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.
Type designer Fernando Mello’s beautiful new serif typeface from FontSmith is called FS Brabo. It’s based on early book faces, with lots of expressive swashes and ligatures. It draws inspiration from 16th Century types like Bembo, Garamond and Plantin. These fonts, all of which share wedge-shaped serifs and distinct though not excessive contrast between strokes, are classified as Garalde fonts (that term is apparently a portmanteau of the names of seminal type designers Claude Garamond and Aldus Manutius), though Brabo distinguishes itself by being moderately more angular in the serif. When set in large blocks for reading, Brabo has a truly lovely color.
This article from New York’s WNYC takes a look at the 119 station exits throughout the city’s subway system that have remained closed even as ridership has surged in recent years. Their inaccessibility is a remnant of a roughly three-decade period during which so few people rode the New York City subway that closing exits was a logical safety and cost-saving measure. Today though the lack of exits can exacerbate crowded platforms and even delay train operations.
Using data obtained through a Freedom of Information request, the WNYC data team created this interactive map that shows stations with closed exits alongside data about the number of people who pass through them each day. It’s pretty eye opening.
The full article is at wnyc.org, but it falls frustratingly short of pressing the MTA for an answer as to why so many exits remain closed. Reporter Kate Hinds says only:
The MTA knows the closed entrances are a problem. MTA spokesman Adam Lisberg said reopening them is ‘something we’re very actively looking at.’ But it will take time and money to figure out which of the 119 closed ones it’s worth reopening.
Sometimes I think that data reporters are so impressed with the admittedly valuable analytical work that they do that they forget to ask the truly pertinent questions. Mapping out all the problem areas is useful, but what would be more useful is a look into why exactly the situation persists.
Do we really need a smartphone-enabled version of everything? There must be some point at which such products cross over into absurdity. If there is, a connected suitcase is safely short of it, because I’m very impressed—in theory—with the Bluesmart suitcase, a pullman-style luggage piece that features a digital lock, a battery charger, location tracking, proximity alerts and, most genius of all, a built-in scale. It’s available for pre-order for the not exactly cheap amount of US$399 at bluesmart.com.
Update, 11 Nov 2015: A reader drew my attention to a review of the Bluesmart at travel site thepointsguy.com. The review itself was even-handed, pointing out a number of shortcomings in the tech features and the fact that the bag itself exceeds United Airlines’s size restrictions, but recommending it nevertheless. Unfortunately, it apparently provoked a hostile response from the company’s executives. It’s worth reading if you’re thinking about buying it.
A computer-aided, handheld fabrication device that lets users “sketch” real world objects—furniture, appliances, life-sized sculptures—at actual scale. The rather janky-looking, gun-like device works by forming adhesive tape into tubes that can be easily interconnected and even formed into simple mechanisms like hinges.
Last week in New York at Google’s annual design conference—formerly called Form but, after Google acquisition of Relative Wave’s Form, now called SPAN—I moderated a panel on the current state of design prototyping software. The panelists were: Andrew Debreczeni of Form; Andrew Pouliot of Facebook’s Origami; Clark Valberg of InVision; Daniel Hooper of Principle; and Paul Colton of Pixate (also now owned by Google). Google has generously made the video of all of SPAN’s panels, including this one, available on YouTube. I really enjoyed talking to these folks at the helm of some of the most interesting design tools today, and I think you will too.
I upgraded all but one of my Macs to OS X El Capitan before realizing that it’s not compatible with the current version of St. Clair Software’s Default Folder X. Since then, I’ve been checking every day for news on a new release; I depend heavily on this utility’s augmentation of the operating system’s standard Open and Save dialog boxes to help me jump around various folders on my Mac instantly. Being without it felt like a painful handicap.
Thankfully, yesterday St. Clair released a beta version of Default Folder X 5.0, which the company describes as a “complete rewrite of Default Folder X from top to bottom.” It’s unclear if they’ll charge for such a major upgrade, but I’ll gladly pay if so. I can’t get by without it.
That got me thinking about the other must-have utilities that I can’t do without—“desert island utilities,” if you will. A few come to mind immediately:
Bartender is a clever tool that can roll up all of the icons that lodge themselves into your Mac’s Menu Bar under a single icon. It’s a great way of tucking away distracting access points to various apps without having to get rid of them entirely. If you’re the obsessive compulsive type, this is for you.
Cordless Dog’s Stay is super-handy for laptop users who plug into large monitors regularly—I have two that I prefer to use over my MacBook’s built-in screen. The app remembers the placement of all the windows in all of your apps and automatically restores them just the way you like them on each monitor. It’s truly essential if, like me, the way you work and what you work on is different when you’re sitting at your desk versus when you’re on the go.
A lot has been written about Smile Software’s TextExpander, and with good reason. It truly gives you super-powers at your keyboard by automatically converting simple typed shortcuts that you define into full words, sentences, even blocks of text. This is a truly robust piece of software that I feel confident will reward any user, regardless of what you use your Mac for. If you’re interested in learning how to maximize its power, I recommend Michael Cohen’s ebook “Take Control of TextExpander.”
Finally, there’s another utility called Handler that I cooked up a few years ago with my friend Scott Ostler that intercepts web links and email links and presents a quick, on-the-spot menu of apps that you can send each to. It looks like this:
This is perfect for me because I use at least two and usually all three of the major browsers each day, and want to be able to choose which of them to send links to on a case-by-case basis. I also use multiple email clients to support various email accounts, and being able to select which mail program to use with any given mail link is a huge help. Unfortunately, Scott and I have never been able to find the time to finish up the app for public consumption, but there is an alternative available called Choosy, though it’s long in the tooth and not as elegant as ours, if you ask me.
In light of the fact that I now work at Adobe, I feel quite ill at ease when it comes to making public statements about Bohemian Coding’s Sketch these days. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that I’m still a dedicated user; it’s the tool that I turn to nearly every day, and with pleasure—I still find it to be the best solution on the market for web and mobile design.
It’s not perfect, though. In fact, it’s sometimes infuriatingly imperfect. Maybe this is the underlying truth for all design software; as good as these tools get, there may always be a nontrivial minority of features that are just terrible.
Sketch’s Achille’s heel, in my opinion, is its erratic handling of type. It’s not quite true to say that type behaves unpredictably in Sketch when you edit copy or change line-spacing because there’s some kind of logic driving it. But it’s a logic that defies understanding, at least for me. This glaring inefficiency has plagued the program as long as I’ve been using it—more than two and a half years now—and it’s been frustrating to watch it remain unchanged, revision after revision.
Sometimes, when faced with intractable problems in life, it’s helpful just to talk about those problems—or blog about them. In order to let off some steam, then, I tried to document the craziness of Sketch’s type handling. First, I set a short block of lorem ipsum at 40 pt. with three different line-spacing values: Sketch’s automatic leading (effectively 49 pt.), 45 pt., and 40 pt.
The automatic line-spacing demonstrates Sketch’s type handling at its most reliable in that the app behaves pretty much as you would expect it to with respect to the baseline. In this diagram, I’ve drawn a cyan line at the baseline of each line of text.
In this next image, the blue highlight indicates that I’m actively editing the copy. As you would expect, the type remains in place relative to the baseline.
Now if I reduce the line-spacing to 45 pt., things start to get weird. In fact, the spacing here is not quite 45 pt. but actually 46 pt. when measured. The baseline of the first line of text shifts downward—my expectation would be that it would shift upward, if at all. What’s more, the amount that that first line of text shifts downward is different from the amount that the second line of text shifts downward. You can see that difference in the image below with the magenta baselines I drew; compare them to the cyan baselines which mark the baseline positions from the earlier automatic line-spacing example.
When I edit this example, the text now inexplicably shifts upward. In fact, the first line of text seems to now match the baseline of the automatic line-spacing example, but not quite; it’s a point lower. The second line of text has risen up dramatically, too, for a reason I can’t figure out.
One more example to bring the point home: here I’ve changed the line-spacing to just 40 pt. The first line of text drops further again, but the second line of text hasn’t dropped at all.
And this is what happens when I edit the copy:
As I said, there is surely some kind of engineering logic that’s driving this behavior, but whatever it is, it escapes me, and I would guess it escapes most Sketch users too. The fact of the matter is that precise type placement in Sketch is very difficult; most of the time I find myself approximating placement, rather than truly specifying it. That’s a severe handicap.
As an avid user, I desperately want to see this fixed, but I have to admit, I hesitated to write this post. Though I’m friendly with the Bohemian Coding team, it can be unbecoming to point out flaws in the competition’s products—and no one would argue that Adobe’s products don’t have glaring issues of their own.
But type handling is so fundamental to what Sketch promises as a product that to leave it unattended like this seems to undermine the potential of what its team has built.
As this market for UX/UI design tools heats up, as Adobe rolls out Project Comet, as Affinity continues to burnish their excellent Affinity Designer, as even prototyping apps start to push more towards end-to-end design-to-prototyping solutions, it becomes increasingly important that foundational features like this should be unassailably polished when they ship. In my belief, that’s just table stakes for long term success.
With luck, what we’ll see in a few years is a truly robust market with not just one dominant app, but many thriving, commercially successful applications for UX and UI design. That’s the ideal that translates into a net benefit for everyone, especially users—it’s the notion of a truly vibrant array of choices for the consumer. The apps that will get there will get there with winning ideas; original, thoughtful approaches to how design work gets done, along with superb execution. Sketch has those ideas in spades, but its handling of type does those ideas a disservice.
It’s unfortunate that we even have a product category just for batteries to recharge our mobile devices, but alas we do, so let’s make the most of it. Example: the exceedingly clever folks at Nomad, who have figured out ingenious ways to help you get a charge on the go by building cables and batteries into key fobs, carabiners and even things that someone should have thought of long ago but didn’t, like car chargers.
Their latest is a battery hidden into the spine of a leather wallet. It boasts a 2400 mAh capacity, enough for a single charge for an iPhone 6 or 6s. That’s not as much as lots of external batteries that are popular these days, but I bet the sheer value of always having this battery with you has got to more than make up for that.
I‘m not really a big fan of Cetra/Ruddy’s One Madison skyscraper on Twenty-third Street in New York City. It’s not offensive but neither is it particularly inspiring. However, after seeing it from a nearby building today, I have to admit that it makes for a pretty good photo subject. Taken on an iPhone 6 Plus, no filters or editing.
Wonderfully rectilinear work by Hong Kong photographer Chan Dick of a fire station that happens to be within viewing distance of his workspace. Looking down out of his window, the open yard next to the station transforms into serenely abstract, beautifully minimalist compositions.
