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.
The artist Tyrus Wong, who made major contributions to Walt Disney’s 1942 animated classic “Bambi,” passed away just before the end of the year. He was responsible for the gorgeously distinctive background paintings that made it a breakthrough in animation.
Wong’s obituary recounts his epic tale: as a Chinese-born child he was forced to endure withering government screening and trials to immigrate to the States; his father taught him to use a brush with just water because they could not afford ink; he earned a pittance in wages and the bigotry of low expectations making his way in the arts; when he tried his hand at animation, he was assigned the “in between” work that was considered the trade’s lowest and most menial job; through sheer pluck he managed to convince Disney to hire him to create the work that has helped “Bambi” endure for decades, and yet he was still fired during an employee strike in which he did not take part; ultimately it took until the 1990s for him to win recognition for his seminal work. Despite all that the man lived to be 106 years old before he passed on. Amazing.
Read the full obituary at nytimes.com. Also, read about the retrospective exhibition of his work that was mounted last year at observer.com.
The “Star Wars” franchise is generally classified as science fiction but for many years now it’s really been in the process of metamorphosing into a genre of its own. It’s hard not to look at the last seven films and miss the fact that as a whole they have become increasingly, almost pathologically self-referential, governed by their own increasingly solipsistic rules and conventions, preoccupied with burying the original trilogy further and further in useless proprietary trivia.
This momentum towards meaninglessness is what each new episode must contend with. Last year’s “The Force Awakens,” in its slavish devotion to recreating tropes and devices we’d seen in the franchise before, had the effect of making the vastness of space seem small, hermetic, and starving for possibilities.
In many ways “Rogue One,” the latest installment and the first “standalone” film, doesn’t quite escape these expectations. Throughout its two hours and thirteen minutes, it busies itself with conveying meanings that only the most ardent devotees of Star Wars will ever be able to decipher. It’s peppered with details and characters and allusions to not just its theatrical predecessors, but also to the television shows and novels and video games and toys that we’re all supposed to be buying so that we can enjoy the next movie, television show, novel, video game or show.
Yet “Rogue One” also manages, somehow, to sneak in a real story in the midst of all that fan service. It’s not the most original story, or the most vividly rendered, but it’s a highly entertaining one that achieves a workable truce with the demands of its unique, Disney-owned form. It’s the tale of a rag-tag band of misfits, led by a conflicted protagonist, who attempt to steal a critical MacGuffin that could tip the balance in an exhausting war. Along the way you get distrust and scheming and then reversals of fortune and leaps of faith and heartening epiphanies, and some intensely choreographed shoot ’em ups and explosions too.
You’ve seen all of this before. It echoes many hallmarks of war movies and heist flicks—and that, maybe more than anything is what makes this movie work so well. Despite all of its sly winking and nodding towards the initiated, this movie is ultimately interested in more than its sandbox, this fictional universe in which people duel with light swords and you can hear explosions in outer space. Alongside the fan service, there are references to “The Longest Day,” “The Dirty Dozen”, “The Asphalt Jungle,” “Le Cercle Rouge,” “Rififi” and scores of other films. By borrowing liberally from these relatively fresh sources of inspiration, director Garett Edwards returns us to what made “Episode IV” so fascinating: the idea that you could pastiche together dozens of bits of cinematic history and create a wholly immersive and novel world out of them.
All of this may sound like rewarding a triumph over low expectations, and there’s a certain amount of truth to that. Frankly, until now every installment in this series since 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back” has been terrible. “Rogue One” seems refreshing simply because it was directed and apparently reworked with an eye on making it survive as a movie on its own merits. And because it cracks open the door to its universe just a bit and lets in some new ideas.
For some fans like myself who have always felt that there’s more to explore in this franchise, this is its most salient achievement: “Rogue One” effectively proves the inherent sturdiness of the Star Wars universe. It shows that it’s possible to tell more than just that one same old story about hiding critical data in a droid which makes its way to a reluctant hero who finds the Force, et cetera et cetera. The result is that it makes this far, far away galaxy feel more porous and sprawling, less predictable and much, much more interesting.
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.
