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 wrote an article over at Quartz on diversity in the design industry. These excerpts are the heart of it:
I’ve been working as a designer in some fashion for more than two decades—as an employee and as an entrepreneur, in small studios and in large agencies, and at tiny startups and late-stage enterprises. What I’ve seen is that as an industry, we are teeming with progressive-leaning professionals, most of whom would avidly applaud the idea of greater diversity and inclusion in design workplaces.
But if I’m honest, I can only count a handful of times that I’ve worked with an African American, Hispanic, or Native American designer at any level. The reality of the design industry is that we’re homogenous—overwhelmingly white and, like myself, Asian American…
This egregious situation reflects an ongoing, industry-wide failure to prioritize the development of diverse and inclusive workplaces. I’m as guilty of this as anybody: When I was starting out in the design field, I readily accepted the commonly held belief throughout our culture that problems of race and cultural diversity were largely solved. And if things weren’t perfect, the consensus opinion seemed to imply that the best way to resolve them in everyone’s favor was to just ignore race, gender, and culture entirely.
Clearly, that hasn’t worked. If that were the only problem, it would be significant enough to motivate us all to act decisively. But this is more than just an issue of doing the right thing—it’s a challenge to the very notion of design itself.
This is the lates part of an ongoing campaign to use whatever influence I have at my job at Adobe to try and push this situation towards greater fairness and equity for everyone. More to come later this year. In the meantime, read the full article at qz.com.
I feel a little sheepish about confessing that I didn’t really like “Black Panther” all that much, especially after the nearly universal acclaim that greeted its debut last month. I went to see it on opening night with high expectations, in part because I thought director Ryan Coogler’s previous film, “Creed” was pretty close to a masterpiece. And while I was impressed by the cultural significance of “Black Panther”—it’s a total triumph on that front—I found that, narratively, it was as messy, as poorly paced, and as unconvincing as any other Marvel film.
In fact, I find myself pretty much at the end of my rope with Marvel movies. I still believe there’s a lot of interesting things that can be done with this genre, but I’m exhausted by the studio’s obsession with continuity and crossover appearances and, well, merchandising. Every outing seems to lead to the same large-scale, bloodless and mostly stakes-free battle scene, and only serves to queue up the next installment.
Also, as a designer, I’m tired of the milieus of these films all looking almost exactly the same. Whether it’s a technologically superior African country or a mythological realm of Norse gods or even the Second World War, these worlds are all dreamed up within a very narrow band of imagination. The costumes and the technology and the sets and the effects all look like they were designed by Nike.
Admittedly, “Black Panther” does sidestep some of these problems. It’s more of a standalone film than its predecessors, if not by much, and it poses some genuinely interesting social questions. And the injection of African dress and aesthetics into Marvel’s usual quasi sci-fi production design did make it moderately more intriguing. But I found myself largely bored unless Michael B. Jordan’s Kilmonger character was on screen; not only is he a better performer than leading man Chadwick Boseman, his character was just many times more engaging on screen.
People do seem to adore this movie though and so maybe I ought to watch it again. But it used to be that the only time I’d want to rewatch a movie was when it was so good that I felt compelled to experience that excellence over and over. But with these movies that hail from heavily sequelized cinematic universes, the sensation is closer to feeling duty bound to watch so as to be sure that they’re not bad. Partly that comes from the sunk cost fallacy; I’ve invested so much into these franchises that I want to find something worthwhile in them, if for no other reason than to be able to properly consume and appraise the next sequel. That is a bad way to watch movies.
Anyway, in addition to “Black Panther” I also watched twenty-three other movies last month. Here they are:
Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 New York City Subway Map is well remembered both as a beautiful example of modernist design and as a notorious victim of public short-sightedness. I tend to think it’s a bit overpraised and the fact that it was largely deemed unusable by the public has been too conveniently written off by its fans.
That said, its hallowed reputation amongst design fans continues to grow. Now Milan-based author and illustrator Emiliano Ponzi has nudged it further towards mythological status with a children’s book that tells how it came to be. The book uses warm, painterly illustrations that playfully illustrate the challenges that Vignelli faced, while also squeezing in a gentle introduction to design problem solving and the principles of modernism. Sample spreads:
To learn more about the book, you can read Steven Heller’s brief appraisal at designobserver.com. You can also see some of the original illustrations, free of copywriting, in this Behance project. And of course you can buy a copy for the young modernist in your life at Amazon.
Update 03 Apr 2018: This feature is now available in Lightroom for iOS as well.
When I take photos I often like to get the composition as square and upright as I can. If there’s a straight line, like a tabletop or a wall or the contours of a building, I do everything I can to make sure it’s as rectilinear and aligned with the edges of the frame as I can. This isn’t always possible, of course, not just because I can’t always get in the right position to capture an image in that way, but also because of the way camera lenses of all kinds (especially those on phones) tend to visually distort the images they capture.
Some photo editing apps make it pretty easy to fix this, especially on desktop. On mobile, I used to use an app called SKRWT which did a nice job for a while before a disastrous redesign a few years ago rendered the app basically unusable. Since then there hasn’t been a good replacement, but last month Adobe Lightroom CC mobile app added a “geometry” feature that makes this effect easy to do. Finally.
These screen grabs illustrate the process. After importing an image, in this case a shot I took of some theater signage that stood several feet above me, I tap on the new “Geometry” tab in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. That allows adjustment of the image using sliders to control the distortion, an imprecise but sometimes useful method.
It’s much more satisfying though to tap the small, cross-like icon just above those sliders to manipulate the image more directly, as shown in the middle image above. This is done by using my finger to draw guides on the image itself that the app uses to straighten the image. You can draw as many as four of them along angles in the picture, each one indicating that the image data should be stretched or pinched to appear more square. Because this can dramatically distort the shape of the overall image, the last step is to crop it down to just the usable area. Below you can see the resulting image, where the type in the signage is more or less fully straightened, as if I shot it looking straight on.
This is an incredibly handy feature to have on the go and frankly its execution is superior to SKRWT or anything that came before, in my experience. Unfortunately right now it’s only available on Lightroom for Android which is a little frustrating but iOS users get so many features first or even exclusively that it’s only fair to feel the reverse occasionally. Nevertheless my colleagues at Adobe remind me that the feature has been available on Lightroom for desktop for some time, and assure me that it’ll come to iOS soon too.
This incisive tweet from type designer James Edmonson of Oh No Type Co looks like a humorous one-liner but is actually a brilliant piece of criticism. In just four words, he summarizes the pervasive tendency towards a visual uniformity that seems to draw in nearly every major tech brand operating today.
When I read it it struck me as a good companion—a much more succinct and effective one—to the post I wrote here in January about the near ubiquity of a very specific, narrow band of visual expressiveness in illustrations for tech brands. Like that post, this tweet raises questions about what kind of culture we’re building online and whether it’s as truly diverse as their ostensibly progressive shepherds would claim. For me it also asks the question of why we aren’t examining the design language of these companies with more rigor?
Consider the macro trend of these brands all visually converging alongside the industry’s current mania for design systems. That juxtaposition suggests that we’re far more interested in implementing ideas than we are in ideas themselves. Put another way, as practitioners of design we’re most comfortable asking questions like “How do we implement our brand’s design language, propagate and scale it, and make sure it’s consistent?” We’re much less comfortable asking questions like, “What’s the larger context for the brand we’re building? Are we making a unique and worthwhile contribution to the value of our company, to the world at large, or even to our profession?” It’s the difference between merely executing ideas and really understanding them.
Last week American Airlines failed in its second attempt to register its logo with the U.S. Copyright Office. Apparently the body was unimpressed by the level of distinction inherent in the diagonal shape, meant to suggest both a wingspan and a runway and interrupted in the middle by a stylized eagle’s head. In a written explanation a spokeperson said, “A mere simplistic arrangement of non-protectable elements does not demonstrate the level of creativity necessary to warrant protection.”
This current logo is of course the one that, back in 2013, replaced American Airlines’ longstanding and iconic Massimo Vignelli-designed identity. While I prefer Vignelli’s, I’m surprised by this rejection by the Copyright Office. First, it’s surprising that a major corporation with the heft of American Airlines has been unable to push through a successful copyright application. You would expect them to have more sway.
But I’m more interested in the fact that the Copyright Office is essentially rendering a design judgment here. I know nothing about its operations, but a quick look at the body’s web site shows that its leadership team is largely composed of lawyers and policy makers. I don’t doubt their expertise in copyright law of course, but do they know design? What level of expertise do they have in logotypes and corporate identity, and is that even a required area of knowledge to serve on this board?
More to the point, shouldn’t there be a designer on their leadership team at the U.S. Copyright Office, someone with proven experience in the design industry who can help give context to cases like this? I’d never thought about whether there should be design representation in copyright before, but now I’m very curious about how our industry’s work is affected by how this body operates and renders judgments. To my eyes, this logo is easily more than a “simplistic arrangement of non-protectable elements.” It’s not exactly my taste, but it’s as good as countless others out there.
At the beginning of January, before everyone came back from the holidays, I indulged myself in what is, for a parent of young kids, an unimaginable luxury: one full afternoon spent by myself, at the movies. I started with Steven Spielberg’s Pentagon Papers dramatization “The Post”. And I followed that with Aaron Sorkin’s “Molly’s Game,” which tells the story of Molly Bloom, a former Olympic athlete who came to run a high-stakes poker game for Hollywood’s elite. It was kind of a liberal’s double-header, you might say.
“The Post” is like a lot of Spielberg’s recent prestige fare: overly earnest and really, really on-the-nose about what it wants you to think and feel. It’s also visually nauseating; cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s highly stylized atmospherics have all the personality of one of those sickly sweet Hallmark posters with little kids giving each other adobrable kisses that they issued to everyone’s dentists in the 1980s. Still, the movie is not ineffective and I found myself wrapped up in it way more than I expected to be. Good flick for the plane, if it happens to be playing.
As for “Molly’s Game,” it’s tough to know which Aaron Sorkin is going to show up for any new project: the brilliant, hilarious storyteller responsible for “A Few Good Men,” “Sports Night” and the best years of “The West Wing”? Or the didactic, agenda-obsessed debate club vice-president of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and “The Newsroom”? Luckily it’s mostly the former who was on duty for “Molly’s Game” which also happens to be Sorkin’s feature film directorial debut. He generally knocks it out of the park with a smart, expertly paced, fully gripping thriller disguised as a biopic. Mind you, the movie itself is preposterous in its framing of virtue and vice, and it’s as flawed as any Sorkin work. Nevertheless it’s a blast.
Including those two, I watched a total of fifteen movies in January. Here is the full list:
I’ve seen a decent number of airport art exhibitions in my time, but I’ve never seen one as good and as extensive as “The Parisianer 2050,” on display right now at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. I landed here this morning on my way to a week of conferences and meetings in Lyon and Berlin, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the fifty or so large graphic prints that make up this exhibition lining the long corridor between my gate and immigration.
“The Parisianer” is of course a riff on the long, grand illustrative tradition of The New Yorker magazine’s covers. There is no Parisianer publication, but as a project it has been running for nearly five years. It’s a kind of ongoing a platform for French illustrators to do wonderful work celebrating the City of Lights. This exhibition is actually a preview of an upcoming book whose theme is imagining the Paris of the future and the artwork is phenomenal. It’s a perfect greeting for visitors and it will be on display for the next few months in Terminal 2E, Hall M.
By the way I’ll be in Lyon the next few days where I’ll be giving a talk about design criticism at IxDA’s annual Interaction 18 conference. Then, on Friday, I’ll be at Awwwards Berlin, where I’ll be giving a talk about how we can level up the design industry. Then, on Monday, I’ll be making an appearance for the IxDA Berlin chapter too. If you’re in Lyon or Berlin, join us!
Below are some samples from “The Parisianer 2050,” prints of which are conveniently for sale at image-republic.com.
This short documentary video that The New York Times posted a few days ago keeps nagging at me. It’s called “Your Train Is Delayed. Why?” and it’s an eleven-minute “explainer” that unravels the many historically thorny reasons why the New York City subway system has come to own “the worst on-time performance of any major rapid transit system in the world.”
If you live in New York or if you’re interested in why this icon of public transportation and civic infrastructure is now in a state of emergency (literally), then this video is genuinely informative. It’s also really bewildering. Its tone is so informal, so whimsical and, occasionally, so irreverent that I’m kind of shocked that it comes from The New York Times. Watch it and you’ll see playfully abrupt edits, humorous captions, vintage film footage, animated cutouts and even a busker who was hired to sing tongue-in-cheek verses about the subway system. It’s not particularly “Timesian,” as they say at the Gray Lady.
It’s actually all pretty entertaining but its style is also pretty patronizing, if you ask me. The Times has never been afraid of explaining things clearly, but at its best its journalism never underestimates its audience. And there are parts of this video where any reasonably intelligent viewer would feel like they’re being talked down to. Skip to the 3:03 timestamp at which point a toy train set (really) is used to illustrate a key historical decision. At first the track is turned to the left towards one possible decision, and then it’s repositioned to turn to the right towards another. Get it?
What nags at me though is not so much this execution as the question of whether this is what journalism needs to look like in this day and age to succeed? Is this video an example of the style—of the attitude—that reporting needs to adopt in order to resonate with online audiences?
The thing is, I don’t even mean to condemn this approach, because it has its merits. A more Timesian video would have been sober to a fault, and probably much less interesting. This, at the very least, is not that. I also recognize that the Times has to find younger audiences in order to thrive, and that the process of learning how to do that will inevitably strike traditionalists as confounding if not appalling. And maybe that’s all this is: one iteration in a process of finding a balance between the organization’s traditional values and the vastly different landscape. That’s fair; I can’t fault them for trying something different. I just kind of hated myself for watching it—which come to think of it is the way the rest of the Internet makes me feel, so I guess they’re on to something.
I’ve written here before about my Fake TV, one of my favorite device purchases from last year. It’s a simple, compact box covered with multicolor LED lights that emulates the effect of a television illuminating a dark room. The idea is to deter prospective burglars by giving the impression that someone is at home.
That same concept is at the heart of Kevin, a new device being funded through this just-launched Kickstarter campaign. Taking its name from Macaulay Culkin’s character in the immortal “Home Alone,” Kevin is what you might call a “smart fake TV.” That means it’s a wifi enabled, internet of things-y, fancy schmancy design object with richer, more varied, and more intelligent light emulation routines than my Fake TV. It also takes the illusion even further by including a variety of ersatz audio—there are sounds that give would-be intruders the impression that the family is home, having dinner, rooting for a favorite team during a big game, enjoying a movie, or even exercising strenuously. Everything can be controlled through Kevin’s mobile app (which looks copiously illustrated in the de rigeur tech aesthetic I wrote about a few weeks ago). This video demonstrates Kevin in action:
The basic technology at the heart of Kevin—programmable LEDs and playback of prerecorded sounds—is straightforward enough that it seems like a relatively low-risk Kickstarter gamble. Its network capabilities also suggest that buying several of them would make for a pretty convincing solution for an entire home; you can imagine programming three or four of them to simulate a fully active household. Kevin also sports a much, much more attractive industrial design than the hideous Fake TV; it looks as good as any Sonos or smart speaker, at least in the press photos. But, at about US$200 each, Kevin is also roughly many times as expensive as a Fake TV. If that doesn’t discourage you, you can back the campaign at kickstarter.com.
