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.
Designers and clients are understandably spooked. In private, some designers speak of clients who refuse daring work. In public, they gently rue the armchair critiques that undermine months, sometimes years, of work. Others are more forthright. ‘I think the Internet and the press should shut up and allow the identities to find their audiences,’ says Paula Scher, a partner at Pentagram and the mind behind Shake Shack’s branding among many others. ‘They will ultimately determine the success and failure.’
Setting aside that surprisingly combative “get off my lawn” attitude, what this article really gets at is the current state of design criticism, at least insofar as it entails the discussion of the craft of corporate branding. In the past, before broadly public channels for airing one’s thoughts on new logos became ubiquitous, most critical assessment of this kind of work happened within the pages of trade journals. On occasion, if a logo was particularly noteworthy or egregious, awareness and debate might seep out into the public, but that was rare.
Now we have a public square for discussion of corporate identities, its bright, unsparing light can be deeply uncomfortable for a profession that for most of its history largely entailed designers and executives sending signals to other designers and executives. Part of this discomfort lies in the fact that, more so than most flavors of arts criticism, this particular public square is full of people who are both poorly equipped to constructively appraise branding and who feel more empowered than ever to pass judgment on it. That sounds derogatory, like I’m saying that the masses are not qualified to thoughtfully consider branding, but that’s not my intention at all. I state it merely as a fact; the conversation around design has changed materially in the past two decades, and nothing will return us to that state in which identities are left to their own devices to “find their audiences.”
What this underscores, though, is the idea that, more than ever, we need a solid foundation for the thoughtful consideration of design. If we’re going to have this much attention paid to new corporate identities, we need to begin building an inclusive, plainspoken framework for how we talk about new logos, new design systems, new experiences rooted in the craft of design.
A lot of that can come from having a recognized role for critics. Though many people dismiss that profession as elitist, having a class of non-practitioners dedicated to examining the ideas behind a craft is incredibly useful to engendering a robust, thoughtful public square—just look at the way critics help shape how we think about art, architecture and film.
There are of course plenty of designers who write incisively about design, but that’s not the same thing at all. To be a practicing designer makes it very difficult to avoid being compromised by the clientele you’re trying to build, or the professional networks that you’re trying to grow, all in the name of career opportunity. Writing objectively about the work of other designers you know for other companies you may want to work for one day is really difficult. What’s needed is independence, and design has a relatively paltry number of truly independent critics at all; fewer still who don’t spend most of their time talking about architecture and industrial design; and almost none who write for respected, high profile, general interest publications. If we ever want to see design turn into a truly mature art form and to have design work appreciated and critiqued in substantive fashion, we’ll need to elevate criticism to the next level.
I’m continually impressed by the developer community creating plugins for Sketch. Here’s one of such forehead-slapping usefulness that it’s a wonder it’s not already standard issue on every design app: Sketch Navigator lets you quickly jump to any specific artboard without having to scan the all too easily cluttered Layers List in the app’s left-hand pane.
Just hit command-E and you get a pulldown menu with every artboard in your document—not just every artboard on the current page, but any artboard on any page within that document. From an interface and technology standpoint it’s not particularly inventive, but it effects such a profound change on the way you get around within Sketch that it almost feels like it’s rewritten the actual physics of your documents.
“Stacked” is a superb series of architectural images from fine art photographer Malte Brandenburg that feature beautifully flattened buildings isolated against a neutral sky. See the full project at behance.net, and find out more at maltebrandenburg.com.
Shot just seven years after the original “Star Trek” series went off the air, this amateur footage captures one of the first in what would become a long tradition of fan gatherings. You’ll see early cosplay, unaffected devotion, and even appearances from Leonard Nimoy and James Doohan (you have to wonder what was going through those actors’ heads at the time). Seen through the quaint filter of grainy, scratchy Super 8 footage, the whole event glows with earnestness and charming naïveté; it seems only distantly related to the overwrought nature of today’s super sized fan conventions.
The latest version of Bohemian Coding’s Sketch finally fixes a longstanding problem that I wrote about in this post last November: the app’s handling of type has been erratic. Mixing multiple fonts and sizes has historically produced unpredictable results. According to Bohemian Coding, that is a byproduct of the app’s reliance on OS X’s text rendering engine. Version 3.6, released just this week, sports new “typesetter” code that behaves in a manner that’s much more consistent with what designers expect from type. Hallelujah! In this Medium post, the team goes into some detail on fixing the problem:
When designers speak of setting the line height to, say, 20 pt, what they mean is they want 20 pt between the baselines, and not line fragment rectangles of 20 pt height. That makes sense because what determines the visual vertical rhythm of text is the baseline, which is much more ‘visible’ than these abstract rectangles. So how did we fix this?
In Sketch 3.6 we’re introducing a new typesetter which produces consistent baseline offsets for paragraphs with a fixed line height. To make that work we’re looking at all of the line fragments in a paragraph and choosing a baseline offset which suits them all.
The consistent baseline offset is also maintained between paragraphs, even with varying fonts, as long as they have a fixed line height. When no fixed line height is set, we use the one the font indicated, which as we saw can leave us with varying results. When you set it to fixed, you get a beautiful, predictable vertical rhythm…
How does this work with existing documents? New text layers use the consistent baseline typesetter by default and text layers created in earlier versions of Sketch can adopt the new typesetting behavior by changing the line height.
As I argued last year, Sketch is full of winning ideas, but its handling of type had been doing them a major disservice—until now. Congrats to the team for addressing this longstanding and nontrivial problem. Read the full article at medium.com.
Two children’s books by Paula Scher, of Pentagram, and Seymour Chwast, of Pushpin, are back in print.
Chwast illustrated “The Pancake King” back in 1971 but it’s been out of print since the early 1980s. Princeton Architectural Press has brought it back, complete with a kid-friendly pancake recipe (with a new Chwast illustration) addendum. It’s as vibrant and lovely as ever, and is a wonderful showcase of Chwast’s signature, era-defining style.
Paula Scher wrote (but did not illustrate) “The Brownstone” back in 1973. It’s a very New York-centric story of six families (cats, kangaroos, owls, mice, pigs, bears, and an owl as the landlord) living in a single browstone and what it takes for them to coexist. Most of the story is illustrated in a cutaway style that shows the tenants moving around the building.
My kids have been enjoying both books, but for several nights running they kept asking for me to re-read “The Brownstone,” sometimes repeatedly, if that tells you anything.
The peerless Paul Ford digs into the innards of Photoshop’s proprietary format, PSD:
You can read the entire specification, current as of 2013, updated on Adobe’s website. The more of it you read, the more you learn about the history of commercial software. Because Photoshop has to be backwards-compatible, and it has to deal with every kind of image imaginable, and it ultimately has to do that perfectly for millions of people.
You might think that a Photoshop file is just, like, a bunch of pixels. But not at all…
Photoshop itself is complex, it’s no secret, but its native file format is much more than just image information—both are records of what Ford calls “terrible imperatives,” years of business ambitions and user demands in code form, preserved in sedimentary fashion. And yet, as Ford acknowledges in his article, you can still open a file created in a twenty year old version of Photoshop with today’s software, seamlessly.
In spite of how good television has become, I still find it’s rare to find a show where every episode is a truly worthwhile chunk of time spent. If one season is ten or twenty episodes, at least three to five hours of it will be duds, in my experience. With those odds, and given I’m now past the age where time seems unlimited, I’d rather take my chances with movies instead. There are so many to watch. Beyond even all the great films that I haven’t seen yet—and all the great ones I’d like to re-watch—there are countless movies that I’m just curious about, that I’d like to discover for myself.
So I made a New Year’s resolution to cut out my television viewing and spend that time watching movies instead. So far, I’ve done pretty well. I went a little nuts in the beginning of January, but overall, when I look back on how I spent my time, I feel like I gained so much from watching these movies, much more than I would have had I binge-watched “The Walking Dead.” Here is a rundown.
January
“Sicario” Rewatched at home after seeing it in theaters last year.
“The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” Really had a hard time finishing this one. Completely inessential.
“The Double” I was skeptical at first because it seemed very arch, but it’s full of inventive stuff.
“The Keep” Finally got to watch this rare early Michael Mann movie, transferred from a terrible print, via Amazon. Pretty flimsy, but still has some vintage Mann elements.
Though I was really rooting for “Mad Max: Fury Road,” I can’t be unhappy that Tom McCarthy’s sublimely well crafted “Spotlight” beat the odds and took home the Academy Award for Best Film of 2015 on Sunday night. Relative to its tally of car crashes, firearms, explosions and super-heroics, “Spotlight” boasts a higher voltage-to-narrative ratio than any film I saw last year. It’s a masterpiece of studied, careful storytelling that’s also intensely gripping from the first to the last.
It’s also a powerful case for the importance of journalism and for news organizations dedicated to a broader mission than just returning profits to shareholders. “Spotlight” recounts a horrific tragedy that the Catholic church perpetuated for decades; The Boston Globe’s reporting team that sits at the center of the movie literally changed the lives of millions of people.
Thoughtful news consumers generally don’t need much convincing that The Globe’s brand of investigative reporting is essential, but it’s rare to have that kind of work elevated to such a prominent position in popular culture. Thirty-four million people tuned into the Oscars broadcast on Sunday, and they all saw the Academy recognize the importance of such deeply committed journalism.
Given the newspaper industry’s habitually dim prospects, this is a golden opportunity for The Globe—if not news organizations everywhere—to remind the public at large how valuable their service is. The newspaper has set up a special page devoted to the movie and the original reporting that inspired it, but you’d almost miss the unassuming promo for it on the site’s home page, and there’s nothing at its sister site, boston.com. If you think an Academy Award would be a huge opportunity for an ailing business, you might doubt how much that business really wants to be saved, judging from how unenthusiastically The Globe seems to be capitalizing on its ostensible windfall.
I’m not much of a marketer, but I’m sure it wouldn’t take much imagination to put together at least a year’s worth of promotion around this Oscar win. Not just giving it visibility on the newspaper’s sites, but running a full ad campaign, or sending its journalists on tour, or teaming up with other newspapers to talk about how critical it is that the public understands the enormous benefit that quality reporting returns to society. I’d like to think that the folks at The Boston Globe, being pragmatists by nature, were caught unawares by Sunday’s success. Maybe they’re regrouping this week and making plans to shout this story from the hills for a long, long time. I hope so, for everyone’s sake.
Film and photo artist Jeff Frost captured tons of horrifyingly beautiful footage of forest fires raging in California for his upcoming feature documentary “Fire Chasers.” Shot in 4K, the film includes time lapse shots from deep inside fires alongside firefighters scrambling to save the surrounding communities, and chilling images of the what these fires leave behind.
