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.
This is remarkable. Filmmaker Keven McAlester re-created, shot by shot, this vintage footage of the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles. The two street tours of the city, which follow the exact same path except where current road blockages make that impossible, are shown in split screen format in this video, nearly perfectly synchronized with one another. It’s an amazingly vivid illustration of how drastically that city has changed in the intervening seventy-odd years.
For the past few weeks I’ve been testing out a Starry Station wi-fi router at home as a replacement for the Apple AirPort Extreme that I’ve been using for the past several years.
The Starry Station is the best looking wi-fi hardware I’ve ever seen. It’s got a unique, triangular shape that’s attractive sitting on any tabletop surface but that also makes reaching its rear ports simpler than a traditional box-shaped chassis would. Of course, the jewel of the device is the touchscreen display on its frontside, a surprisingly rare feature for this kind of device. At about the size of a smartphone, the display makes setting up, controlling and checking the status of the Starry Station much, much more pleasant than any other router I’ve used.
The user interface is well designed and fairly clever. The colored circles you see in the illustration above aren’t purely decorative. They represent clients on the wi-fi network, with each client’s bandwidth usage corresponding to the circle’s size. I’m not completely sure that’s the most useful way to render the information, but it’s harmless enough and certainly cute.
The display is also a good resolution to a common router design practice that has always vexed me. As I wrote several years ago in a blog post titled “The Only Thing a Router Is Good For,” the vast majority of the time, the only reason you need to interact with a router is to reboot it. And yet on every router I’ve ever encountered, the only way to do that is to push a button on the back or, worse, unplug and replug the power cord. I’ve long argued that there should be a power button on the front of these devices, but the Starry Station strikes a fine compromise by allowing you to reboot it via an on-screen button. That in and of itself is a big win.
As for network range, the Starry Station does its job decently. Unfortunately it’s not really a breakthrough in terms of offering dramatically better wireless coverage in the way that other next generation routers like the Eero purport to. My house is not particularly large, but certain rooms have always been a challenge for routers, and the Starry Station fared no better than various models of AirPort Extreme that I’ve used, which was a disappointment. I suspect that the Starry would benefit from a network extender, and in fact the manufacturer had a product called “Starry Wing” in the works for later this year that would serve just that purpose. However, in recent weeks it seems to have been removed from the web site with no explanation.
Overall though, I find the Starry Station to be really well designed and easy to use—it’s certainly a better option than your average Linksys, Netgear or other consumer model (though to be fair, its price tag is higher than most). It reminds me of my Nest thermostat in that it represents enough progress to starkly highlight how poorly realized the other products in this category are. In fact, if it’s successful, its principal benefit may be that it spurs other manufacturers to finally take industrial and software design seriously and strive to create truly desirable and well-considered objects—something they’ve frankly never done.
Update, 05 Aug 2016: According to Starry, their Starry Wing extender is in fact going to ship later this year.
Longtime readers may recall that I unexpectedly developed a penchant for The Muppets when my daughter became obsessed with them a few years ago (I wrote about that in this post). Sadly, she’s since outgrown them but I haven’t. That’s why I fully intend to buy this forthcoming book from author Brad Meltzer and illustrator Christopher Eliopoulos. It’s called “I Am Jim Henson,” and it’s a part of a biography series for kids called “Ordinary People Change the World.” It looks adorable; I’m sure my two younger kids will dig it, but even if they don’t, I will. The book is out in January.
For most of last month my family and I went to France where we visited family and relaxed (hence the lack of posts here; sorry!). Mostly I stayed off the grid, but I kept in touch with what was happening back here in the States via Nuzzel, a great news app and web site. Once you sign into the service and auth one or more of your social networks, Nuzzel monitors activity among your friends. Whenever a specific news story or link is shared by more than a few of the people you follow (or, if you like, the people that they follow), you get a push notification. It’s a surprisingly effective method of staying abreast of current events.
I’ve been using Nuzzel for at least a year and a half and have always liked it, but on this trip I basically came to the conclusion that it’s the best mobile news experience out there, bar none. I read a lot of news with it while I was away, and it let me feel up-to-date without having to monitor a host of different news sites myself. Nuzzel’s model of capturing the fleeting zeitgeist of any given moment via your social graph is so complementary to the mobile experience that, for me, it’s come to represent the only mobile news experience that really makes sense, and it’s almost certainly the news app I would choose if I had to abandon all but one.
Nuzzel works best as simply a push notification service that takes you to the specific story that is currently making waves; tap on the notification and you go directly to the story. It lets you completely bypass the source’s home page, and even the Nuzzel app experience. And because its data corpus is the cohort of people that you follow and who presumably share your interests, it’s amazingly precise and relevant. It’s that old idea of a news source that’s tailored exactly for you, except it works really, really well.
Of course, Nuzzel isn’t perfect. Though you can get the vast majority of its value just from notifications, if you want to find past stories you’ve read, or you want to look ahead and find new stories on the bubble, or if you want to fine tune your settings, or anything beyond just using its notifications, then you’re thrown into the Nuzzel app experience which, unfortunately, is both pretty inelegant and confounding. The app is aesthetically lacking, difficult to navigate and would win no design awards. But it’s an example of the kind of thing that works in product design: its central insight, that a social filter is a great way to curate the news, is so powerful and compelling that its design hardly matters.
There’s one more way that Nuzzel is far from perfect: it apparently has no means of generating income. That may be coming soon, but throughout the many months that I’ve used it, I haven’t seen any ads or been offered any premium upgrades. There have been many, many attempts at building interesting news apps on mobile and almost all of them have run aground when it came to the question of becoming viable businesses. While Nuzzel is in my view far and away the best of them, it seems just as vulnerable as its predecessors did to the difficulty of monetizing the news. Sadly, product excellence is only minimally helpful when it comes to solving that particular riddle.
June was my slowest month yet for movies; I saw only eleven. Still, that brings the current tally to ninety-one movies that I’ve watched through the first six months of the year. At this rate, I’ll have watched at least one hundred and fifty before 2016 is out. Even I’m a little shocked at the number. I honestly had no quantitative expectations when I first started this experiment of ratcheting back my television viewing in favor of movies. I only expected to enjoy my time in front of the tube (or screen) more, and that’s definitely been true. Looking back at everything I’ve watched, there have been many deeply satisfying ones—the best thing I watched last month, and maybe all year, was Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 “High and Low”—and very few stinkers. Overall the time has been very well spent, even if I’ve had to miss out on all the water cooler talk about “Game of Thrones.” We all make our own choices in life.
“Before Midnight” Somehow found myself re-watching this trilogy in reverse order.
It’s going to be a sad summer for Apple fans in the Big Apple. Tekserve, the beloved Mac repair shop that distinguished itself with a customer friendly and quirky, faintly old timey identity, will close after nearly three decades of service to New York City’s Apple faithful. When I first moved here almost two decades ago, there was no such thing as the Apple Store and in fact the Apple brand seemed on the verge of collapse. Tekserve was not just a reliable service center for the PowerBooks I carried around back then, but it was also a bit of an oasis for like-minded Mac geeks. I’ll miss it terribly.
There’s a write-up on the coming closing at nytimes.com.
I’m very excited to announce the opening of this year’s Design Tools Survey—you can take it right now, here. The market for software made for product designers, web designers, app designers, interaction designers and more has never been more vibrant and interesting. This short, five-minute set of simple questions helps us all understand the big picture in the day-to-day tool choices that we make. So go let your voice be heard!
Background
Last year I launched the first iteration of this survey in June, and over the course of just a few weeks it garnered over 4,000 responses. Once all the data was in, I worked with my good friends at the Brooklyn-based design studio Hyperakt to crunch the numbers and they produced a beautiful report of the findings—you can still see that overview of 2015’s design tools market here.
This year’s survey is largely the same, though of course I’ve added all of the major new players that have entered the market since last June. I’ve also made an adjustment to two of the questions, consolidating the project management and version control topics into a new one labeled “design workflow.” This seemed like a simpler and more straightforward way to address a category of tools that are hard to classify by specific functionality.
Partners
I want to thank this year’s sponsors, Dropmark and Designer Fund for helping to make this year’s survey possible.
Dropmark is “the smart way to organize all your links, files, and notes into visual collections.” It’s a wonderful product from the team at Oak, the incredibly talented design studio who will be producing this year’s survey results report in the early fall. I can’t wait for that.
Designer Fund invests in startups co-founded by designers, and builds and educates design teams for partner companies. It also connects experienced product and communication designers with new full-time, in-house career opportunities at design-focused companies like Asana, Dropbox, Fitbit, and Medium, as well as earlier-stage startups. Basically they create great opportunities for ambitious designers. If you’re ready to make a move, get in touch.
Take the Survey
The survey is open to everyone and no authentication or login is required (though you may choose to enter your email at the end to get updates on its progress and the results report). Please spare a few minutes to let your voice be heard, and share it with every designer you know. Get started right now here. Thank you!
What gets written on the Internet about the design of apps, web sites, icons, identity systems and digital experiences of all kinds is almost always written by people who are professional designers first and foremost. We don’t have a class (or even a sub-class) of writers who are actively engaged and uncompromised in thinking about what makes for good design and why.
Some designers think this is a good thing, but I don’t. Other forms of culture benefit enormously from critical thinkers who stand clearly outside of the profession, who don’t “ship” work—whether it’s art, theater, film, music, architecture, or even technology. There are at least a half a dozen prominent technology critics writing regularly for major news organizations, but not a single critic focused on the design of the products that are reshaping modern life.
As a result, so much of what passes for design criticism, especially in the world of digital product design, would not stand up to intellectually rigorous scrutiny—including, I’ll be the first to admit, a lot of the stuff that I write here on this site. Most writing about design gets done between work commitments, or at home before bedtime, and it’s rarely backed up with particularly studied research. Much of it also blurs the lines between critique and self-promotion, sometimes honestly and sometimes insidiously.
To be clear, there are many people who write very thoughtfully and earnestly about design and that work adds tremendous value for the practitioners who read it. But there’s a difference between writing about the process of design—even when it’s well done—and good criticism. Very little of what gets posted on Medium or what shows up on Designer News really qualifies as the latter, and even less of it is helping the world at large understand what we do and grow their appreciation for it
I’m not sure we’ll fix this situation in the near future, or if we ever will. But if we want to make progress towards that, one thing we could do, each of us, is to read what gets written about design more carefully, to be a little more skeptical about what we’re sharing so enthusiastically. What follows is my working list of questions that, in my opinion, would be useful for all of us to ask ourselves when reading any article about design. They’re grouped into four major sections.
Who wrote this?
Does the writer convincingly establish his or her credentials in discussing the subject matter?
Does the writer clearly state any possible biases that he or she might have towards the design being discussed?
Does the writer work for the company that the design was created for?
Does the writer have any kind of relationship with the company the design was created for (or its employees)?
Is it likely that the writer might someday work for the company, as an employee, a contractor, a partner, an advisor, or an investor?
Does the writer have any kind of relationship with competitive companies?
Does the writer stand to gain—financially or otherwise—from the success or failure of the design that’s being discussed?
What is it saying?
Does the article rely on access to information or insight that’s not also publicly available?
Does the article clearly indicate when its argument is based on speculation or unsubstantiated facts?
Does the article cite sources for facts and figures used in its argument?
Does the article provide any context for its assertions other than the writer’s own personal experience?
Does the article provide any context for its argument beyond just comparisons to similar products?
How is it being said?
Does the writer use exclamatory or hyperbolic language in making his or her assertions?
Does the writer make unsupportable leaps of logic, e.g., equating correlation with causation, or inferring generalities from specifics?
Does the writer use language that is unfairly dismissive or disrespectful of the people who created the design?
Does the writer use simple, understandable language?
Does the writer use excessive jargon or technical terminology?
Does the writer offer opposing points of view and does he or she treat them fairly?
How effective is it?
Do you find value in the argument even if you don’t agree with it?
Does the article challenge your assumptions—your opinions and widely held beliefs—about the subject matter?
Does the article help you understand the problems that the design addresses in a new way?
Does the article help you understand this and similar design solutions in a new or unexpected way?
Did you learn something new by reading this article?
In constructing this list I was tempted to word the questions so that they could serve as a kind of litmus test for reading design articles, so that if the answers to more than a given number of these questions were “Yes” you could then say “this is a badly written article.” Ultimately, that seemed to run counter to what I’m suggesting here, which is an overall appreciation for thinking more critically about what we read and write. Good criticism is not black and white, it’s unflinching in its grayness. It’s not quantitative but qualitative. Its purpose is not to answer questions but to raise them.
Like I said, this is a working list. If you have suggestions for additions or changes, please send them my way.
This is a lovely supercut that draws from over sixty movies to show how color can be used to evoke various states of mind. It’s not what I would call definitive—other than just the common associations we typically make with basic colors, this video offers no clear overarching theory that governs why a given color is associated with a given emotional frequency. Still, it’s a delight to watch.
If like me you were confused by the lack of iPad-specific announcements at WWDC 2016 last week, you may be interested in this theory from the always insightful Federico Viticci of MacStories:
After WWDC, I strongly believe that Apple has notable iPad-only features in the pipeline, but they won’t be available until later in the iOS 10 cycle, possibly in early 2017…
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple move from a monolithic iOS release cycle to two major iOS releases in the span of six months—one focused on foundational changes, interface refinements, performance, and iPhone; the other primarily aimed at iPad users in the Spring.
I think it’d make sense for Apple to dedicate more time and engineering resources to a separate, more focused iPad release. If history is of any indication, it’d be reasonable to expect more iPad changes coming with a big mid-cycle software update and an iPad media event in the Spring to refresh the 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch models.
I hope something like this is the case. Last year Apple got off to a great start in rebooting the iPad franchise with its software announcements at WWDC 2015 and its introduction of the iPad Pro line. What worries me is the idea that there may not be new iPad software announcements until next year, and that that momentum will be lost, or muted. Maybe Apple will surprise us this fall with new software features; that could help jump start the holiday season.
To be fair, Apple did announce some iPad-specific improvements last week, though they weren’t prominently featured in the keynote. Viticci details them in this article, too; read it in its entirety at macstories.net.
