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.
Last week, in response to the Umpqua Community College Shooting, President Obama challenged news organizations to report the total number of recent deaths caused by terrorism as compared to those caused by guns in America. Wired rose to the challenge and did a terrific job, showing, as Obama guessed, that guns kill far more Americans than terrorism. Like good journalists, they offered additional data for comparison: deaths by diabetes, by motor vehicles and by heart disease. The context is useful, but for me it clouds the stark graphic that Wired produced, so I pared it down to just guns vs. terrorism.
See the full chart and read the article at wired.com.
For the past two days I’ve been telling everyone I know about the hands-on demo that I was lucky enough to get of the Slate, a new device from French startup ISKN. The Slate is a screen-less writing surface about a quarter of an inch thick, with a battery and several magnets embedded beneath the surface. You connect it over Bluetooth with your iPad so that it can communicate with ISKN’s Imagink app, available free from the App Store.
Once the link is established, you place your favorite kind of drawing paper on the Slate and draw with the included ISKN pen; the magnets pick up every mark and stroke in real-time and replicate them in the app with almost flawless accuracy. You can’t quite get the kind of pressure sensitivity that you’ll soon be able to get with the Apple Pencil, but Imagink will record thinner strokes when you move the pen more quickly and thicker strokes when you move it more slowly. When you’re finished with your notes or drawing, you can export the finished page from the Imagink app in a number of standard file formats, including even SVG, which allows you to manipulate it with nearly infinite resolution.
All of that in and of itself is a kind of magic, but products that bridge pen-and-paper and digital are not exactly new. Livescribe has a catalog of smartpens and specialized paper that work together to do something similar, and Evernote offers a Document Camera app that can capture images of your paper and make it instantly searchable.
There are two things that distinguish the Slate from those methods. First, you’re not restricted to using single sheets of paper. In fact, the magnets can track your marks even if you’re using a notebook that’s as thick as three-quarters of an inch. And second, you’re not restricted to using ISKN’s pen, either. The Slate ships with magnetic rings that can be fitted around any pen or pencil.
Taken together, these two features mean that you don’t have to compromise on your tools in order to digitize your work—you can actually use your favorite pen or pencil and your favorite paper or sketchbook. When I divulge this detail to people, their eyes immediately light up with enthusiasm and they ask me how they can try one out immediately. These reactions demonstrate why analog note-taking and drawing are still so powerful; we form very particular habits around our very particular preferences for what we’re writing or drawing with and on. Put another way, this product complements the way you work rather than requiring that you adopt new behaviors like using only compatible pens or notebooks, or taking photos of finished pages. That’s smart design.
Still, the Slate is not a perfect product, and it’s very much a version 1.0. It feels not particularly substantial when held, and the plastic backing seems like it could be easily broken or cracked. A bigger challenge may be that any paper or notebook that you draw on cannot be misaligned as you make your marks, otherwise what gets captured in the app will become jumbled. ISKN mentioned that they may ship clips that will secure your writing surface to the device, but I imagine in the meantime a couple of binder clips will do just as well. In usage, I didn’t have a particularly hard time with this problem except when I decided to move to a different location in the middle of working on a page.
Early imperfections aside, ISKN’s ability to allow you to use your preferred analog tools seems like a meaningful innovation. This is true especially given that one of the big takeaways from my Design Tools Survey was how well basic pencil and paper fared as an everyday staple of the way designers work, even in our digital age. Nearly two thirds of participants cited pencil and paper as their preferred tools for brainstorming, beating all software alternatives by a mile. This is actually in line with what ISKN sees in the market; they told me that when they shipped their first batch of devices (to backers of their original Kickstarter campaign) what they saw was that creatives—illustrators, artists, designers—responded more enthusiastically even than people who use notebooks for general note-taking.
Find out more at iskn.co. As of yesterday, the Slate is officially available for sale at store.iskn.co.
Two interesting stories at the intersection of technology and politics. First is this Medium article by veteran tech journalist Steven Levy about how GOP primary candidate Carly Fiorina was “fleeced” by Steve Jobs many years ago, when the former was in the midst of her mostly poorly regarded stewardship of Hewlett-Packard.
Levy recounts a deal that Fiorina and Jobs struck under which Hewlett-Packard secured the right to sell a version of the iPod with the HP logo on it (underneath the Apple logo on the back, of course). This was a rare case in which Apple allowed such co-branding, and in return Apple exacted from HP a commitment to ship iTunes on all of its personal computers. That aspect of the deal was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Apple, and they got it basically for free.
It was at CES that year that HP announced its version of the iPod. That in itself was pathetic. The company’s motto at the time was Invent! But at the biggest event of the technology world, HP’s big newsmaking announcement was that it was selling someone else’s invention. Nonetheless in our interview on January 8, just off the show floor, Fiorina boasted about cobranding the iPod as if it were an innovative coup for her own company. Apple chose her company, she told me, ‘Because HP is a company that’s an innovator. We believe innovation is our lifesblood. It’s why INVENT sits on our logo.’ So why sell someone else’s product? She described her strategy as ‘focused innovation.’ Apparently this meant throwing in the towel when a competitor came up with something really good.
It gets worse:
…Soon after HP began selling iPods, Apple came out with new, improved iPods—leaving HP to sell an obsolete device. Fiorina apparently did not secure the right to sell the most current iPods in a timely fashion, and was able to deliver newer models only months after the Apple versions were widely available.
Over at Vox, political writer Ezra Klein offers a theory of how American politics is changing. It’s a cogent, big picture view of how party primaries are being transformed by a less predictable form of campaigning, resulting in the unexpected success of candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Parties have a range tools they can use to influence both electoral and legislative outcomes, but the most important one—in part because it underlies so many of the others—is elite opinion. If a critical mass of Republican Party elites think Jeb Bush is the best candidate, then the best staffers will want to work for him, the biggest donors will want to give him money, and voters will get signal after signal from trusted Republican sources that Bush deserves their vote.
Distilled to their essence, money, staff, and elite signaling all work to influence voters the same way: They shape the amount and kind of information voters possess. This happens both directly—money buys television airtime—and indirectly.
For instance, politically engaged voters get much of their information through various forms of political news; in order to generate all that political news, political reporters talk to party actors and watch fundraising numbers and note who’s hiring the top staffers; and so the opinions of those party actors ends up influencing which candidates get covered and how positively they’re portrayed, and that influences what voters end up knowing when they walk into the ballot booth.
The importance of this process—and it remains important—is diminishing. Voters have more information than ever before, and they are able to shape and choose the information they get in unprecedented ways.
This is a trailer for “Design Disruptors: How Design Became the New Language of Business,” a new documentary about the craft of digital product design, produced by the crackerjack team at InVision but starring designers from Pinterest, Google Ventures, MailChimp, Twitter and more. It looks like an amazing project but this two-minute preview left me with mixed feelings.
On the one hand, many of the subjects in the movie are people that I respect and admire greatly (and a few are actually friends), and I would gladly sit and watch a feature-length film just to hear their insights, as I’m sure to learn lots from them. Moreover, I have tremendous respect for InVision and what they’ve done in just a few short years in defining the rapid prototyping category. They have an amazing product and even more amazing marketing and frankly I wish it had been Adobe who had the idea to make a documentary on this subject.
But there’s something about the swelling music and the dramatic build up in the trailer that makes me uncomfortable. It has the feeling of the kind of film that captures superhuman quests of courage—but it’s all just design, right? The trailer looks like “Man on Wire” when perhaps it should feel more like “The King of Kong.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m a hundred percent for raising the profile of our profession but I guess maybe I’m just not fully at ease with making us all out to be heroes.
Nevertheless, I fully intend to see the movie. Find out more at designdisruptors.com.
Here is the latest installment in my ongoing series about what’s new in design tools. This week’s items include continued innovation in creative productivity for iPad, lots of pushes towards greater fidelity prototyping, and a handy scorecard for how all of the many prototyping tools out there match up against one another.
Quill is a new “collaborative drawing and wireframing” app—for tablets. The app works in real time or asynchronously, and basic team workflow is supported: project organization, permissions management, commenting and sharing. More at getquill.com.
Folio is a new, simple version control system for OS X, launching today. It’s based on Git, so it is capable of supporting teams or multiple contributors, though its developers say that aspect is not yet exposed. This is a very interesting problem to solve; in both my design tools survey and anecdotal research, designers still use shockingly manual and even arcane methods of managing versions. More at folioformac.com.
Flinto releases an OS X version of its popular iOS prototyping tool. The company claims that it has been working on this new product for the past year. It costs US$99 but a 14-day trial is available at flinto.com.
Atomic, the browser-based prototyping tool, now features “advanced motion control.” Atomic’s designer Jarred Bishop writes: “You can now adjust the delay, duration and easing of individual elements on a simple and familiar timeline, complete with in-editor playback, timeline scrubbing and a comprehensive set of easing options.” More at blog.atomic.io.
Rapid prototyping leader InVision announced a forthcoming product called Motion, an advanced user interface animation editor. The company claims that it will allow users to “communicate your design vision in the highest fidelity possible,” and features a timeline as well as a code editor. No shipping date announced yet. More at blog.invisionapp.com.
Proto.io is another browser-based prototyping app, and it now sports revamped groups, layers and multi-item edit. I don’t like to post about every feature release but I thought that it was interesting to note that the timeline in Motion by InVision and Atomic, as well as Proto.io’s attention to its layers view, all point towards a similar, Flash-like interaction model. That may be where we’re all headed. More at proto.io.
Gravit is also browser-based, but it’s a “pixel design tool for beginners and professionals,” analogous to Illustrator or Sketch. More at gravit.io.
Vectr is a new design app that works both in the browser and on the desktop. Your work product resides in the cloud, apparently, as it’s automatically synced and available to you on any platform where Vectr is available. Its creators promise weekly updates and improvements and a “free forever” price tag. More at vectr.com.
Blocs, a WYSIWYG web design tool for OS X, launched a major revision: version 1.5, since updated to 1.5.1. You can read the changelog here or watch this kind of leisurely overview video. More at blocsapp.com. Blocs was also a finalist for App of the Year in the 2015 Net Awards (see below).
So who won App of the Year? None other than Bohemian Coding’s Sketch. It’s well-deserved; the Sketch phenomenon is our strongest signal that the market for creative tools is thriving. See all the winners at thenetawards.com.
Finally, Emily Schwartzman of design and strategy firm Cooper has updated this mammoth scorecard of prototyping tools. Each application is graded on criteria such as speed, fidelity, sharing, dynamic elements, etc. Schwartzman says that this is a “living document” that will be updated periodically (there are at least one or two omissions). See it at cooper.com.
And here is the demo video for Folio. It’s definitely worth a look.
What I’ve learned about pre-ordering new gadgets that offer incredible innovations is: just say no. More often than not, I’ve been disappointed after buying into the promise of a particularly persuasive marketing web site or a Kickstarter page for amazing items that were not actually yet in market. That said, the Oaxis InkCase i6 is sorely tempting. It’s a second, e-ink screen that attaches to the back of your iPhone and displays your schedule, HealthKit stats, photos and more. It also doubles as a protective case. You can pre-order right now at oaxis.com for US$30 off the retail price when it ships. When it ships.
Coming this December: a documentary of the legendary, highly influential meeting between film directors Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut that resulted in the famous tome “Hitchcock by Truffaut”. The latter was, at just thirty years old at the time, already an internationally famous guiding light of the French New Wave. When he published this interview as “the definitive study of Alfred Hitchcock,” it forever changed the popular perception of his subject from that of a purveyor of populist entertainments to that of a seminal genius of cinema.
I’d like to own an Apple Watch. Or rather, I really want to want an Apple Watch. On several occasions I’ve stopped in at my local Apple Store to look at the various models and try them on, but I can never muster up the will to actually make the purchase.
Part of the reason why is because I never fell out of the habit of wearing a traditional watch on a daily basis. I own a simple, inexpensive, military-style analog watch with a canvas strap that almost wholly satisfies my expectations for a device worn on the wrist. It tells the time and date and needs almost no maintenance.
By contrast, not long ago when I borrowed an Apple Watch from the office for an extended test run, I was immediately flummoxed by having yet another digital device to mind. On several occasions I was caught unawares when I forgot to charge the Apple Watch in a timely manner, or when I tried to use it and realized I was out of range of my phone, which I’d left on my desk on the other side of the office. Charging a watch and keeping it within range of my phone aren’t really outsize maintenance demands, it’s true. But they did stop me cold and rendered the Apple Watch useless in those moments, and they’re at least an order of magnitude more demanding than my analog watch—which, again, requires that I do nothing for it to work.
Of course, this kind of overhead is part and parcel of adopting new technology. I keep that in mind each time I look at an Apple Watch in the store, and also try to remember that wearables are the future and that, as a designer, it’s almost my duty to bear these mild burdens in the interest of furthering my own craft. Plus, I have to admit, Apple makes wonderful products, and I want to own them.
However, what really stops me from buying one, the hump that I just can’t get over, is that the Apple Watch is rectangular and not round. Without a question, that is the thing that I have the hardest time abiding.
It’s just my personal preference that a watch should be round. A rectangular watch implies a definitive top, bottom, left and right, and also that the wearer should obey that orientation when looking at it. But a circle is much more forgiving; it can be read clearly from nearly any angle and it looks “right” regardless of what position your wrist is in. There’s an unquantifiable, harmonious connection to the body in a circular watch face; it’s the shape that’s most complementary to being human.
To be clear, a circle is not nearly as utilitarian a shape when it comes to a digital display. This is Apple’s reasoning for why its smartwatch is rectangular, and it’s a plausible argument. Samsung’s recently announced Gear S2 (below) is a very convincing marriage of a traditional circular watch form and a smartwatch, but it remains to be seen whether it’s actually useful at all, much less whether it’s a better product than the Apple Watch.
This is the tension that vexes me about the Apple Watch, though—the trade-off between wearing something useful and wearing something that looks and feels good. Last year, before Apple announced its smartwatch, I wrote in this blog post about the challenges of creating an entirely different product that by definition would be more fashion accessory than gadget. I described how fashionable goods are designed from the outside in—first comes how they look, and then comes how they work—rather than the way tech products have always been designed: from the inside out.
When technology companies look at goods that are built from the outside in, they generally see irrationality and inefficiency, a broken market just waiting to be corrected and ‘disrupted.’ They believe that they can engineer so much value into these items that people will be swayed to buy goods built from the inside out, that the promise that drives hardware and software—‘adopt this and benefit from its utility’—will convince people to upend their sartorial habits.
Apple got a lot of this challenge right by putting far more care, craftsmanship and good aesthetic judgment into the Apple Watch than any other wearable before it and since. The fit and finish of the hardware is amazing, and the wide range of high quality bands and styles largely satisfies what I described as the problem of creating variablity at scale—giving consumers enough options so that they could feel that each watch was their own.
But for me the decision to make a rectangular watch was just the wrong one. Even though Apple did so many things right with its watch, it still falls into the same trap that so many tech companies have fallen into before: the Watch is concerned more with tech than fashion, even if, in balancing these two during the design process, the former only just barely edges out the latter. I’m not sure what the prospects are for modifying WatchOS to work within a circular face, but I suspect I still won’t be able to bring myself to buy an Apple Watch until that happens.
If you saw the Subtraction.com Design Tools Survey that I released several weeks ago, then you may have noticed the wonderful information and visual design produced by my friends at Hyperakt, an exceedingly smart and talented studio based in Brooklyn, NY. As I mentioned, I personally did zero percent of the design; I merely handed the survey results to the Hyperakt team and they had at it, turning out a terrifically lucid, visually engrossing presentation of the findings that makes the data so much more meaningful than it would have been otherwise.
Founded by Julia Zeltser and Deroy Peraza, Hyperakt prides itself on being more than “just” expert visual communicators; they also aim to make design a force for positive change. As it happens, the studio is hiring a new Senior UI and UX Designer—the first time they’re going outside of their own ranks to fill such a role. I took the opportunity to ask Zeltser about the position and about how the company distinguishes itself from other studios.
What’s unique about Hyperakt’s mission?
Hyperakt is built on the idea of creating meaningful design for the common good. We concentrate on helping change-makers tell their stories through compelling narratives and making complex information more accessible on and offline. We hope to attract people who share our belief that, through well-crafted design and communications, we can bring awareness to issues and help organizations to improve people’s lives.
Can you talk about an example of that kind of “meaningful design for the common good”?
Sure. We recently worked with BRIGHT, a brand new non-profit organization that trains and places leaders to head high-poverty schools across Ohio. They were looking to recruit aspiring school principals from education and nontraditional backgrounds—business, military, philanthropy, and nonprofits.
We developed an inspirational brand identity and extended it to an accessible web site focused on attracting new applicants. The outcome was that BRIGHT was able to fully secure their necessary funding, and they received 300% more highly qualified applicants than they originally expected. We like hearing from clients when they say, “We surpassed our own expectations!”
What part will the senior designer you’re hiring play in the company?
In the past, this role was filled with members who grew into the position as the company evolved. That meant that our senior UX/UI staff were interdisciplinary designers, trained in communication design, branding, print, and data visualizations.
Today, we’re looking for someone who is not only a seasoned design ninja but also a systems thinker, compassionate leader, inspiring mentor and a cheerleader for the team. This is a leadership role. The projects we work on are more robust and require more systems-oriented design and management. As the design team grows, we need better systems and structures while pushing the boundaries of design.
How closely will this person work with you and your co-founder, Deroy Peraza?
Deroy and I are actively involved with all projects at Hyperakt. We provide creative direction very much in collaboration with our team and ensure consistent, high-quality output. We’re more involved at the beginning of the project, and then step back to let our designers have a bit more freedom to create and take ownership over the work.
It sounds like you need someone who has already had lots of valuable working experience. How would you expect this person can grow at Hyperakt?
We ask the applicants for this position come to us with three to five years of experience creating digital experiences. He/she will be entering the agency at a senior position. They might not have been leading a team elsewhere, but they need to have the qualities of a natural born leader. After a few years, this role can evolve into a UX/UI director. But that maxes out the vertical growth at Hyperakt.
There are lots of other opportunities for personal growth that go beyond client projects though. Hyperakt Labs is our vehicle for self-initiated projects and it lets us expand the boundaries of design and push our UX/UI craft. Many of the Labs projects require learning new skills, far beyond design: various business models, topics, and technologies. The Design Tools Survey that we did with you, for instance, was a great opportunity for our team to really stretch ourselves creatively. And our On the Grid project, a neighborhood guide curated by designers around the world, is loads of fun. So we think there’s lots of room for individual ingenuity and collective creativity, whether it’s for client work or our Labs projects.
If you’re interested in this opportunity, read more at Authentic Jobs.
This is the latest in my occasional series spotlighting interesting job openings for designers. Also see my interviews with Carbon 3D, ESPN, The Coral Project, Digg and Toca Boca.
