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.
Software developed by The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media can now analyze a film and determine how much time an actress actually appears on the screen. A ninety minute film can be processed in just fifteen minutes, and The New York Timesreports that in the first round of research, the findings are eye opening:
In the first round of research using the tool, a study of the 200 top-grossing, nonanimated films of 2014 and 2015, like ‘Jurassic World’ and ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron,’ found that overall, in 2015, male characters were both seen and heard about twice as much as female characters. Parity on paper does not help: In films with male and female leads, the men nonetheless appear and speak more often than the women. Even in films with female leads, the men still get nearly equal screen and speaking time.
The report is available at the Institute’s web site along with some interactive charts, which are vivid. Here’s the data for 2015. Pay particular attention to the pie graphs, which nicely summarize total screen time.
After a busy summer during which I never got to try the beta, I’ve finally got the official release of iOS 10 installed on my phone and tablet. Hooray! It’s always a kick to explore the many new twists and turns scattered throughout each major revision of almost everybody’s favorite operating system.
One of the changes that I like the most is kind of simple and not particularly earth-shattering: this landscape orientation-specific layout for the lock screen on iPad. It breaks iOS’s longstanding center-aligned layout by left-aligning the time and date. It’s a simple move but it was kind of shocking when I first encountered it, and I find it very elegant.
Here is a screen grab of how the layout displays iOS 10’s notifications, which have been changed in this version to appear as cards. (I’ve redacted the information in each notification.)
One of the curses of being a designer is that one can never stop hypothetically redesigning things one comes across in the wild. For instance, I can’t help but think that the layout would work even better if the cards were placed on the right half of the screen. In their current position, they have to scroll beneath the time and date, but if they shifted over to the other side, they could scroll freely from top to bottom. It would also activate that space more effectively.
Last Friday, before I boarded a red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York, the airline representative at the gate made an announcement that any passengers traveling with a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 must turn that device off before boarding, and were forbidden from turning it on during the flight. I tweeted about it at the time.
About to board a flight and they made an announcement specifically about the Galaxy Note 7: "Do not power it on if you have one."
This of course was a response to the Note 7’s notorious exploding battery incidents. In fact, the devices have not been banned by the FAA, just cited in an advisory. Still, the situation is extremely grim for Samsung, as plenty of airline passengers are hearing the same warnings.
Two announcements (pre-flight and right after takeoff) about FAA regulations against using the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 at all during flight.
These exploding batteries make for a terrible turn of events for Samsung—not to mention a horrible safety risk for their customers. But Samsung’s response does not seem to be up to the task of managing the crisis. Forbes writes in this article that the scandal is proving to be very damaging:
…the approach taken by the South Korean company is taking a significant amount of time, looks haphazard when viewed from the outside, and the story is being defined by external agencies–such as the FAA and international airlines banning the Note 7 from being turned on while on board.
Potentially embarrassing and even dangerous technological flaws are a fact of life for every hardware company—they may be extremely rare, but they are an ever present risk. What sets the best companies apart from others is their ability to respond in a way that preserves their brand and wins back the trust of customers. Unfortunately, I can’t imagine a worse situation for Samsung than having what amounts to a public service announcement before every flight advising customers not to use your product.
I just returned from two weeks of business travel with just my 9.7-inch iPad Pro as my main computing device—no laptop. I’ve been traveling this way for about a year now and each time it gets a little bit easier, and I get more and more confident that it will satisfy my needs. It’s also consistently liberating; when I’m on the road, carrying fewer cables and less weight, and bypassing the overhead of managing a desktop operating system, these feel like priceless advantages. I’d much rather be sitting in coach with an iPad than in first class with a laptop that I’d have to lug around for the rest of the trip.
It’s not all smooth sailing though, I have to admit. There are still some speed bumps that can disrupt workflows. They are mostly (though not all) minor, but when I come across them, they can be irritating and time consuming.
For instance, on occasion, I’ll come across a web site that’s not particularly tablet-friendly, which is not exactly the same thing as being mobile-friendly. Everyone’s encountered the latter; sites that don’t present well on phones or tablets, rely on desktop-specific functionality like hover states, or use very small touch targets that make it impossible to use them on a multitouch screen.
Tablet-unfriendly web sites, on the other hand, make an incorrect assumption that phones and tablets can be treated exactly the same way. There’s a lot more screen real estate on an iPad, even on the 9.7-inch model. There’s enough to do real work, or certainly to use the request desktop site feature in mobile browsers to see what you’d see on a “regular” computer. But a lot of web apps, including Google Drive apps, actually break that feature, so there’s no way you can get to functionality that should be available to you.
Google, in fact, was the source of one of the more difficult problems I had with native apps too. Their otherwise excellent Sheets app does not allow Google Apps for Work users, like myself, to create publicly viewable links. I wanted to share a spreadsheet outside of my company by allowing anybody with the link to view and edit it, something that’s easily done in a desktop browser. But neither the iOS nor the Android versions of the Sheets app make that possible. In the end, I had to resort to requesting the desktop version of the Sheets web site on my Android phone (apparently the site works that way with Android but not with iOS) and pinch and zoom my way to the necessary controls, which were uncomfortably laid out for desktop usage.
Finally, it’s still a disappointing fact that it remains difficult to do real, production-grade design work on an iPad. I actually used Adobe Comp for some lightweight design tasks over the past two weeks, but it’s still not realistic to take on a big project with it. I still believe that this will change one day soon (we are still chipping away at the problem at Adobe), but that day is not here yet.
Until then, I generally reserve intensive design work for when I’m back at my desk, which, while inconvenient, is not exactly debilitating—even in the days before I carried around a laptop on flights I never did a ton of design work on the road anyway. And, for better or worse, the work that I do while traveling these days is principally managerial—“office stuff,” like the aforementioned spreadsheets, word processing documents, Keynote slides, note-taking, reviewing PDFs, Slack chats, video conferencing, and tons and tons of email. All of that is eminently possible on an iPad right now; in fact it’s my preferred way of doing this stuff, whether at home or away.
Ars Technica has this great article on how “Star Trek: The Next Generation” invented (or at least imagined) the precursors to today’s tablets. To begin with, props for the futuristic technology featured in the show were driven in large part by the limited budget that the crew had to work with. Series art director Michael Okuda describes how that factor led them to imagine touchscreen interfaces:
‘The initial motivation for that was in fact cost,’ Okuda explained. ‘Doing it purely as a graphic was considerably less expensive than buying electronic components. But very quickly we began to realize—as we figured out how these things would work and how someone would operate them, people would come to me and say, ‘What happens if I need to do this?’ Perhaps it was some action I hadn’t thought of, and we didn’t have a specific control for that. And I realized the proper answer to that was, ‘It’s in the software.’ All the things we needed could be software-definable.’
The thinking for those interfaces was extrapolated out to clipboard devices, a common prop from the original series from the 1960s that they wanted to update in a sufficiently advanced way for the new show. These were basically
For ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ and beyond, Starfleet used touchscreen PADDs. The thin, handheld devices used the same interface as the control panels and computers on the Enterprise-D. ‘The idea was that we wanted to make them sleeker, slimmer, and way more advanced than the electronic clipboards were on the original series,’ Okuda said.
But PADDs were much more powerful than electronic note pads. ‘We realized that with the networking capabilities we had postulated for the ship, and given the [hypothetical] flexibility of the software, you should be able to fly the ship from the PADD,’ Okuda said.
Seeing as how it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the “Star Trek” franchise I figure this is as good a time as any to admit that, as cheesy as it often is, I’ve always preferred “Star Trek” to “Star Wars.” I hope this is okay with everyone.
This is a little late as the summer games are over, but it’s fun and visually inventive enough that I thought I’d pass it along—balloons competing in Olympic sports. From London-based animation studio Animade, who specialize in “characterful creativity.” Their other work is well worth a look.
Just seventy-four days left until Election Day. I don’t talk about politics here very much but I do spend a lot of time thinking about it, particularly during this crazy campaign season. In fact, these days I find myself consuming more about Clinton and Trump than just about any other topic. Here’s a rundown of all the news sources I hit regularly…
Politico Though I’ve never counted, it wouldn’t surprise me if I refresh Politico as many as fifty times a day to see what’s new. This was especially true several weeks ago, during that stretch after the two political conventions, when Donald Trump seemed to say something outrageous every eight hours or so. Though I have lots of quibbles with its mobile app (its breaking news notifications often lead nowhere) I find Politico’s reporting to be, on the whole, quite good and very timely.
Playbook This is Politico’s daily tip sheet, sent out each morning around 7:30. It’s often the first thing I check; it provides a terrific overview of what all the major political outlets have published, and what will be driving the day.
Real Clear Politics A decent round-up of notable politics stories from around the web, updated twice a day. I check it regularly, but I don’t often click through to the actual stories. Many times I’ve already read them or they are so partisan (both liberal and conservative) that I don’t bother.
FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver and company’s superb, insightful, statistics-based outlook on politics, sports, and more politics doesn’t publish at a rapid clip (“just” once or twice a day), but it is a delight to read. It was a real shame for The New York Times when they lost that team.
The New York Times After all the furor of the election is over, the Times will be the one that I keep reading, day in and day out. The reporting is still superb and more definitive than any other source, though the way its content is offered is not without its problems. The politics desk’s Election 2016 section doesn’t seem to wake up too early in the day, as it can sometimes take until late in the morning for its “What to Know” section to get updated. The section is also buried in the site, so you really have to dig for it. Similarly difficult to navigate to are its First Draft daily politics newsletter (decent, though not essential) and The Upshot, which is their replacement for having lost FiveThirtyEight several years ago.
The Washington Post I wish that The Post and The Times would get together and offer a single bundle: if you subscribe to one at full-price, you’d have the option of adding a subscription to the second at half-price. As it is, I can only justify paying for access to The Post during election years, even though they produce a lot of very good content, and at a faster clip than The Times does. Their site however is in even worse shape than The Times’. Most of its politics stories have a right-hand column that goes into an overbearing, app-like elections news mode, triggered automatically whenever you look at the left column funny.
The Wall Street Journal Very solid stuff, though I “only” check it several times a week. Their Blue Feed, Red Feed tool is a really remarkable if sad illustration of the echo chamber at both ends of the political spectrum.
Talking Points Memo I’ve been reading Josh Marshall’s work for years, so I come back here from time to time. They do some genuinely valuable reporting, but I have little patience for heavily liberal coverage these days, and that’s a lot of what you get here. There’s a whole universe of much, much more liberal sites than this one that I largely don’t bother with, too. To be clear, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool lefty, but I’ve lost my taste for unhinged partisanship.
That’s what I read every day, but I’m also listening to a ton of politics coverage on my phone. Here are the podcasts I subscribe to—for each one, I listen to new episodes almost as soon as they’re out:
NPR Politics This is really my favorite politics podcast, bar none. It’s got great, insightful commentary and genial banter that doesn’t try too hard. They release new episodes on Thursdays, though there are often quick hits released earlier in the week, too.
NYT The Run-Up Podcast Recently launched and very good. Timespolitics reporter Michael Barbaro makes for a great host, though some of the segments on the show are a bit too overproduced for my taste.
Keepin’ It 1600 Terrific name. I’m not sure I understand why The Ringer exists or what the heck it is, but this podcast hosted by Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer, former advisers to President Obama, is consistently good. It’s a little more partisan than I prefer, but it’s very revealing to get into the heads of people who have worked directly on campaigns and at the White House.
Ken Rudin’s Political Junkie Veteran radio reporter Ken Rudin is a real pro—both as an encyclopedia of political knowledge, and a host who brings together an eclectic collection of political stories.
Peak TV means you can have more of almost anything you’ve ever watched before. How about salvaging a poorly reviewed, alt comedy box office dud from 2001 and turning it into an eight-episode streaming series? Netflix obliges. Or how about bringing back one of cinema’s great offbeat auteurs for a revival of his inexplicable, cult favorite television show from over a quarter century ago? Coming soon.
It’s probably safe to say that artist Stephen Byrne believes in this truism; he has a vision for an animated version of “Firefly,” the short-lived, much loved but still obscure sci-fi western TV show that ran (very) briefly about a decade and a half ago. He created this loving, dynamic, almost jubilant concept trailer and its thirty-odd seconds look so great you can’t help but want much, much more of it to exist. In this day and age, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why it can’t.
Japan has more brick and mortar music stores than anywhere else in the world, reports Quartz in this fascinating article. Oddly, this a result of a market that became immersed in digital technology years before many other first world countries, and that experience has engendered an unexpected consumer fondness for physical media. Japan’s music industry has also been smart about maximizing the perceived value of the compact disc:
The huge popularity of girl and boy bands, and the rabid fandoms that they spawn, allow record companies to cash in using the marketing gimmick of limited editions. It’s not uncommon for a CD to be released in five different versions, featuring different covers, B-sides, or bonus DVDs.
This speaks to a love of physical objects that’s characteristic of Japanese and also German culture, says Mulligan. These two countries have a shared preference for cash over credit cards, and also the strongest sales of physical music in the world.
This has led to a transformation in what CDs mean—from being objects that play songs to a form of merchandise. It’s less about the music itself and more about the experience of supporting, and feeling closer to, your favorite idol, says Ronald Taylor, music correspondent for the Japan Times.
In the last 15 years, record companies have partnered with artist management agencies to take this further. Inside the CDs there are tickets to special concerts; handshake events, where buyers can spend a few seconds locking hands with their idol; and voting cards used for annual ‘elections’ that determine the popularity of band members within the group. Popular members get TV appearances and endorsement deals that the bands and management can further profit from. Fans can vote as many times as they want—one CD single counts as one vote—leading extreme fans to buy thousands of copies of the same CD.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I’ve never been fond of the exploitive tendencies that physical formats, especially CDs, seemed to inspire in music marketers; there’s no good reason to buy five versions of the same album, and, environmentally speaking, plenty of good reasons why there shouldn’t be five versions even issued.
On the other hand, I admire how the Japanese music industry has apparently continued to add emotional resonance to their products—not just to the actual CDs, but to the idea of an album or a release as a work to be valued, as a connection to the artist. This is diametrically opposed to the trend that I’ve experienced with streaming services, where the value of a work seems to degrade all the time; I feel less connected to the artists (and albums) that I’ve discovered on Spotify than I do to the music I actually owned—whether in physical form or even as a digital download. There’s got to be a happy medium between buying five copies of the same CD and feeling generally blasé about an infinite catalog of streaming music.
Last year, in this blog post, I mentioned in passing a macOS utility that my friend Scott Ostler and I have been tinkering with, on and off, for several years. It’s called “Handlr” (we’ve since dropped the “e”) and it intercepts links that you might click on in apps like Slack, Mail, Messages, Notes, Preview, etc. and lets you decide which browser to open them in. The interface looks like this:
There was enough interest in Handlr that we decided to finally finish the work and release it to the public. It’s just about ready, but before we pull the trigger, we’re hoping to find a handful of beta testers to help us kick the tires and make sure it’s really sturdy. So if you use multiple browsers (or would like to) and want to have more control over where your links are opened, please head over to this Google form and sign up to be a beta tester. With luck we’ll have this out before too long. Thanks!
