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.
It’s been interesting to me to see how startups have been advertising in the New York City subway in recent years. These ads from Casper are notable because of their genial illustration style. (As it happens, we recently bought a Casper mattress for a spare room in our house; the product does live up to the hype.)
These ads from StreetEasy also caught my eye. The particular illustration style they employ is not my exact taste, but I’m a fan of the fact that the company was willing to stray away from the antiseptic, vector-based illustration style that seems to be de rigueur for technology companies. Overall I think they’re great.
And then there are startups’ ads that are notable less for their aesthetic than for their attitude. I wrote very briefly about this brazenly obsequious advertisement for Uber back in February:
The basic worldview of that ad—that these customers are more important than the average person—shows up in advertising from other startups, too. Here’s one for TaskRabbit that I spotted recently; its message seems to be that cleaning is something that other people should do for you, so you can spend your time on more important things, like yoga:
The worst ad of this type that I think I’ve seen is from Seamless, which delivers restaurant take out. This particular billboard makes no bones about the idea that people who speak other languages—foreigners, basically—should really be doing the bidding of its privileged customers.
Before I got an Apple Pencil last week I wasn’t sure how much I would use it; now I can’t put it down. It’s reignited a part of my brain that’s been practically dormant for years; as I kid I used to draw endlessly—until, somewhere along the line, computers got in the way. I feel as if finally, after decades, technology has finally dovetailed with that part of me that used to pour myself into making pictures.
These are some drawings that I made over the weekend with Pencil and Adobe Illustrator Draw, which is vector based. That combination is really profound for me. It’s not like working with a replication of real world art supplies, though obviously many of the same principles apply. The difference is that I’m drawing in a way that’s native to the tools; the vector engine allows you to zoom in and out incredibly quickly, and so I can work at very, very fine levels of detail. There’s also unlimited undo, which makes me much bolder in making marks, and much more willing to experiment. Finally there’s also an unquantifiable character to the way the strokes I make with the Pencil are interpreted as lines by the app that’s much more forgiving—and fun—than drawing with pen and ink, at least for me.
I’m not saying that these are remarkable pieces of work, just that they were really, really gratifying to make. I felt better about these drawings than I have about any drawings I’ve made in at least the past ten years. That’s what technology is supposed to do; make you feel like you have super powers.
This was the first major drawing I did with the Apple Pencil and Adobe Draw. These faces were drawn from my head.Afterwards I started drawing with my kids and did these characters from “Star Wars.”After watching Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” (starring Bencicio del Toro), I drew this portrait and combined it with a map of Cuba in Adobe Comp CC.
One of the non-Apple devices that I own had the innards of its Micro USB port literally ripped out by the cable, a result of not particularly heavy usage. That’s never happened to me with an Apple device—even with the old, unlovely 30-pin dock connector. I’ve always found Micro USB to be cheap feeling—no matter how nice a device is, as soon as I spot a Micro USB port, it seems somehow less appealing—but this incident drove home for me how disappointingly fragile the whole specification is too. And yet most portable devices these days rely on it; even if you tried, it would be difficult to avoid Micro USB. I suppose Apple has good reasons for holding the Lightning spec close, but I sure wish I could just use Lightning cables everywhere instead.
Veteran film critic Owen Gleiberman, appearing on Elvis Mitchell’s excellent radio show The Treatment, makes an argument for why the movie form has gotten “short shrift” in the current golden age of scripted television.
…Movies still, for me, transcend television, if I can dare to say that in this day and age. It seems that the idea that television is now officially better than movies has so taken over. I don’t argue at all with the rise of television; I’m an absolute devotee of shows like ‘Sopranos’ or ‘Mad Men’ or ‘Breaking Bad.’
But I think that there’s a lot of serial television that can just hook you because people like the serial nature of it. I think that movies at their best—and I still think people are making extraordinary films even in the franchise era—movies have a kind of primal power that transcends that. And I’m not just talking about the fact that you’re watching it in a theater. You look at a movie like Todd Haynes’s ‘Carol’ or the ‘Mad Max’ film from last year in very different ways. I think those films are operating on levels that even the best series television, I would argue, is not. They just have a visual and emotional power that is very deep, that is very primordial. And that’s what we always wanted from movies.
The idea that serial television because of its multi-episode nature attains a complexity that movies don’t have…sure if you’re comparing it to some franchise popcorn. But in a way that argument is specious in that it would undermine the complexity of all the great movies of the last hundred years. Whether you’re looking at classic Hollywood or ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ or ‘Nashville’ or ‘Carrie’ or ‘Boogie Nights’—none of those movies needed to be one minute longer than they were to attain a timeless complexity.
A typically astute argument from one of the best film critics working today. Gleiberman has also written a new book: “Movie Freak: My Life Watching Movies,” which looks excellent. Listen to the full interview at kcrw.com.
Amazon’s new Kindle Oasis is its most elegant and sophisticated yet, but even this latest iteration leaves so much to be desired if you’re a lover of design. Every time I look at the Kindle—the whole product family, not just the shockingly chintzy hardware, but also its unabashedly inelegant software, complete with endless typographic offenses—I think of that Steve Jobs quote about how design isn’t just the way it looks, but it’s the way it works, too. For me, the Kindle seems to be all works and no looks—the Oasis is a step forward only if you regard the visual language of day planners from the 1990s as an artistic high water mark for society.
The Kindle’s surprisingly resilient upward trajectory—the company insists that the Kindle line is still a source of revenue growth, even in the face of smartphone and tablet ubiquity—is a reminder that “good design” is hardly universal. When it comes to digital products, people value things that work well more than they value things that look good. Apparently working really well is good enough for this audience—Kindle users love their Kindles. It doesn’t much matter, I guess, that my stomach goes queasy and my eyes start to bleed every time I try to read anything in a Kindle.
Still, I believe that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Would it be so hard to make these devices and this software not ugly? Given Amazon’s resources and willingness to invest heavily in all kinds of crazy technological baubles, it seems well within the company’s reach to ship a Kindle that looks like it costs more than the cover price of a hardback bestseller to manufacture; it probably wouldn’t take much more effort to make sure the typography engine features a halfway decent hyphenation and justification algorithm, too.
It all seems so clearly within reach that the fact that these products look the way they do suggests not ineptness but rather a highly honed strategy. It’s almost as if the company has determined, probably through some advanced analytics and extensive multivariate testing, that the Kindle brand’s very particular imbalance of utility and looks is somehow perfectly matched to the market. Maybe making the Kindle line look even one percent better would cause sales to dip massively. I guess there’s no arguing with success.
This is a 16th Century painting by Giovanni Battista Moroni that, like many others, has been hilariously mashed up with titles that reflect the trials and tribulations of programmers over at classicprogrammerpaintings.tumblr.com. Genius.
The Impossible Project, which has been tilting at windmills for several years trying to bring back Polaroid film and cameras, has announced its new I-1 Instant Camera. It’s a modern take on classic Polaroid cameras that accepts The Impossible Project’s painstakingly reverse engineered Polaroid-compatible film.
Writing in The Harvard Business Review, John Geraci talks about his attempts to innovate during his tenure as Director of New Products at The New York Times.
The Times is a perfect example of company-as-organism. Employees at the Times rarely go offsite for lunch or meetings. When you work there, your network is inside the building. That’s where all of the action is, where the valuable information is traded, where the battles are fought, and where the victories are won. When the Core Team or the Newsroom Team or the Beta Team finds a solution, it is a Times solution. Naturally there are inputs and outputs to the company, but like an organism, these are discrete—a mouth, a nose, an ear. At the Times, the Strategy Team pursues and manages strategic relationships for the company, takes in the resources needed to stay alive, and channels those to the rest of the organism. It’s the model of the companies our fathers and mothers worked at. And it worked great for them.
But in today’s world, it doesn’t. Companies with the organism mindset are too slow to adapt to survive in the modern world. The world around them changes, recombines, evolves, and they are stuck with their same old DNA, their same old problems, their same old (failed) attempts at solutions.
Geraci contrasts that with what he calls “the ecosystem mindset,” or a worldview that emphasizes how well an organization is connecting to what’s going on outside of its walls. Essentially, he makes the argument that the Times is too insular, and not sufficiently well-connected to what’s happening in the market.
It wasn’t very overwhelming. It was a lazy kind of night with a bunch of fat cats at the dinner table. It’s not a real pleasant experience to tell you the truth…You tell me what the hell is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and what does it do besides talk about itself and sell postcards?
I don’t know why it took the artist responsible for “Fly Like an Eagle” to finally point out the absurdity of the Rock and Roll Hall of fame, but more power to him. The worst thing that pop music ever did was build a shrine to itself.
I took my daughter to see Disney’s “Zootopia” a few weeks ago and I was impressed not only by how visually well-realized it is, but also by how substantive its ideas are. The movie is essentially an updated riff on some of the ideas that underpin “Animal Farm”; that is, human frailties as told through the travails of anthropomorphic animals. Luckily, it only occasionally veers into the obvious and didactic; it’s mostly good fun and surprisingly heartwarming.
The video below is a rather remarkable, 45 minute-long documentary about the making of the movie. There’s lots of detail on the enormous effort that was required to turn it into reality, including the expected glimpses of the film in its early stages, when it was composed of thousands of hand-drawn sketches rather than computer models, and a look at some of the extensive research and experimentation that went into fully realizing the filmmakers’ vision.
The meat of the documentary, though, is the in-depth examination of the process of developing the movie’s storyline; not just the fascinating workshopping protocol (the writers and producers periodically gather in a room and, as a group, basically critique the screenplay into shape), but also lots of frank discussion about the tricky ideas at the heart of the film. A lot of careful thought went into how to render the emotional truth behind experiencing racism, and the documentary takes a detailed look at the filmmakers grappling with that. However, it also betrays one of the unfortunate truths of the production; the movie is commendably bold about addressing prejudice, but it’s evident from watching the documentary that of the five-hundred plus people who contributed to the film, hardly any were non-white, and even fewer were African-American.
