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.
Adobe’s marquee apps like Photoshop and Illustrator get a lot of criticism, sometimes deservedly and sometimes not. But they’re still workhorses for millions of people, and as a reader reminded me recently, often they feature the kind of attention to detail that really matters to designers, even in the smallest ways.
Sometimes it’s the little things. Illustrator has the ability to align dashes to corners. For the life of me, I can find no other Mac graphics program (Affinity Designer, Omnigraffle, Graphic [Autodesk], …) that has a similar feature. Am I missing something?
I hadn’t realized this, but this reader is totally right. I revisited this feature recently to see for myself. Here’s a 150 px square with a 1px thick dashed line that breaks for 5 pt every 15 pt. Notice how the corners are not uniform.
Here’s the same square, with the catchily named “Align dashes to corners and path ends, adjusting lengths to fit” option turned on. The result: pretty corners.
And here’s that square again, with dashes that are 75 pt long instead. The dashes magically align with the corners and the midpoints of each segment of the square.
In each of the last two cases, product designers, managers and engineers sweated over the details to make sure the output matches the designer’s intent. That’s a rare quality—even amongst the many newcomers to the design tools space who are clearly as passionate about creative tools as Adobe is. This is not to say that Adobe apps do not have lots of work ahead to be simpler, more performant, more in tune with what users want. It’s just to say that creating software for designers requires an extraordinary amount of attention to even the smallest details; you have to account for nearly every detail that every designer would ever want to finesse. You know how designers are; we’re fussy.
Frankly, I’m depressed. The whole idea of a “President Trump” has left me adrift, has dimmed my hope. My reaction has been denial, excessive devotion to my to-do list, and turning to film. Luckily, the gray that comes with the end of the year—and in the weeks since the eighth of November, it’s been unbearably dark and cold—can be reliably tempered by the harvest of the “serious” film season. I’ve seen some extraordinary movies in the past month, two of which feel like they mark the end of an era, and a third that will almost certainly come to be regarded as timeless.
Before election day, I went to see Barry Jenkins’s exquisite, tender “Moonlight,” a coming-of-age tale about a gay, African American boy growing up in poverty in Miami. Jenkins’s last feature was 2008’s “Medicine for Melancholy,” a mumblecore-esque melodrama that I found charming yet overly careful. So I wasn’t prepared for how confident and unhesitating his work in “Moonlight” is; it’s powerful and engrossing without compromising the authenticity of its subject matter in the least. It also now seems, in the aftermath of the election, like a closing chapter in the Obama era, a time when LGBT progress seemed destined to make greater and greater strides for years.
I also saw, on opening weekend, Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival,” the story of a linguist wrestling with the personal and geopolitical implications of trying to communicate with aliens who have landed on Earth. Villeneuve directed the nearly perfect “Sicario,” one of my favorite movies of last year, and in “Arrival” you can still see the same pitch perfect directorial instincts: a keen feeling for naturalism and the ability to challenge the audience without sliding into the inscrutable. Maybe the most notable thing about “Arrival” though is a kind of movie magic that often goes unappreciated: insanely fortuitous release timing. Sometimes, the erratic, lurching path of filmmaking somehow produces a piece of work that is perfectly suited for the very day it debuts. This story of a desperate, international scramble to deeply understand and communicate with one another bowed in theaters just days after a dramatic shift away from empathy, from internationalism, like a commentary on what could have been. It might actually make your mourning even more difficult, actually.
To me, these two movies are a coda for the past eight years; products of an era of open-mindedness and intellect. The third movie I saw is perhaps better suited for the next four years in that it’s an intoxicatingly effective piece of escapist entertainment: Park Chan-Wook’s surprisingly romantic “The Handmaiden.” From the very first scene, in which a poor Korean girl leaves a makeshift family to go work in the grand home of a rich and twisted master, this movie upends expectations and roles repeatedly. The initial half hour or so, which dives into the societal distortions of Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s, is a fairly standard historical drama, but even in its conventionality it’s enthrallingly made. Before long, though, the movie transforms itself and repeatedly—in turns, it becomes a long con, a romantic comedy, a pornographic exploitation, a revenge thriller, and, briefly towards the end, a horror film. All of it is redeemed with the director’s wit and craft; it’s the purest kind of cinema in that it is the kind of fully immersive tale that can only be made on the big screen. In short, it transports you to another world, and lets you forget, for a time, about this world here, where Donald Trump was elected president.
My productivity as measured in Todoist recently—the bars represent the number of to-do items I’ve been crossing off my list each day. This is basically me coping with tragedy.
It’s been quiet here, but I do have something to say about Trump winning the presidency. I’ll try and cobble together my thoughts soon.
I spent a lot of time thinking about work and politics in October, and not enough time watching movies. As a result, I only clocked in seven films. That’s the lowest count of the whole year. I only managed to see a few of them in theaters. One of them was “Storks,” which seemed strangely off kilter and bizarre for a mainstream kid’s film—until I saw that it was executive produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who are steadily creating one of the most distinctive bodies of work in movies.
More next month.
“Prisoners” Kind of saw it as a warm up for director Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival.”
“X-Men” I was shocked by how poorly the FX has aged, but the human core of it still works.
“The General” I’d always heard good things about this one; it did not live up to the things I had heard.
One day, decades from now, my children will ask me, “Papa, why didn’t you stop global warming when you had a chance?” Or, “Papa, how in the world did Donald Trump become president? Didn’t you realize that he would destroy the country?”
To which I’ll reply, “Hey, look, as a generation, we were busy adapting Bruce Willis’s immortal 1988 action masterpiece ‘Die Hard’ into a coloring and activity book, for release by Harper Collins.” Then I’ll show them these awesome spreads, and then they’ll understand everything. Everything.
Announced today during the keynote for MAX 2016, Adobe’s annual user conference: Project Felix is a new app that reinvents three-dimensional modeling so that it’s comprehensible to—and, more importantly, useful for—graphic designers. Not only does it allow you to quickly apply materials and shading to models, it also allows you to easily place that model inside a photo with automatic perspective and lighting correction, so that the effect is seamless. The user interface looks like this (though you can also turn on a dark mode— why would you ever do that?!?):
Felix solves a real problem that typically 3D-averse designers (most of us) have always had—being able to give visual form to physical objects we see in our heads without having to resort to the vagaries of traditional 3D modeling software. It’s a problem that, as a designer, I never imagined anyone would want to solve for me; but it’s fantastic that those kinds of assumptions are changing. Design tools aren’t just getting more numerous, they’re also starting to address problems that have been overlooked for many years.
Andy Baio has been blogging for fourteen years and he’s still at it. As he launches a new design for waxy.org, he offers some thoughts on the anachronism of persisting with this media form in 2016.
But there a few reasons why I’m sad about the decline of independent blogging, and why I think they’re still worth fighting for.
Ultimately, it comes down to two things: ownership and control.
Last week, Twitter announced they’re shutting down Vine. Twitter, itself, may be acquired and changed in some terrible way. It’s not hard to imagine a post-Verizon Yahoo selling off Tumblr. Medium keeps pivoting, trying to find a successful revenue model. There’s no guarantee any of these platforms will be around in their current state in a year, let alone ten years from now.
Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.
I’ve been tinkering with a similar post of my own (though not a redesign), tentatively titled, “Why Am I Still Doing This?” But it’s not ready yet. In the meantime, you can read Baio’s post at waxy.org.
Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design student Chen Winner created this film combining distinctively analog-style animations with audio clips from interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen and David Lynch. It would probably be fair to assume that anyone who chooses to feature all of those particular luminaries in a school project is a little too self-serious, but the end product here is still enjoyable and very well done.
It’s no accident that Microsoft announced its stunning new Surface Studio PC the same week as Apple’s new Touch Bar-enabled MacBook Pro models. These two products represent dueling ideas of how “desktop” operating systems should evolve. As technology writer Jason Snell perceptively writes in his article “Perpendicular Philosophy”:
Microsoft’s belief is that PCs can take a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B and the result is a product that’s more flexible. Apple’s belief is that it should make the best product in column A and the best in column B, and that you can’t do either if you take a little bit from both.
My preference is for the latter approach, but I’m trying to look at the Surface Studio with an open mind. It certainly appears to be substantially more elegant and impressive than any Windows hardware I can recall, it’s true. But I’m not sure I can see myself owning one. From the pictures, it looks elegant, but not that elegant—there’s something that strikes me as unconvincing about the monitor supports and the box that holds the CPU. The designers seem to have optimized for the specifications of the display; it’s as if the goal of having the thinnest monitor out there prevailed over the need to integrate everything into one element.
I also already have two Surface Pro tablets, which I rarely use, and that colors how I look at this machine. As someone who has been extremely comfortable in the Apple ecosystem for many years, my experience is that navigating Windows is, well, difficult. There are some lovely touches to be found, but it’s far too easy to trip back into the legacy Windows user interface, at which point despair sets in.
That said, I have to admit the idea of adding touch to a desktop OS is not without its merits. As I’ve mentioned, I often use my iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard for extended periods of time, without returning to my Mac. That’s a device that requires both touch interaction and keyboard entry (though not mousing), and it’s come to feel pretty natural to me. In fact, the most telling indicator of whether that combination of interaction methods works is what happens when I’m away from my iPad. I find that when I sit down with my MacBook, I often instinctively reach to the screen to interact with what I see before realizing that that’s not possible. I imagine that today’s children, who are growing up with touch devices, will have the same expectations for all computing hardware before too long. As far as gambles on the future of computing go, I’m not ready to rule out the Surface Studio PC.
I’m one of those crotchety oldsters who still clings to my Apple Wired Keyboard with Numeric Keypad because, well because it’s got a numeric keypad and Apple refuses to make a wireless version. I don’t know about you, but I kinda type a lot of numbers, so having number keys in an extended layout is pretty damn useful. I’ve tried third-party wireless keyboards with numeric keypads but the tactile quality of those keys never felt quite as satisfying to me as Apple’s, plus they never look nearly as nice.
That changed when I bought a Wireless Aluminum Keyboard from Ontario-based keyboard nuts Matias Corporation. For all intents and purposes, it’s exactly like Apple’s wired version, including the same or very similar key switches—though it comes in four color schemes.
It also sports not just one but four Bluetooth connections, which allows me to pair it with my desktop, laptop and iPad (with room to spare!) and then flip back and forth between them. This harkens back to the old days when I used to have a KVM (keyboard, video and mouse) switch to hop back and forth between my Mac and the Windows machine that another era of computing demanded I operate. It actually makes me wish there was a third-party version of Apple’s wireless trackpad that could also support multiple Bluetooth connections.
If you don’t need to pair with more than one Bluetooth device, NewerTech sells a wireless numeric keypad that you can use with Apple’s previous generation wireless keyboard. In fact, Matias Corporation itself created this wireless numeric keypad too, exclusively for NewerTech. I bought one some time ago and cosmetically, it’s a pretty good match for the Apple hardware.
However, it’s awkward that the numeric keypad is a separate piece from the main keyboard. Even though NewerTech ships it with a plastic widget that lets you connect the two into one unit, it still feels like something of a hack. I would recommend Matias’s own full wireless aluminum keyboard over this one in a heartbeat.
And that, my friends, is about as much thought as anybody should put into numeric keypads.
