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.
I’ve long been a fan of Meetup and their uniquely genuine and concrete mission: strengthening human connections in the real world. This means more, far more, than just getting people to click approvingly on one another’s text fragments and random images. Meetup wants their users to actually meet face-to-face, to engage in real dialogue and share their time together. They’ve long been stalwarts of the New York City tech scene (over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to get to know Meetup founder and CEO Scott Heiferman—a great guy) and, incredibly, are nearly a decade and a half old. They’re still going strong, though, and in fact are in the midst of an important new stage in their evolution, one that has design at its center. I asked Meetup’s VP of Product, Fiona Spruill (also a friend and former colleague from my time at The New York Times) about their search for a new Head of Product Design and what it signals for the company.
Khoi Vinh: It’s amazing to me that Meetup is now fourteen years old. For those who might be familiar with the brand but haven’t kept up, how has the company changed and what are its priorities right now?
Fiona Spruill: Meetup was started in 2002 with the mission of bringing people together and spreading real local community across the world. We still have that same ambition today. Meetup is unique because people show up in person, do things together and actually talk. As a result, Meetup changes lives. That’s remained a constant since the launch, and it’s the main reason people are drawn to work here.
The not-so-secret news is that Meetup is on the verge of being fundamentally reborn. We’ve already shifted to thinking of ourselves first and foremost as a mobile app instead of a desktop web site. Now we are in the process of launching a brand new beautiful Meetup that brings that evolution to life. Our members and organizers will experience the new, redesigned Meetup first on our iOS and Android apps.
Our top priority right now is to ship those beautiful new apps and launch a brand new logo and visual identity, which we worked on with Sagmeister & Walsh. We’re also doing a major technical replatforming, so there are big changes coming that we are super excited about. Sometimes it’s a struggle being a teenage company in a world of technology start-ups. But a core value of ours is to continually change the company, and that’s the main reason we are still thriving.
Regarding the work Sagmeister & Walsh did: how will the new Head of Product Design that you’re looking to hire work within it, versus expand upon it?
We turned to Sagmeister & Walsh for two main reasons: One, it was obvious that Meetup needed a new, modern visual identity, and two, we wanted a new branding system that would allow Meetup groups to create their own visual identities while still keeping a tie back to Meetup’s brand. Nailing both of those things is a tough assignment. We have long admired the work of Sagmeister & Walsh so we knew that if anyone could pull it off, they could.
The work to launch our new apps and logo is well under way. But we are looking at this launch as the birth of a new visual design framework, as opposed to a finished product. That means we’ll be looking to the Head of Product Design to build on this solid visual foundation and create a world-class user experience.
Practically speaking, what does this mean? We are super excited about the apps we’ll be launching in the fall but we have ambitions to make them so much better. We expect to constantly iterate on them, and the Head of Product Design will be heavily involved in all future iterations. Another exciting challenge that we have barely begun to tackle is to bring the app redesign concepts to the web site. And there is also a lot of fun work to be done to bring the branding system for individual Meetup groups into the product. Design at Meetup isn’t just about designing for the screen. It’s about the whole experience, online and offline. The overall system that Sagmeister & Walsh created gives us a ton of room for invention and expansion on all fronts.
Can you tell me more about the offline design aspects of this opportunity?
Right now we’re pretty good at getting people to show up at Meetups, to actually talk to each other and do things together. But we know we can be so much better at that. We see most of what we do as being on a continuum: A great online experience can lead to a great offline experience, which in turn can change lives. There are so many interesting technological advancements happening right now at the intersection of physical and digital experiences. This whole area is ripe for experimentation and could make the experience at Meetups even better.
Other specific areas of offline focus will be great signage for Meetups, making it easier for people to find a Meetup when they show up. And we want to make it easy and fun for Meetup groups to design a logo, and to create tee-shirts and other swag that they’ll show off with pride. That’s a big part of bringing the Sagmeister & Walsh branding system to life.
How does the design team at Meetup work now, and how do you expect that might change with this new Head of Design position?
There are one or two designers on every product team so they’re integrated with those teams. But they also gather several times a week as a design team to share work, get feedback and make sure everyone knows what each other is working on. These feedback sessions help ensure that the individual projects are building toward a larger, cohesive end-to-end user experience, which is a big goal of the redesign. They also help us continually evolve our new living style guide/design pattern library.
We like to prototype and user test new ideas twice a week. Because many of the designers also code, they’re able to quickly build prototypes. Two designers built a fully functioning prototype of our new app in React Native, which was hugely beneficial for testing out the design concepts with real data.
Design hasn’t always been a driving force in how we approach product development at Meetup. That has changed significantly in the last couple years. Our design team has grown from one person four years ago to a team of nine now. It’s impossible to say exactly how things will change under the new Head of Product Design. In general, though, we’ll be looking to that person to lead the design of a great user experience, to ensure our product thinking is design-driven and to expand the team.
So the team is very collaborative and hungry, and the company is serious about its ambitions to become design driven—you describe a situation with a lot of potential. But these circumstances are familiar to lots of companies today; what is truly unique about this opportunity for design candidates who meet your job requirements?
You might accuse me of being biased, but I genuinely believe this is the most exciting design job in the tech world. Here’s why:
Designing a great experience that connects the online and offline worlds is a unique challenge. It’s particularly interesting at a time when virtual reality, self-driving cars and many other things are starting to push the boundary of how the virtual world interacts with the physical world. These are the interesting problems to solve right now, and Meetup is in a great position to tackle them in innovative ways. (Just look at our name!)
Meetup has a solid subscription business so our revenue comes directly from our members and organizers. We don’t have to pander to advertisers, which means creating a great user experience that has a big impact is, without question, our top priority.
I’ve mentioned that the design culture is fairly new at Meetup. That means there aren’t a lot of entrenched processes for how we do things. The Head of Product Design will have a lot of room to develop new approaches. He or she will also be surrounded by design, product and engineering teams that are hungry to take things to the next level.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the world is becoming more caustic, more bombastic and feeling less together every day. The news over the last couple weeks has tragically made this very clear. Meetup is an antidote to these problems because it brings people together. This is a design job where the potential for significant impact is huge because you can literally change lives.
This is the latest in my occasional series spotlighting interesting job openings for designers. See previous entries here. This content is not paid for by Meetup or any other company.
Slate polled more than twenty prominent filmmakers, critics, and scholars to compile this list of the fifty best movies by black filmmakers.
Our goal is to change the way readers think about the history of movies—and to keep the conversation about black storytelling going long after the #OscarsSoWhite fury has dissipated…
Despite everything, black filmmakers have produced art on screen that is just as daring, original, influential, and essential as the heralded works of Welles, Coppola, Antonioni, Kurosawa, and other nonblack directors.
The supercut below runs through them chronologically, and you can see a full list, along with Slate’s thoughts on the project, at slate.com. I have to admit that I’ve seen distressingly few of them—just fifteen.
StyLit is a research project from The Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction at the Czech Technical University in Prague and Adobe Research that combines traditional, analog drawing skills with 3D modeling and animation. The video below, starting at 2:18, shows how an artist’s natural media rendering of a simple sphere can be applied in real time to complex 3D models like a tea kettle, an animal and even a human hand and a human figure—and then easily transformed into rich animations.
Essentially, StyLit is able to use a single drawing as the basis for an expansive aesthetic vision. So long as you have the 3D models at hand, you could feasibly extrapolate a complete, stylistic world from very little work—work that, crucially, is virtually indistinguishable from the approachable, non-technical expressive methods that humans have been using for millennia. The computer does it for you.
This incredibly thorough redesign is so convincing that it’s difficult to believe that it’s not officially authorized, but apparently it’s a self-initiated undertaking by Constantine Konovalov, the “former lead designer of integrated transport navigation at the Moscow Department of Transportation.” He and his collaborators have gone to enormous lengths to create a shockingly viable alternative to the city’s official map; the end products are not only highly professional and even concrete (you can download them in various forms for various uses), but the work shows a highly refined thoughtfulness. You can see this in their decision to use a “circular line pattern” as an organizing principle around which the lines and geography are subtly but meaningful redrawn to enhance clarity. You can see how this works in practice in this process video:
This is an interesting overview by Wired of the methods that Apple says it is using to provide the benefits of big data and machine learning without the attendant privacy compromises.
Differential privacy, translated from Apple-speak, is the statistical science of trying to learn as much as possible about a group while learning as little as possible about any individual in it. With differential privacy, Apple can collect and store its users’ data in a format that lets it glean useful notions about what people do, say, like and want. But it can’t extract anything about a single, specific one of those people that might represent a privacy violation. And neither, in theory, could hackers or intelligence agencies.
This sounds great, but what strikes me is that it’s going to be hard to determine if differential privacy realizes concrete benefits to end users. On the one hand, if it works well, we may never know that that’s the case—it’s hard for people to appreciate the positive outcome of no personally identifiable information making its way into the wrong hands. What’s more, Apple is still playing catch-up in designing for services overall, so for the foreseeable future it may be hard to tell whether that’s the case because their product design is still evolving or because of inherent drawbacks to differential privacy—or some other reason. This is murky stuff.
This video was created by Method Studios for the Association of Independent Commercial Producers’ awards show. It uses “motion capture, procedural animation and dynamic simulations” to create a truly mesmerizing demonstration of how “real” movement and computer animation can combine something that is both otherworldly and recognizably human.
I got out to the movies last month—three times, even! I saw Whit Stillman’s delicious “Love & Friendship,” which, as a Jane Austen adaptation, is not exactly in the same milieu as his modern classics “Metropolitan” and “Barcelona,” but it nevertheless fully recaptures his magical and very particular blend of absurdly articulate witticicsms and high society mannerist comedy. The natural complement to such period costume entertainments is, of course “Captain America: Civil War,” which was good enough fun that I went to see it twice. I’m not exactly proud of that, but at heart, I am a geek.
May 2016
“The Guest” I knew nothing about this movie before watching it and was pleasantly surprised.
“The Dark Knight” Watched this again after several years; I was shocked by how much of it is really stiff and unconvincing, but its second half is still potent.
These are the new audio devices from Tom Devesto, creator of the wonderful Tivoli line of radios, one of which I own. The Solo, at top, and the Duetto, its stereo sibling, both focus on streaming instead of terrestrial radio, and allow you to listen to Spotify and a host of other Internet-based audio options. Unfortunately, I’m not sure there’s AirPlay support, which is my preferred method of listening to music. Anyway, they’re gorgeous.
Devesto is currently raising funds to build and ship these two devices at kickstarter.com. You can learn more about his new company at comoaudio.com.
Lots of people are head over heels for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” the hip-hop reimagination of the origin story behind American history’s most bad ass Founding Father. For a Broadway play, it’s been receiving nearly unprecedented popular attention in all kinds of media, and it’s almost certainly going to clean up at the Tony Awards this coming weekend, too. That in turn will probably only increase the outrageous premium that tickets are commanding on StubHub—you’d be lucky to get a seat for a cool US$1,000. I was lucky enough to see it last winter when buzz was high though not yet insane. Whether I personally liked it or not is practically irrelevant as all three of my kids are addicted to the soundtrack and it’s on extremely heavy rotation in our house.
My wife is a fan, too, and what’s more, in her role on the design team over at WSJ.com, she happened to be involved in designing this extensive analysis of Miranda’s complex and, apparently, crowd-pleasing lyrics. She and her colleagues trained an algorithm to understand the musical’s rhyme patterns, analyzing its phonetics, use of vowel sounds, the emphasis on various syllables and even the strategic usage of various suffixes. Their interactive project lets you listen to the vocals as the algorithm visually maps each fragment against the patterns it has identified. This isn’t just an academic dissection, either; the project also highlights the various influences on Miranda’s writing style, showing how specific lines echo the work of rap luminaries like Rakim, Nas, Lauryn Hill and Kendrick Lamar. If you’re a fan of this play, you’re going to find this fascinating.
