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.
More specifically, a Japanese traditional arts and crafts edition of the venerable American board game Monopoly. It looks like a perfectly weird combination of blatant Western capitalism and exquisite Japanese design.
As the Japanese arts and design site Spoon & Tamago puts it:
Instead of Atlantic Avenue you’ll own a Daruma doll business. Instead of Illinois Avenue you’ll own the Nanbu Ironware craft of making teapots. Instead of the railroads you’ll control Hato-guruma (Dove Cart), an enduring folk art made of a woven two-wheeled bird. By collecting these handmade toys, you’ll discover that they originated in Nagano and are associated with industrious effort because they appealingly depict they way a dove pecks at food while walking.
If like me you’re tempted to buy one for yourself, 5,000 limited edition boxes are on sale at nakagawa-masashichi.jp for ¥5,400, which is about US$46. Read more at spoon-tamago.com.
More often than not I find that Helvetica is the right solution for the design problems I tackle, but I acknowledge that there are many great alternatives out there. Designer Hrvoje Grubisic has rounded up six of them in this simple inventory over at Medium. He also created these sharp illustrative samples of each; overall it’s a very handy resource.
Geoff Teehan talks to the Bohemian Coding founder on the “past, present and future of Sketch.” This was one of my favorite quotes:
In the last year we’ve spoken to a lot of people and companies and I’ve very often heard ‘Sketch is just perfect the way it is, you just need to add this one thing.’ One person mentions auto-layout, someone else mentions prototyping, someone else mentions data driven design. So often these suggestions sound easy to the speaker, but what they are saying is to take these already fundamentally very complex ideas and then if we could just add just one little thing to Sketch, then it would be perfect. Everyone suggests something else, there doesn’t seem to be any underlying parallel requests or even themes. And many of the suggestions may sound like an easy tweak, but are actually very complex to address. At some point we have to choose and understand we can’t satisfy everyone. I don’t want to make an application that is purely driven by what customers say or think they want. It’s also important to preserve your own vision with the app and not just dump things in because customers ask for them.
Sketch’s single biggest asset is Pieter Omvlee. He does three things well—the only three things that matter in building software: he defines a very clear, widely relevant vision; he builds a nimble, very talented team around it; and then they execute on that vision without distraction. That’s what’s made Sketch so successful, and that is what this quote summarizes so well.
Teehan’s interview is well worth reading in full at medium.com. Though the Guillaime Courtois painting (above) that he selected as the illustration is not as clever as he thinks (smiley face!).
David Bowie died of cancer on Sunday. This animated tribute to the musician’s many faces was created by U.K. illustrator Helen Green for Bowie’s 69th birthday, which was just last week; it’s a lovely way to remember how expansive his career was.
I came to his music late—I remember trying, many times, as a teenager to grasp it but it was too sophisticated and advanced for me, and it wasn’t until I was in my twenties when it finally started to register how preternatural was his talent. In time, his artistry came to mean so much to me, and I’m deeply saddened by his passing.
Several months ago I had this idea that we, as a community of users and enthusiasts, should be tracking how well Apple is doing on its major initiatives. For better or worse, Apple is a very important company, and while its sales speaks volumes, I’ve always thought that it would be valuable—to us as well as to Apple itself—if we could somehow quantify all of the incredibly rich chatter and opinion about it that flows through Twitter, all the various technology publications, podcast, blogs, etc.
Trying to get a read on how well people think Apple is doing in, say, cloud services or hardware or stewardship of its various platforms is a very inaccurate science, but my thinking is that there is still lots of value to be derived from a community’s assessment, even if it’s only subjectively directional rather than objectively quantified.
This could be a big job, but I figured we could get a good deal of the way there by surveying a very small group of people: developers and writers who focus on Apple. So I sent a note to Jason Snell proposing that he use his excellent Six Colors blog as a platform for just such a thing. It took him some time to think over but he ultimately bought into the idea, and not long ago he sent out a poll to more than two dozen “writers, editors, podcasters, and developers” on eleven subjects. He received twenty-four responses which he then averaged and assigned letter grades to—he’s publishing the data for the first time today.
Above, you’ll see Jason’s topline graph of the results. Each participant was asked to rate Apple from 1 to 5 in these eleven categories, and what you see here are the averages. Jason’s post goes into detail about what the numbers mean and the overall sentiment that they suggest, and also includes lots of quotes from the participants. He’s also made a version of the survey available to the general public, so if you’d like to make your voice heard, you can take part in it yourself.
Slack is wonderful. I’m now a member of eight Slack teams (that I can remember). Surely there are other users out there that have to cope with more, maybe many times more, than that. But at any given time I might need to access any or all of these eight teams from one or more of my three Macs, two iOS devices or two Android devices. In order to do that, I’ve had to manually sign into Slack teams a total of fifty-six times—an excessive number even if, violating good security practices, I might have reused the same password for a couple of related teams (don’t tell my sysadmin).
Relieving this user pain seems like something the Slack product team should be working on, if they aren’t already. I can imagine signing into a single “SlackHQ ID” on each device, then being presented with a list of all the teams available to me, each of which I can then check or uncheck depending on my preferences for that particular device. I could also associate any or all of my various email addresses with that SlackHQ ID so that I can join new teams with it.
And while we’re on the subject, how about a master view of all activity that’s relevant to me across all of my Slack groups? Sort of like the “all inboxes” feature that’s become common in email clients, which let you see across all of your email accounts.
Of course, this is all easier to blog about than to pull off, especially when, like Slack, you’re often dealing with the typically thorny logistics of corporate IT departments. This kind of scaling challenge is the downside of tremendous growth trajectories like the one that Slack has enjoyed over the past two years or so; adoption and user needs are now outpacing product development. I certainly don’t fault them for not having a solution to this kind of edge problem already. But at this pace, as more and more users encounter similar problems, they’ll need to address it soon, before the bloom is off the rose. Slack has so far been a model of startup execution and generally very good product design, but the next stage in its growth will really test its design and technology foundations.
This terrific short animated tribute to “The Wire” by director, designer, and animator Elliot Lim is chock full of visual riffs on the show that transition into one another with tremendous cleverness. It reminded me how much I miss that show, and how, even though we have so much good television available to us today, few shows have been able to match “The Wire” for sheer quality and substance.
Eight classic designs from the Swiss International Typographic Style of mid-Century graphic design, lovingly recreated in CSS. What saves this project from being merely an academic exercise is designer Jon Yablonski’s gentle reinvention of each work for the browser. He cannily marries the International Style’s preference for simple, geometric shapes with CSS’s strength in lightweight animation to bring each design to life in an unexpected way, while fully respecting the original work. It’s a nearly perfect union of two methods of exploiting technology for presentation that just happen to be separated by a half century.
Artist Red Hong Yi made this video of seven “Star Wars” characters that she constructed by casting a beam of light onto various materials. The level of accuracy and detail she achieves is impressive.
Apple hasn’t said one way or another, but as a dyed in the wool iPad supporter, I’m very curious whether the holiday season just passed was a good one for the platform. About a week ago I posted this Twitter poll (my first) and managed to get nine hundred responses in twenty-four hours.
Did you receive an iPad as a gift for the holidays?
To be clear, I claim nothing scientific about this survey. In fact, I’m not sure whether these results are good or bad at all. I do know, though, that there’s plenty of room for improvement here. It will be interesting to see how next Christmas looks.
