Kawak is a pretty stunning new typeface created by Javier Viramontes during his studies at the Type@Cooper postgraduate program and “mastered” by Latinotype Foundry. It somehow manages to look vibrantly contemporary and pleasingly retrograde at the same time. Viramontes writes:

Kawak is a Mexican Grotesk inspired by Mayan glyphs from the Tzolk’in ritual cycle. It marries modernist typographic tradition with pre-Hispanic formalism, creating a ‘mestizaje’ between cleanliness, readability, objectivity, and the Mayan super-ellipse.

Sometimes I think the goal of describing the ideas behind new typefaces is to sound as esoteric as possible, and Viramontes takes it to a whole new level by referencing concepts from an entirely different civilization. Nevertheless, that doesn’t take away from the fact that Kawak is a gorgeous accomplishment—especially its Black weight. Even better the complete family—for desktop and web—is available for less than US$90 right now at youworkforthem.com.

Apple’s Lightning cable spec is great. Of all the various types of cables I’ve used over the years, it’s the easiest to use and the most reliable by far, plus it provides the most satisfying tactile feedback, hands down. And yet, sooner or later almost every Apple-branded Lightning cable I’ve owned ends up looking like this:

There are various hacky methods of fixing this problem but none of them seem particularly effective. I’ve actually taken to buying Apple MFi-certified Lightning cables from Monoprice, which I’ve found to be both sturdier and cheaper. Recommended.

Just this morning I saw that the always clever accessories manufacturer Nomad is now selling a series of ultra-rugged Lightning cables that are “wrapped in 1000D nylon woven in a ballistic weave pattern.”

Other features include: “Reinforced RF shielding for fast data sync. 2x thick protective PVC jacket. Extra thick wire gauge and a robust kevlar core.” If the technical language and the impressively science-y diagram above don’t sway you, the cost will certainly give you pause. A basic cable is US$34.95, nearly twice the price of Apple’s stock 1M USB-to-Lightning model.

However, for just US$5 more, Nomad also offers a version of this cable that has a “high capacity 2350 mAh portable battery” embedded along the cable length, which I find to be pretty ingenious. It looks like this:

Of course, external batteries have notoriously short life spans, so when this battery has effectively died, you’ll have a needlessly heavy and bulky cable on your hands. Still, if it doesn’t fray, I wouldn’t complain.

For the past two years or so, designer Eli Schiff has been causing a stir among his fellow product designers with the critical essays he’s been publishing on his web site. With titles like “Instagram’s Abomination,” “Uber’s Atomic Meltdown,” and “Fall of the Designer,” these writings have taken the design industry to task for recent trends in product design, branding and aesthetics. In particular, Schiff spends significant energy examining what he believes is a harmful tendency among designers towards undervaluing their own contributions.

Schiff’s essays have been polarizing, to say the least; while they have had their share of defenders, many within the design community have condemned them for both their substance and style. For me, as a proponent of more thoughtful criticism within our trade, I’ve been reading Schiff’s writing with great interest. The often impassioned backlash to his writing has been eye-opening; for good or bad, it has shown that close scrutiny of how design functions at the intersection of business and technology inspires strong feelings. In my view, Schiff’s work clearly raises some worthwhile if provocative questions, though the language of his arguments often seem less than ideally productive.

After reading many of his articles, I became very curious about his motivations and the way he perceives the impact of his work, so I suggested an interview. Over the course of several months, sometimes with long pauses due to scheduling on both sides, we conducted this interview. If you’ve already formed an opinion about the value of Schiff’s work, it may not alter it, but at the very least it will help you understand a little bit more of what goes into those controversial essays.

Khoi Vinh: I think a lot of people know your writing but not as much about your background. Can you start with a brief overview?

Eli Schiff: Growing up in Massachusetts, I gravitated towards the arts, but it was more a hobby than anything. After high school I took a gap year to teach a third grade class, and then went on to pursue a business degree at UMass Amherst.

About halfway through my studies, I started to explore Photoshop in my free time and quickly shifted focus towards design. My school didn’t have a design program, but a couple faculty members supported my building an independent curriculum. Among other things, I did design writing, worked freelance and reached out to the small Boston design community.

Since then, I’ve worked in-house and consulted with a variety of companies, while at the same time deepening my critical writing practice.

How did you begin your critical writing about design?

As a teen, I loved to read books by writers like Thomas Paine, Ambrose Bierce and Christopher Hitchens. The subject matter they dealt with was captivating, but it was their biting style and commitment to criticality that resonated most.

Also, in my early days in the icon and UI customization community (MacThemes, DeviantArt and Dribbble), I was lucky to be involved in a small cohort of mutually critical designers. I found myself coming to write implicitly critical commentary about broader history and trends, and over time that gradually turned into the longer form criticism I engage in today.

You say “gradually”—does that mean it was mostly a subconscious progression? Or did you decide early on to explicitly write criticism about design?

As far as my associating with the term ‘criticism,’ it was definitely subconscious to begin with. I only explicitly adopted the title after I had built up a body of critical writing on design. At that point, it clicked.

At this point I think some people would say, “Is he qualified to be a design critic?” How would you answer that?

If the interlocutor were a designer, I would ask them ‘what qualifies a designer to design?’ The two professions are here analogous. In the same way a designer is hired by clients to design, a critic is hired by their readership to write.

Most of us can remember exiting a movie theater in a heated discussion with friends about the quality of the acting or special effects. In this way, every one of us engages in criticism, though it’s usually informal.

Having said that, few have the patience to research history and theory, let alone a desire to publish their perspectives. What differentiates me as a professional critic is being compelled to maintain a critical practice as a living.

So do you see yourself as different from any other designer writing about the craft on his or her blog or on Medium, say?

The danger of a platform like Medium is it encourages a sort of drive-by approach to writing. Of course reaction pieces are essential. But as far as my critical practice goes, I find a lot of value in being able to source years’-worth of extended research living in notes, graphics, mind-maps, outlines and half-written essays.

What I’m trying to get at is whether you regard your critical writing as something different from the common design discourse we find on the Internet circa 2016. Your thoughts on that?

So much of design writing is promotional, beholden to a particular company’s design ideology. Diverging from that, there are a handful of cultural critics who write about the aesthetics of politics, of broader societal issues. But I am one of the few critics who distinctly tackles the politics of aesthetics itself, of style and beauty.

Let me see if I can summarize your central focus. It’s the idea that style and beauty are more than just superficial aspects laid on top of functionality, that they deserve thoughtful consideration of their own, and that designers are too readily dismissive of them in the pursuit of legitimacy in business. Does that sound right?

Well put! It’s a big part of what motivates my writing.

Can you give some examples of where you see this play out in the industry?

Right now I’m focused on articulating where this anti-aestheticism emerges from and how it plays out in visual design and software. Those who take the time to read my criticism can begin to understand why.

For the sake of readers of this interview, can I get you to cite some examples?

Recently I took to Twitter to publish some informal criticism of the new logo for a well-loved brand. Most in the design community were supportive of the refresh, as the brand got a new logo, site and products, accompanied by a lengthy case study. I didn’t intend for the critique to be contentious, but it spread like wildfire, quickly getting around a million impressions.

My critique centered on the observation that the new logo suffered a loss in character—though that’s par for the course. What surprised me was that my numerous detractors didn’t leap to the designer’s defense and justify any qualities of the logo as you might expect. Instead, they exclaimed that the logo simply did not matter.

Why did they argue the logo didn’t matter? Two reasons: first, they felt the products the logo would be emblazoned on were sufficiently appealing. But even more callously, some apologists argued that the logo didn’t matter because the brand would inevitably remain profitable. Of course neither retort addresses the criticism I levied. Quite the opposite–they simply backhandedly insulted the designer they sought to defend. It is this sort of anti-aestheticism that drives much of our discourse.

Do you think “anti-aestheticism” is something endemic to the craft, or do you think it’s been driven by particular circumstances? What would you say its origin is?

Absolutely. Modernist functionalism is all but indistinguishable from design itself. They have been tied together since the inception of the craft.

None of this is all that surprising if you look at the political benefits of modernist ideology. Consider that design must appeal to business for its very survival. The edifice of modernism offers a false sense of stability in a sea of uncertainty.

What do you mean by that last remark? What’s that “false sense of stability” you’re referring to?

How else could I describe an ideology that believes it has always and will continue to achieve objective and universal form? It is pure hubris set in a monochromatic palette.

I would doubt that most designers who aspire to a modernist, minimalist or “flat” aesthetic really believe it leads to a truly objective or universal form. Many of them, if not most, probably believe that it’s a way of working that benefits the end user. Would you agree?

I agree most people believe they’re designing in the interest of the end user. Whether things work out that way is another story.

That said, I’d emphasize that many influential designers indeed do believe modern minimalism results in objective and universal form. Those designers without said belief either aren’t reading the canon, or aren’t internalizing it.

So do you contend that even if a designer doesn’t believe in Modernism’s foundational values (“objective and universal form”), working in the Modernist framework is nevertheless a mistake? Even if the designer has a different interpretation of what it represents and what it means?

Let’s take for instance the grid. You’ve been a major proponent of designers understanding grids, even if the intention is to subvert them. Designers who entirely ignore the topic of grids miss out on something deeply important in their education.

What I’m getting at is that in using certain tools, designers run the risk of reifying the ideologies that are associated with them. This is most true when tools and techniques are fetishized, which is the tendency among designers. So the designer who works within the frame of modernism is, in the artifacts he’s producing, not untouched by it.

I would agree with that. But are any of these tools—grids, Modernism, skeuomorphism, whatever—inherently good or bad? My feeling with Modernism in particular is that it’s so pervasive, especially if you account for its many permutations, that to judge it all as bad seems counterproductive. Similarly, there’s an argument that capitalism is bad, but that doesn’t really get us anywhere.

Are the tools themselves inherently bad? No—but neither are they inherently neutral.

As you point out, capitalism and modernism are vast enterprises, but they are equally worthy of inquiry as both broad categories and in their specifics.

We’re getting into the finer points of this argument, but I wonder if you believe it’s been effectively communicated to—or heard by—your audience?

That’s why I’m happy to say there’s much more to come on my blog.

I’ll be more direct: there’s a sense that generally your critiques are focused on negativity and pejorative evaluations and less on substance. I think it’s probably fair to say that there’s a bit of inflammatory language in your writing. Is this, for you, an effective mode for communicating your ideas?

I’m very deliberate about writing. It’s true, some people don’t have the stomach for my style. On the other hand, my writing was never intended to be for everyone.

Also, I question the premise that negative critical appraisals are antithetical to substance. If anything, writing a critical pan should inspire one to grapple with their subject.

Maybe it’s the hyperbole that riles many people. A few examples: you called Instagram’s recent rebranding an “abomination.” You said that modern minimalism tends toward “intentional obscurantism” and is aimed towards elevating “a class of would-be elite designers and their sycophants.” And you dreamed up an “Unofficial Apple Icon Awards” which, though satirical, many found to be mean spirited. There’s a an undercurrent of dismissiveness and heightened negativity in these writings. Some would say they stray beyond critique and into maliciousness. How would you respond?

Be glad I use the language I do. It’s rare to find this sort of honest polemic elsewhere given the incestuousness of the design community.

Final topic: what do you think it would take to have more robust critical writing and thinking about product and interaction design? And what do you think needs to happen to even convince designers that that’s necessary?

On one hand, designers already embrace criticism. As I mentioned earlier, we all take to social media to appraise the latest logo redesign. At the same time, most people have a strong aversion to making something more of these everyday acts of criticism, as that invites a scrutiny of its own. As far as I can see, the way forward is to lead by example.

Back in May I wrote a post asking “Is Netflix Still Worth It?,” complaining that its catalog of high quality, interesting and surprising movies seemed to be diminishing all the time. All of that was subjective, but this week the site Streaming Observer has a more objective take on the question. They looked at the best ranked 250 movies at IMDb and cross-referenced that list with what is available from Netflix in the service’s top nine international markets. The results give us a much more concrete idea of something that has frustrated many customers for a while but only in vague terms. It’s especially eye-opening for those of us in the U.S. and the U.K., who are apparently suffering with the two lowest ranking catalogs of the group.

Streaming Observer also has a comprehensive chart of exactly which markets carry each of the movies on IMDb’s list. See the full article and chart at streamingobserver.com.

One of the unexpected revelations from the Clinton campaign emails released by Wikileaks is an interesting exchange on the process of developing Hillary’s 2016 logo. It turns out that the campaign’s chief strategist Joel Benson was skeptical that Pentagram, who had been hired to design the work, was up to the task. As Co. Design’s John Brownlee writes, there was concern that the new logo could not match the heights of Obama’s 2008 logo (a branding home run if there ever was one for a political campaign).

Benson expresses doubt that the Hillary logo shows this same sense of forward momentum. That could mean that at the time Benson wrote his email, Hillary’s logo did not contain the aisle-crossing arrow that became a hallmark of her identity. Benson further complains that instead of figuring out a way to introduce movement into the logo, Pentagram seems too strongly focused on the idea of using the mark as a ‘window,’ representing the openness and transparency of the Hillary campaign—a design motif that, indeed, has become a central tenet of Hillary brand’s, as the ‘H’ logo is a transparent mask overlaid on different campaign images.

Marketing veteran Wendy Clark was also consulting on the project, and she came to Pentagram’s defense with this impressive rejoinder on how branding really works.

To be clear, a logo can communicate and aid attribution of qualities, but it is not a proxy for the messaging of the campaign until they are relentlessly connected and delivered, repeatedly and consistently. That’s when brands take on meaning.

As Michael has used previously, no one would look at a red Target logo and think: design for all—fashionable yet affordable choices for my home and family—expect more, pay less. But their relentless, contemporary, fashion-forward products and aligned messaging has imbued that logo with meaning just that.

Similarly, Apple, the world’s most valuable brand, launched with their rainbow apple mark in 1976. It simply stood for creativity, thinking differently. Their repeated, consistent use of the mark along with some of the world’s most creative advertising has imbued that bitten apple logo with meaning, but no one would look at that mark stand-alone and say it means Apple is the leader in human-centered designed, electronic devices with a vision for the future.

In other words: logos gain their power when used repeatedly, consistently and well. I bet brand designers everywhere wish that their clients could read this.

Read an overview of the exchange at fastcodesign.com.

Over the weekend I bought a new television, a Vizio M55-D0. It sports a beautiful 4K display with vibrant colors and deep blacks, and it’s sold for a surprisingly reasonable price. Actually, the official product name is the “VIZIO SmartCast M-Series 55″ Class Ultra HD HDR Home Theater Display.” Despite the use of the word “smart” in its branding, I would call it a “dumb” TV—in the very best sense of the word.

If you’re tech savvy in any respect, you’ve no doubt been bewildered and frustrated—if not downright offended—by the truly terrible user interfaces that television manufacturers have foisted on consumers over the past decade or so. Even as TVs have gotten more and more technologically capable, these interfaces have gotten only incrementally more sophisticated, at best. Almost without exception, they’re too elaborate for no good reason, throwing poor if not incompetent aesthetics in your way when all you want to do is accomplish simple tasks, e.g., switching inputs, or making the picture brighter. What’s worse, in order to navigate these screens, they ship with horrifying remote controls like this one which, in case it’s not clear from the picture, is a two-sided device, with a full-sized keyboard on the backside.

That remote shipped with last year’s M-line of TVs from Vizio, and the embarrassment must have cut deep, as they have seemingly learned their lesson well. The company’s 2016 televisions finally do away with the misguided conceit that that kind of interface is a good idea. Instead, the on-screen controls for their 2016 line are emphatically bare bones. I wasn’t able to get a screenshot, but the shockingly simple remote that the M55 ships with is a very telling indicator of how minimal the television’s interface is.

To do this, Vizio made a relatively daring but very simple calculation: their customers have smartphones, and they like controlling things from those smartphones—so why not let smartphones be the principal way that they control their TVs too? Rather than forcing users to cope with the misery of the company’s bespoke operating system, Vizio has offloaded nearly all of the controls you normally find on the television to what has become everybody’s unofficial but nevertheless reliably present second screen.

Once downloaded for your iPhone or Android, you pair Vizio’s SmartCast app with your TV and off you go. The software allows you to do everything the physical remote does and more, including assigning a custom name to the TV, setting up favorite channels, adjusting picture and sound, joining your wifi network, and more. It makes perfect sense. The app also happens to be very competently designed; it won’t blow anyone’s mind, but it’s still leagues better than anything I’ve used from a TV manufacturer in the past. (This is a reminder that the stack you design and develop on really matters; building the app on a widely used operating system obviously freed the company’s design team to do a caliber of work that building on top of their proprietary TV-based systems never allowed.)

All of this is actually made possible by Google’s Google Cast technology, which allows a phone or tablet to power an auxiliary screen. That means that you can send video and sound from any Google Cast-compatible app, either on iOS or Android, to the TV in essentially the same way that iOS users are accustomed to using AirPlay to do the same. I’m a devoted AppleTV user, so this feature doesn’t do a lot for me, but it’s worth noting that while all of Vizio’s 2016 TVs use this app-to-TV approach, some models actually come bundled with a 6-in. Android tablet for those who want a remote control that always stays in the living room. I had assumed that it would sport a stripped down flavor of Android tailored especially for Vizio usage, but in fact it’s basically a full-fledged Android tablet that comes pre-bundled with Vizio’s SmartCast app.

In the future, I tend to doubt that Vizio will continue shipping these tablets unless they can find a way to make them truly worthwhile for customers. For now, the tablet is basically superfluous; I would have been just as happy without it. But I’m still very enthusiastic about the basic value proposition that Vizio is proposing here: TV manufacturers should focus their energies on making great displays—and the “smart” part of their devices should be powered by the technologies that consumers are already familiar and comfortable with, like Android. It’s a model that I hope a lot of other tech manufacturers will follow.

Here’s every movie that I watched last month. The only one I got to see in theaters was “Southside with You,” the preposterously sweet and thoughtful imagining of Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date. It’ll bring tears to the eyes of every liberal and make steam come out of the ears of any conservative.

• “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” Exactly as bad as you’ve heard.
• “Wild Card” Totally serviceable B-movie
• “The Third Man”
• “Casino”
• “Southside with You”
• “Tangerine” Terrifically strong and impactful.
• “The Running Man”
• “Stagecoach” When that camera zooms in on John Wayne—total movie magic.
• “The Assassin” One of the most beautiful movies in recent memory.
• “Heat”
• “The Dark Knight Rises”
• “Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss” Bonkers.
• “Annie Hall”
• “Full Frontal”
• “Hitchcock/Truffaut”
• “The November Man” Hats off to Pierce Brosnan for not phoning it in, but a mess nevertheless
• “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” Rewatching confirmed it for me: it sucks.

If you’re interested, here’s my list from August, July, June, May, April, March and my list for January and February. And you can follow along with my film diary on Letterboxd, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7e3QKKOp50

This might be the most powerful, clearly articulated speech of the entire 2016 election and I recommend that everyone watch it. Appearing at a pro-Hillary Clinton rally yesterday in New Hampshire, Michelle Obama delivered impassioned, highly personal remarks on the dangerous normalization of inappropriate behavior towards women that Donald Trump’s campaign has wrought. It moved me.

Obama’s words and impassioned tone are incredibly effective and unmistakably genuine. As a viewer though, you should be mindful of the deft intercutting of audience shots as she speaks; images of rapt audience members—women and young girls, particularly—are strategically interspersed throughout the running time to maximize the impact of her words. They add a powerful, emotionally moving element of relevance to the oratory, but they’re also manipulative in the way that any kind of editing of moving imagery always is. I don’t mean to take away from Obama’s address at all; I just mean to point out that, as authentic as the message is, like everything else in the campaign, this video too makes use of every means at its disposal to sway your opinion.

It’s also interesting to contrast the substance of this speech to the one that Donald Trump delivered immediately afterwards.

Last year I wrote briefly about BoxBox, a new design tool then still in development with a focus on responsive layout of UI elements. That project has now become Subform, and it’s raising money over at Kickstarter. Here is their video:

The team behind Subform is notable for their ability to express their mission in uncommonly lucid, relatable language. A few worthwhile quotes that capture their aim and scope, first from their Kickstarter campaign:

Subform empowers designers to create responsive layouts, enforce consistent styles, build stateful components, and work with real content—all inside of a familiar, desktop-based visual design environment.

And second from this Medium article about the shortcomings of static design comps in contemporary digital product design.

Subform is emphatically a design tool, not a WYSIWYG code editor like Dreamweaver.

Subform’s focus is not on exporting production code (although it does export well-organized classes). Rather, code export is a way to create a standardized, versionable record of a UI design that preserves the designer’s intent, while making implementation and change-tracking easier for the developer.

We’ve started with HTML and CSS because they are mature, widely-used structural and styling languages.

So, essentially, the work product that Subform produces is not static PNG or JPG files like Sketch or Adobe Xd, or even a clickable prototype composed of constituent static images, like InVision or Principal. Instead Subform produces code, but for specification purposes, not for development purposes. Its goal seems to be to confer on designers the benefits of working in code—the ability to specify real values and behaviors that can be cleanly translated into the language of development—without having to write code. The user interface looks reasonably close to other design authoring tools, but its controls are heavily focused on the behavior of the design elements on the canvas. There seem to be a lot of values to input and controls to set.

The team makes prominent mention of drawing inspiration from CAD programs, which both intrigues and worries me. I’m not deeply familiar with that category of software, but I’ve never heard anyone say, “I wish our tools could be more CAD-like.” That said, allowing designers to be explicit about the behavioral intent of our designs is the next frontier for design authoring, so I’m excited to see how Subform solves this problem. (I’ve backed the project, but I have not been able to play with a working build yet.) At the very least, Subform looks set to broaden the conversation about the amount of control and specificity that designers should have at our disposal. That in itself will be a valuable contribution.

Late last month Meetup, one of the stalwarts of New York City’s tech scene, launched a new redesign, developed in partnership with the famous design studio Sagmeister & Walsh. This video gives you an enthusiastic tour of the new look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MDwPMCrysg&feature=youtu.be

As those familiar with Meetup will notice immediately, the new identity does away with the longstanding “Hi, My Name Is…” nametag logo that had been a defining feature of the brand for many years. This change surprised me; when I asked the Meetup team why they made this decision, they told me that the old logo, though much loved, felt dated. It also continually proved “hard to work with in the modern world. The most important example is that it made a bad app icon. If we tried to fit the entire nametag into the small square the text became unreadable, so we cut off the sides, and that made it unrecognizable as a name tag.”

What I really appreciate about this work is that it’s comprehensive in its approach to the problem of crafting a new brand for a company for which many people have tremendous affection. This is rare; what’s more common, especially for tech companies, is to roll out a new identity that gets shoehorned into the existing product. In this case, the Meetup team integrated its new design principles directly into a major revamp of the Meetup product itself as Sagmeister & Walsh developed the supporting system. The Meetup product design team told me:

Once we got a look at the direction they were thinking, we started integrating that into our mocks. It was a good amount of back and forth and we evolved the app’s visual language as the branding work developed. We also sent over prototypes of the app as we built it out, so that they could see the work in action and give us feedback.

The result of this expansive system includes a photographic series articulated in a visual vocabulary that, from the start, is intimately tied into the new direction of the company. All the elements look of a piece. Here are some examples of the work:

I’m always curious about how effective it is for technology companies to work with design studios, especially veterans like Sagmeister & Walsh. There have been some truly bland outcomes from such pairings in the past, and it often seems clear to me that the act of going to a big name branding studio is really about validating the company in a way meant to comfort investors and business partners more than it’s about doing what’s best for products or customers. I wouldn’t say that Meetup’s rebranding falls into that category—it has far more personality than most, to begin with. There’s a good write-up of the logo and its merits over at Brand New, which captures my sentiments when it concludes, “I highly appreciate its effort for standing out in a sea of logo sameness.”

Read more about the development of the new brand in this Medium article and the revamp of the product in this Medium article.