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.
Two-thousand and sixteen has been such a bizarre, horrible year. A case in point is Glenn Beck’s bizarre reconsideration of his previously divisive hyperbolic tendencies. Here he is chatting with Samantha Bee on her show “Full Frontal,” and the result is confounding on every level, not least because Beck seems to make more sense than Bee. Watching this clip is like watching reality collapse upon itself. If it weren’t for the fact that next year could be even worse, I’d say I can’t wait for this awful year to be over.
This article at Wired offers some interesting insight into the thinking that informed the alien “written language” in Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival.”
A single logogram can express a simple thought (‘Hi’) or a complex one (‘Hi Louise, I’m an alien but I come in peace’). The difference lies in the complexity of the shape. A logogram’s weight carries meaning, too: A thicker swirl of ink can indicate a sense of urgency; a thinner one suggests a quiet tone. A small hook attached to one symbol makes it a question. The system allows each logogram to express a bundle of ideas without adhering to any traditional rules of syntax or sequence.
Whether this is truly plausible or not, the result is beautiful. Read the full article at wired.com.
I can’t remember how long I’ve been familiar with this incident in its urban legend form, but this video from “Adam Ruins Everything” sheds some light on the actual facts. If you’re not familiar with it, the story goes that a woman bought some coffee from McDonald’s and sued when she spilled it on her lap, prompting people everywhere to bemoan the susceptibility of the American legal system to frivolous lawsuits. The details are more horrible—and sinister—than that.
Carrying around two phones is one of those things that I’ve always associated only with a certain class of dork, but right now that’s me. Along with my iPhone, I’ve been toting around a Google Pixel phone everywhere I go and, as much as I can, I’ve tried to make it my primary device. Everything that I would normally turn to my iPhone for, I try to turn to my Pixel for.
I did this in part to learn more about Android; even though this isn’t my first Android device (I’ve owned two others and a tablet), it’s the first one that from the outset looked like it stood the best chance of legitimately replacing my iPhone. Everything from the build quality to the subtle but meaningful extra attention and care paid to the operating system felt closer to the iPhone than I’ve seen before.
To be sure, it’s a terrific phone. It has a world class still camera that just about lives up to its hype, and to me the operating system has never felt as united with its hardware as it does in this phone.
As much as I tried though, after living with this device for several weeks I still felt that there were several stumbling blocks to jumping entirely to Android. Whether you consider it lock-in or value-add, Apple’s ecosystem is a powerful argument for sticking with the iPhone.
Everyone talks about iMessage being the most compelling argument for Apple’s ecosystem and I found that to be absolutely true. I had hoped that Google’s new Allo messaging product would be a worthy contender, but it fell far short. Allo doesn’t match iMessage’s key strength—the ability to abstract your account—the place where you send and receive messages—from the device. By contrast you can use one iMessage account on multiple devices (I count five devices for my account) and send and receive messages on all of them, but each Allo instance is tied to a single phone number and device, so there’s no device switching, and certainly no receiving Allo messages on my desktop. Learning that was a disappointment and pretty much meant the end of the argument for switching entirely to Android. iMessage is a huge advantage for Apple.
I also discovered something interesting about Google’s much vaunted strength in services: sometimes it’s no better than Apple’s. As an iTunes Match user, I’ve long bemoaned Apple’s inability to make automatic syncing of my music library between devices truly seamless and glitch free. It’s gotten better over the years, but it’s still prone to oddball errors and quirks which, in the past, always made me wish that Google was powering the service instead.
When I got the Pixel I figured I could use Google Play Music syncing for the same purpose—to get the contents of my music library to the Pixel. To my surprise, Google does an even poorer job than Apple. Among the problems I encountered: albums show up in multiple parts; tracks are missing; corrected meta information doesn’t get synced etc. To be fair, Google Play Music syncing is still mostly usable; it just failed to live up to my expectations for Google’s services prowess.
Another thing that surprised me was the experience of using Android’s lock screen notifications, which in the past I’ve admired and found more powerful than those on iOS. They’ve generally been richer and more capable where for a long time iOS lock screen notifications were fairly limited. That is, until iOS 10 overhauled its notification system. Aesthetically, the new notifications interface actually doesn’t look as good, to me, as it did in iOS 9. But I hadn’t realized until I started using the Pixel how very good its interactions are in general. By and large, iOS 10 notifications are easy to use and understand: if you see something on the lock screen you can take action on it and that clears all the other notifications. If you missed a notification, you can access it again by pulling down from the top of the screen once the phone is unlocked.
Android notification behavior, on the other hand, is harder to predict. They tend to stick around even after you’ve engaged with them, and worse, they reshuffle all the time, sometimes right before your eyes. It’s relatively difficult to clear them all too, unless you effectively view (or at least scan) all of them. In the end, I found it disappointing that a system that I had liked previously had turned into something more complex than I feel is really necessary.
None of which is to say that the Pixel is a bad phone. If you’re predisposed towards Android, or don’t enjoy iOS, the Pixel presents a superb overall experience. But I had hoped that, despite my predilection towards Apple, I would be able to find a viable alternative should I ever want to jump ship. I still hope that Android evolves into that, because I think that makes for a much more interesting market. For now though, even though I’m still carrying around my Pixel, my iPhone remains my main device.
Women Who Draw is an open directory of freelance professional illustrators, artists and cartoonists—who all happen to be female. It was created a by “a group of women artists in an effort to increase the visibility of female illustrators, female illustrators of color, LBTQ+, and other minority groups of female illustrators.” It’s a fantastic resource for anyone who needs to hire illustrators but also a pleasure to browse at your leisure.
Beloved indie band Allo Darlin’ have decided to call it quits after eight years. They made three three exceptionally tuneful albums that were also complex and rewarding in the way that the best songcraft always is. Here is a fan-shot video of the very end of their farewell concert in London over the weekend; it’s bursting with both joy and sadness in every note, handclap and dance step.
As a parting gift, the band have also released their last ever single, a lovingly wrought number called “Hymn on the 45,” available over at bandcamp.com. A bittersweet au revoir to a special band, and more proof that 2016 marks the end of all good things.
I was at a winter fair at my daughter’s school over the weekend and spotted a bin full of plastic letters with magnets attached to the back, the kind you’d put on a refrigerator door. I got lucky with the lighting and captured this photo with my new Google Pixel phone (more about which later).
November was a good time to lose myself in film and try to forget about the outside world. I even made it to theaters four times, where I saw three of the best movies of the year (I wrote about them in this post) and one of the least consequential (rhymes with “proctor mange”). I also spent a lot of time on the bountiful new streaming service FilmStruck, a haven for cinephiles that was a source of great comfort. In total, I watched nineteen flicks.
DesignScape is an experimental system from Adobe Research and the computer science department at the University of Toronto. Its purpose is to demonstrate a system that “aids the design process by making interactive layout suggestions, i.e., changes in the position, scale, and alignment of elements.” The user is presented with a set of elements typical to most design problems—a headline, blocks of text, logo, icons and illustrations, contact information, etc. As these are manipulated, the system automatically generates new layout suggestions based on the input. The user can choose one of the suggestions to further refine, at which point the system generates still more suggestions. It’s like having a design assistant at your side as you figure out a layout problem. Watch this video to see it in action.
The examples here are crude, both in the quality of the basic elements and in the suggestions that are generated by the system. But watching the video, it’s apparent that there’s a respectable “layout intelligence” at work here; the system is making reasonably well-informed decisions about how the elements should be placed in relation to one another, resized, aligned etc.
In fact the “quality” of the design decision-making in DesignScape is based on data gathered through asking humans to produce layouts via Mechanical Turk. It’s easy to imagine that a wider scale effort involving more designers and/or more qualified designers could, at some point, produce much more refined outputs.
Even so, what’s on display here all seems fairly academic until it’s demonstrated on a tablet. Fine tuned manipulation of design elements is difficult on touch surfaces; in this context, the idea of assisted graphic design layout suddenly seems not only viable but desirable. Rather than something that might come someday in the future, it suddenly feels like something that could make sense now.
It seems safe to say that while a certain segment of graphic design will never be completely replaced by automated systems, at some point in the near future systems like this will become commonplace, either as a replacement for lower-dollar design needs, or even as a complement to big ticket design processes. Remember, there was a time when many of the world’s most famous graphic designers scoffed at the idea of ever needing a personal computer to do their work.
Learn more about DesignScape, and read the paper, at dgp.toronto.edu.
