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.
Via Spoon & Tamago, I learned about the passing of Japanese Illustrator Noriyoshi Ohrai just a few days ago at age 79.
The iconic artist was an art student dropout who began his career in 1962 illustrating book covers and newspaper advertisements. His big break came when he was 45 years old. An illustration he did of the movie Star Wars for an obscure Japanese science fiction magazine made its way to the hands of George Lucas, who liked it so much he commissioned Ohrai to create the universal poster for the movie’s sequel: The Empire Strikes Back.
At first I thought this was a visually impressive but otherwise shallow exercise in typographic play—Chinese words and phrases fashioned into actual weapons; guns, knives, etc. Then I realized that it’s actually a project aimed to raise awareness about how emotionally abusive language can push children to commit violent acts. What’s more, the characters were not just 3D modeled, but actually machined into real parts that could be physically assembled into the tools shown.
When Storehouse debuted in January 2014 as an iPad-only social network for visual storytelling, it made huge waves for its exceptionally fluid, beautifully designed user interface. At the time, the practice of imbuing interactions with ambient motion had already been gaining ground in app design, but in many ways Storehouse jolted the industry forward, setting a new bar for how even the most basic interactions behave.
In the time since, Storehouse grew to a million users and launched an iPhone version. But as social networks have become increasingly noisy, and users’ willingness to join new ones has diminished, the company recently decided to make a dramatic break. In its new version, launched just last month, the core Storehouse strengths are still there, including the ease with which you can quickly transform a few photos into a gorgeous narrative. But version 2.0 has conspicuously done away with followers, hashtags, republishing and even timelines—all the requisite infrastructure of “social apps.” Its emphasis now is on creating private spaces for people to share photos with friends and family.
I talked to Storehouse’s CEO, Mark Kawano about this major change. Kawano is a friend and an incredibly thoughtful product designer. He spent many years at Apple working on software and as a UX evangelist before co-founding Storehouse, and brings a decidedly design-centric approach to startups.
Q. What motivated you to take such a new approach with this new version?
There were so many different motivations that ultimately led us to Storehouse 2.0. We always look at how people are actually using our service and combine that with our natural instincts on what our team thinks will be best for users. And like most startups, we are constantly thinking about how to build a business that will grow really fast. These are complex vectors that influence a lot of product decisions.
But the simplest answer is that we made the decision to focus our efforts on the parts of the service that people really loved. That meant that we had to remove features that were good or maybe even great, but that really weren’t significantly better than what already existed in the world.
Engineers and designers have a tendency to want to fix everything. I’ve seen many companies and products fail because the team spends all their time trying to optimize or fix all the things that are not working instead of making what is working better and better. With Storehouse 2.0, we decided to focus on making the thing that people loved the most, creating visual stories, even better.
Q. You mentioned “grow really fast”—that seems at odds with your decision to strip the social features from Storehouse. Can you explain?
I think labeling apps and services as social or not social is starting to get tricky. When I first moved to Silicon Valley, we were calling certain businesses “Internet companies.” You don’t hear that too much anymore. Maybe it’s time to rethink when we use the terms social media and social networks now that social features have become embedded into most of the digital products we use.
Regardless of the labels, Storehouse is a better product when your friends and family are also using it. Does that make us a social network? I’m not sure it really matters.
At the end of the day, people love Storehouse because it lets them take the photos and videos that are collecting dust in their camera roll and turn them into a story that they can easily share with friends and family. And our latest update made it a lot easier to share stories using all of the different apps people already have on their phone, whether that’s a messaging app or Facebook.
It’s still very early into our 2.0 update, but so far we’re very happy with how many people are creating stories. Without the timeline, people don’t have to space apart when they post and they can just share a cool experience right after it happened. And now that this big update is out, we’re already working on some slick new ways to make sharing photos with friends and family even more fun. But it has nothing to do with a following model.
Q. You’ve kept a lot of the aesthetic identity of the very first Storehouse, which really set a standard when it debuted. Has that distinctiveness helped you? Hindered you?
Because of the emphasis on photography, I can’t see us moving away from the clean, modern aesthetics anytime soon.
The designer in me likes to think that this visual identity has helped a lot. It sets the mood and communicates a certain set of brand values. For instance, it quickly shows how much we care about the product we’re building.
But I also know that this is only one small piece of the bigger puzzle when building a successful product. The brand values don’t mean much to a customer if the product isn’t useful to a customer. And if you’re obsessing over the details of the aesthetics before you obsess over how to solve the customer’s problem, it’s a huge hinderance to being successful. To be honest, we’ve been guilty of this at times.
Overall, however, I think we’ve found a nice balance of making sure we’re addressing a real problem in an efficient way while also providing a strong visual identity.
Q. You very first version shipped for iPad only. What did you learn about that platform?
People love their iPads. They really do. Since the first iPad launched, I’ve always thought that it is the hardest platform to design software for. Partly because of the orientations and partly because it’s a big canvas to fill.
But most of all, the usage patterns and habits are all over the map. Some people only use their iPads when they go on a plane, some use it every day as a PC replacement, and to many others it’s used for occasional tasks like gaming, video watching, or something else pretty specific. I think this is the main reason we started to see people use them less when bigger iPhones came out. It’s a device that many people don’t know how to consistently fit into their daily life.
Starting off as iPad only was great for us as we got extra attention that I don’t think we would have gotten otherwise. But we quickly learned that we needed to get to the iPhone if we wanted to have a more consistently engaged user base. So we did that. All that said, when you are using an iPad, the large screen makes viewing photos and videos an absolute joy. Nothing else comes close to that experience, in my opinion.
Q. How has being a designer as well as co-founder and CEO affected the way you’ve navigated your company through these evolutions from iPad to iPhone, from version 1.0 to this newest iteration?
It’s somewhat hard to say since I don’t know what it’s like to do this without a design background. I do know that most successful startups are constantly running a bunch of experiments. We’re doing this all the time at Storehouse and it’s very helpful to be able to bring a design approach to them–whether it’s coming up with the ideas or figuring out how to deploy them.
That said, I have also learned the importance of running experiments quickly to get the data back as fast as possible. This often goes against the designer in me as my natural tendency is to want to polish everything before releasing into the wild. So it’s important to be self aware of the bias that comes with my background.
Before Storehouse, I was a designer for a while in Silicon Valley. But it was at Apple that I learned many of the advantages you gain when the entire company cares about design and user experience. Everybody is more aligned around a single goal. That affects efficiency, communication, and so many other things that ultimately lead to a better product.
So when I started Storehouse, I knew that I wanted to have similar values embedded into our culture from the beginning. But wanting that and having that are two different things. Without my background as a designer, I’m not sure I could have recruited the right engineers, designers, or investors for our team. That’s a huge advantage as I don’t have to navigate the changes alone and our diverse team can all come together and figure out the best way to achieve the shared vision.
This looks awesome: a documentary about the seminal Roland TR-808, one of the first programmable drum machines that, because of its affordable price and its ability to produce very deep bass sounds, became a central element of hip-hop and modern dance music. The film’s graphics, at least insofar as they are revealed in the trailer, also look terrific. Here’s the trailer:
I was lucky enough to be invited to do an Ask Me Anything over at Product Hunt today. It was tons of fun, though now my typing fingers are sore. Read it at producthunt.com.
On this week’s episode of the excellent arts radio show “Bullseye with Jesse Thorn,” director Brad Bird talks about his beloved 1999 animated feature “The Iron Giant.” Little seen during its original theatrical release, “The Iron Giant” has come to be regarded as a modern classic and a truly transcendent example of what can be done with traditional animation. Bird also talks about his eight seasons on “The Simpsons” and how he tried to bring Kubrickian animation sensibilities to its densely packed scripts. A great interview.
Most rock autobiographies seem tossed off and phoned in: tour souvenirs. Not this one. ‘Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink’ feels as if it were written during a six-year residency at Yaddo and driven to his publisher on the back of a flatbed truck.
The consensus seems to be that it’s sprawling but idiosyncratic, exhaustive but cagey, intricate but rewarding. I’m a third of the way through it and all of that sounds about right. It also sounds exactly like the man’s work; there are few songwriters as simultaneously accessible and challenging as Costello is, and it feels right that his autobiography would reflect that nature. It’s what’s made him one of the most important pop musicians of the past several decades. You can have “Life” and “Just Kids”—I’ll take “Unfaithful Music.”
Sixteen students at German college Fachhochschule Potsdam each reimagined iTunes as “smaller, focused, single-purpose apps.” Examples include watching movies, reading books, listening to albums, etc. By and large, these aren’t bad as far as student projects go, though I have to question the wisdom of the exercise as a whole. Some of these are built around use cases that, in the mobile age, just don’t seem relevant for desktop software anymore, e.g., downloading apps and transferring them to your phone, listening to podcasts, even watching movies. Still, as a group they do highlight a bigger problem for Apple: when one of your flagship software applications is assigned in schools as a case in feature bloat, it’s crossed some threshold for acceptability. Time to fix iTunes, Apple!
I’m a big fan of the mail order catalogs from the Ann Arbor, MI-based Zingerman’s, which sells all kinds of foods—cheese, cured meats, olive oil and even pecan pies. The pages completely eschew photography in favor of illustrations that curiously balance the whimsical and the intricate.
You’ll find a fair share of fun spot drawings of the sort that would enliven any catalog, but what’s more interesting is how Zingerman’s illustrators lavishly portray their food products. The leavened texture of breads, the specific patinas of cheese rinds, the marbled cross-sections of salamis…these details and more are all lovingly and painstakingly rendered by hand to give customers a very clear picture of the product they’re buying. Yet at the same time they’re highly stylized, too—the line quality of the drawings is exaggerated in its roughness and perspective is thrown out the window to an almost Cubist effect. It’s surely the weirdest combination of realism and artistic license ever put into service of a mail order catalog.
“How They Got There” is a collection of interviews I conducted with designers of prominence like Geoff Teehan, Erika Hall, Nicholas Felton, Naz Hamid, Karen McGrane, and more—fourteen in all (see the full list). Each extensive interview is focused specifically on how these design superstars got their first big breaks, how they navigated the peaks and valleys of the industry, and how they charted their professional journeys.
The response to the book has been so gratifyingly positive; I said when I launched it that this was the book I wish I had had when I was starting out—it’s full of invaluable tales of how big careers are made. Since its release I’ve gotten so many enthusiastic emails from readers in just that position, complimenting me—or really my interview subjects—on all of the wisdom that they impart in its pages. It’s really proven to be a fantastic manual of sorts for starting out in the design field, or even making a mid-career switch.
When I started writing the book it was a bit of a lark; I wanted to do it as quickly and simply as I could, hence my decision to go for a digital-only release. But I secretly hoped that it would do well enough to justify a print edition. Thanks to the strong sales response and with expert help from “book developer” extraordinaire Adam Robinson I’ve been able to make that a reality.
This physical edition has been produced to be printed in batches at Bookmobile, specialists in short run books. This minimizes the cash investment that I have to make upfront while also keeping the cost-per-unit low enough (dramatically lower than at print-on-demand services like Blurb or Lulu) for me to offer it at a reasonable price. This explains the pre-order scenario: ordering now helps me get the first batch sized just right.
Important update: Please note new shipping information below.
The first batch will be printed in early December and will ship out to customers by the middle of that month. This should be plenty of time to get orders out to customers in the U.S. in time for Christmas. Unfortunately, for international orders, we can’t guarantee shipping in time for Christmas despite my earlier belief that that would be possible—many apologies if you were counting on that. However, digital orders are always available for instant download, and if you pre-order a hardcover edition you get the digital versions too. Order now at howtheygotthere.com.
