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.
Designer Samuel Hulick penned this humorous but substantive “breakup letter” with Slack. He argues that where its early promise to obsolesce email and free up time was enthralling, the reality of Slack’s subsequent explosion in popularity and usage is that it has made communication more difficult.
While it’s true that email was (and, despite your valiant efforts, still very much is) a barely-manageable firehose of to-do list items controlled by strangers, one of the few things that it did have going for it was that at least everything was in one place.
Trying to keep up with the manifold follow-up tasks from the manifold conversations in your manifold teams and channels requires a Skynet-like metapresence that is simply beyond me.
With you, the firehose problem has become a hydra-headed monster.
I touched on a part of this problem in this blog post back in January, but Hulick’s assessment is much more thorough and accurate. For me, Slack hasn’t replaced email—or even Basecamp—at all; it’s simply become another channel that I have to monitor—or, to be precise, it’s become at least eight channels that I have to actively monitor. Slack’s promise that I can “be less busy” seems optimistic if not unrealistic these days.
I’ve been using Letterboxd more actively for some months; you can follow along with my film diary here. It’s a wonderful site for film lovers. If you haven’t already, you can set up a free account at letterboxd.com.
They also have a great design sense; in spite of the fact that the site’s aesthetic is somewhat out of fashion, the overall experience is really well executed. And so is this tee-shirt that they’ve just brought back into print:
It’s available for sale for the next two weeks over at cottonbureau.com.
The talented, Portland-based design agency Instrument launched a new web site for itself this week. It’s nice enough, but what I was particularly taken by was the team page, which captures each of the company’s many employees in elegantly styled photos.
There’s no one right way to design a team page, but I think it says so much about the company’s respect for an employee when it’s willing to pay for the cost of high quality photos of its team. A professional portrait, executed in a distinctive style that’s consistent across the whole team, says that the company values the people who work for it and how the world at large sees them. It also arms each team member with a valuable asset with which to represent themselves when appearing at conferences or even to use as social media avatars. It sounds trivial, but small stuff like this counts.
Here’s another nicely realized team page (thanks to Felipe Tofani on Twitter) from New York and Warsaw advertising agency Ars Thanea. They use a gorgeous, highly stylized look to showcase their staff in an inventive layout; the design even offers surprisingly playful alternative shots for some key members when you mouse over them (example in the bottom left).
To me, it’s fully evident that the team enjoyed the heck out of themselves sitting for the shots, but if you}re skeptical, take a look at the making of the photo shoot as captured in this Behance project. What a wonderfully over-the-top production.
It’s worth noting of course that the challenge with these pages is maintaining them as the team grows and changes. Adding new photos in a timely manner, and making sure that the established style remains consistent both require a vigilant regard for a company’s public identity. It’s also probably no accident that these examples are from agencies; those businesses are often more familiar with what it takes to pull off projects like these, and their culture tends to be more accommodating of this high touch level of image management than most. Still, these projects don’t have to be exorbitantly expensive to pull off, and if a company has raised lots of venture capital, the cost of a photo strategy like this is marginal. People are worth it.
Venture firm FirstMark Capital, which happens to be located just a floor below Adobe on Fifth Avenue in New York City, invited me to take part in their Design Driven series a couple of weeks ago. I joined FirstMark vice-president Dan Kozikowski on stage for a discussion about the design industry, the design tools business, end-to-end design production systems, designer co-founders and more. There are some at least mildly interesting ideas in there, so I encourage you to watch (or, do as I did, and just listen to the audio so you don’t have to see my face).
Tomoko is a line of cone of silence-type contraptions made from felt. They hang like a floor lamp so that they can essentially serve as horse blinders, or they sit on top of desks where they can enclose laptops. The intent is to give workers in open plan offices a modicum of privacy. According to the product description:
Tomoko helps you to create an immediate territory of your own by eliminating elements that interfere with your concentration, such as noise or visual distractions. At the same time, it signals to others that you are not to be disturbed.
It’s a joke, right? The products are ostensibly for sale at furniture design retailer Vivero but the site does not disclose pricing. See the listing at vivero.fi.
New design tool Figma (currently in private beta) is earning plaudits for creating a robust, commercially viable UX/UI design application entirely inside the browser. That technical achievement aside, there is some interesting original thinking in the feature set, too. In this recent Medium post, co-founder Evan Wallace goes into detail on their new approach to paths, which they’ve re-imagined as “vector networks”:
A vector network improves on the path model by allowing lines and curves between any two points instead of requiring that they all join up to form a single chain. This helps provide the best of both worlds; it combines the ease with which points can be connected on paper and the ease with which geometry can be manipulated once it’s drawn. Splitting and recombining geometry is much more natural with vector networks. Delete anything, anywhere. Connect anything to anything else. Stroke cap and join styles just work naturally in vector networks, even for points with three or more lines coming off of them. This isn’t the case for paths because it’s impossible to use paths to represent attaching three lines together at a single point.
Reason number bajillion why this is such a great time for design tools: it’s terrific to see interaction models that have been with us so long, like paths, freshly reinvented by new thinking. Users are winning in a huge way right now.
Here are the official logos for three of the four candidate cities vying to host the 2024 Olympic Games; the fourth city, Budapest, has yet to unveil the visual identity for its bid. To me, the logo for Paris is the best by far; it’s both visually inventive and a bit daring in its blending of abstract visual forms. Rome’s logo shows a surprisingly inept mastery of basic draughtsmanship. Los Angeles’s is mostly inoffensive, though the bid’s official site is superbly executed. It’s worth noting that all three employ gradients to some extent; this is the age we live in, I suppose.
More at paris2024.org, 2024roma.org and la24.org. I’ll add Budapest’s logo here when it’s released but that city’s official bid site is at www.mob.hu. Also, if you live in any of these four cities, don’t say no one warned you to find an excuse to be away from home eight summers from now.
Gothamist scored this wonderful interview with legendary writer Robert Caro. Most of the questions are about “The Power Broker,” Caro’s landmark biography of Robert Moses, but I particularly liked this exchange in which Caro talks about the demands of writing on a deadline, especially as seen through the lens of publishing in the Internet age.
You’ve said that you were able to uncover some of your best material in “The Power Broker” and in your LBJ series by being incredibly thorough—“time equals truth,” and “turn the page.” For someone who writes on the Internet, how do you uncover truth on a weekly basis? Or an hourly basis?
That’s what I hated about being a reporter. I liked a lot of—in fact, I was just talking to my wife and I said I’d give anything to take a year off and go back to being a general assignment reporter.
Why don’t you?
Yeah but I’m worried I’m not gonna finish the books now. I don’t wanna waste time doing articles. I love being a reporter. But the thing I didn’t like was you were always having to write when you still had more questions in your mind. I remember that feeling.
This is a wonderful series of illustrations from Russian-born, Thailand-based artist Dmitry Narozhny: it depicts people at their desks, all in front of their computers, but it cannily captures the kinds of details that people use to make their workspaces uniquely their own.
Though Narozhny’s style would seem to be very commercial, he apparently leads an artist’s life and claims that the income he generates from his work is sometimes not enough. You can support him via Patreon.
