet is a real stretch for me. That is, until I moved to New York seven years ago and discovered that the apartments here are tiny and, inconveniently, they often come with roommates. In this city, if you want to get any kind of concentrating done without all of the distractions of your television or personal possessions — and you want to do it away from the close quarters you share with your roommate, you need to escape your home. This is rarely truer than if you are a writer, someone who requires a certain reliable quietude in order to produce to the capacity of your creative prowess.

Which is exactly the reason why my girlfriend and a friend she met in graduate school started Paragraph, a so-called “workspace for writers.” It’s a quiet, spacious retreat from everything competing for a writer’s attention, located close to Union Square on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan.

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Weekend Weblog Work

I don’t get to do it very often, but this weekend I sat down and took care of some maintenance on Subtraction.com. The first order of business was to get the majority of the pages on the site to validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict — finally. This modest goal had been made inadvertently difficult by my frequent inclusion of links to New York Times articles. In order to provide stable links to articles that might otherwise be removed from the Times’ public archives over time, I process nearly all of them with Aaron Swartz’s invaluable New York Times Link Generator.

Unfortunately that free service produces validator-hostile URLs; if before today you had run a typical page from the Elsewhere section through the W3C Validator, you’d get about a jillion errors back. So I installed Nat Irons’ excellent Amputator plug-in for Movable Type, which allows me to automatically reformat those NYT links so that they will fly through the validator, and with only a bare minimum of edits to the Movable Type publishing templates. Fantastic.

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Absenteeism & Apologia

It’s never agreed with me to make apologies for infrequent posts to one’s weblog. It’s not that I don’t value the faithfulness of my regular readers (I do, immensely), but rather it’s that, as a matter of housekeeping, those posts age poorly, and as a matter of public record, they’re of extremely limited usefulness to most everyone beyond the momentary assurance that, no, I haven’t contracted Legionnaires’s Disease or renounced blogging for Scientology. Nevertheless, I’ve been absent from this weblog for a while, and I do feel compelled to apologize for it.

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Absenteeism & Apologia

It’s never agreed with me to make apologies for infrequent posts to one’s weblog. It’s not that I don’t value the faithfulness of my regular readers (I do, immensely), but rather it’s that, as a matter of housekeeping, those posts age poorly, and as a matter of public record, they’re of extremely limited usefulness to most everyone beyond the momentary assurance that, no, I haven’t contracted Legionnaires’s Disease or renounced blogging for Scientology. Nevertheless, I’ve been absent from this weblog for a while, and I do feel compelled to apologize for it.

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The Peacemaker

Some people say that, whether it was truly a case of plagiarism or not, it would have been polite if the propietor of Lethean-Sound.com had emailed me in advance to say he was lifting somewhat heavily from my own Web site, as discussed earlier today. In fact, I did get an email in the middle of the day today (still after the fact, but better late than never) from Lethean-Sound.com that was very polite and apologetic, and afterwards, at my suggestion, a small credit appeared at the bottom of the site’s home page that read, “Some CSS and code courtesy of Khoi Vinh.”

As I said, I was not, in general, made particularly angry by the affair, though neither was I pleased. But the correspondence quickly mollified me and made me realize that, if it was not polite for the site’s proprietor to fail to contact me about the design in advance of launching it, neither was it particularly polite of me to fail to contact him without first posting about it here on my weblog.

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