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.
Norwegian artist Ashkan Honarvar produced this visually arresting series of works that mashes up vintage floral drawings with the violent forms of Marvel Comics characters, abstractedly recomposed so that they’re simply thrusts of graphic energy. The two visual styles are unexpectedly complementary; both are elaborately detailed with ink, and the super-hero imagery is taken from older comic books and have an almost quaint, retro quality that’s embellished by the floral renderings. Occasionally, a stray word balloon will find its way in there, like non sequitur garnishing. Terrific stuff.
More from this series at behance.net. Honarvar is a prolific collage artist and has many more examples of his stellar work at ashkanhonarvar.com
…an unprecedented visual exploration of what is really inside our food, setting the record straight on the controversial and fascinating science of chemical and synthetic additives in processed food—from Twinkies and McNuggets to organic protein bars and healthy shakes.
Eschliman effectively deconstructs familiar foods, both those that unabashedly fall into the “junk” column as well as those that purport to be healthy, and photographs their constituent ingredients in an exquisitely clean, elegant style. In fact, these are some of the loveliest shots of chemical products you’ll ever see; the sample page spreads look like a cross between a chemistry text book and a J. Crew catalog.
I’ve been kind of neutral on all of the hubbub around Apple’s new ad blocking technology in iOS 9. But then just this morning I tried to read this New York Times article on my iPad—not just any article, but one that’s specifically about reactions to Apple’s introduction of ad blocking in iOS 9.
In maybe the sweetest bit of irony that ad blocking advocates could ever hope for, the article itself, as it was served to me, was so beset by a crippling ad position across the top of the page that I could not scroll it. You’ll see in the video above that as I try to move down the page, the Salesforce banner consistently and infuriatingly forces it back to the top, over and over again. At about twenty seconds in I try to minimize the ad, hoping that would help. Nope.
This advertisement literally makes it impossible for me to read about blocking advertisements. Perfect.
You can read an extensive review of iOS 9 over at Ars Technica that gives you tremendous insight into every nook and cranny of the operating system. Or you can read a single, half-baked comment about iOS 9 that I wrote right here. Is it really a choice? Here goes.
I wasn’t particularly excited about Apple’s decision to displace Helvetica Neue with San Francisco, the company’s new bespoke typeface, in this latest version of the operating system. When I installed the beta for iOS 9, seeing it everywhere felt somehow wrong, like I was holding an Android device instead. It’s no secret that I’m a deeply committed Helvetica partisan, so it was painful, in fact, to see it replaced.
But over the past weeks I’ve grown accustomed to San Francisco’s slightly more uniform characters and mildly boxier curves. The strangeness has dissipated—the new fonts seem now totally fine to me. I’m still not convinced that it’s a better solution than Helvetica Neue, but San Francisco pulls off a neat trick of being both more utilitarian and more casual at once. And I’ve started to feel an affection for it that I’ve never felt for Google’s Roboto fonts, which I regard to be its closest counterparts. Both type families are very good answers to the problem of maximizing legibility and brand distinctiveness on mobile platforms; for me, San Francisco is the more successful of the two.
There’s one small detail that irritates me, though. Well, a few small details: the character designs for San Francisco’s opening and closing quotes are barely distinguishable from one another. The opening forms are heavier at the bottom and the closing forms are heavier at the top, but the difference is hard to detect, and both are essentially the same slanted lines. Of course, having such similar shapes for these glyphs can be a valid aesthetic choice for certain typefaces intended for certain kinds of usages. It just seems odd to me that San Francisco, which was custom designed for maximum legibility on digital devices, made this particular choice.
Comparing its quotes alongside Helvetica Neue’s quotes, I can’t help but feel that this was a misfire. Aesthetically, San Francisco’s quotes do look sharper, it’s true, but they feel colder and less thoughtful to me. Helvetica Neue’s quotes, I think it’s safe to say, are far more legible and for me much more elegant.
Of course, most things look better in Helvetica Neue to me anyway, so take that for what it’s worth.
Illustrator Scott Park pays tribute to the delightfully insane vehicle designs from this past summer’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Look, just see this movie if you haven’t already, okay? Currently available via iTunes and at your local Red Box or whatever. No excuses!
The poster is available for purchase at society6.com.
Last Thursday, after Apple’s announcement of the new iPad Pro and the subsequent on stage demos from Microsoft and Adobe, technologist Ben Thompson wrote this post about the challenges in sustaining the iPad as a platform. He makes the salient point that making iPad a more robust development environment, which is essentially what I have been arguing for, is not in and of itself enough:
…Cook’s conclusion that Apple could best improve the iPad by making a new product isn’t quite right: Apple could best improve the iPad by making it a better platform for developers. Specifically, being a great platform for developers is about more than having a well-developed SDK, or an App Store: what is most important is ensuring that said developers have access to sustainable business models that justify building the sort of complicated apps that transform the iPad’s glass into something indispensable.
Thompson also gives a mildly backhanded compliment to Adobe later on in the same article:
Over the last several years both Microsoft and Adobe have altered their business models away from packaged software towards subscription pricing; while their users may have grumbled, they also had no choice given their dependence on the two software giants’ products. And, it’s that new model that justifies the expense of developing iPad apps and explains why it is Apple’s old nemeses who are doing by far the most interesting work on the iPad.
There are at least a few things in that passage that I would describe as “not entirely true,” but there is some truth, at least, to all of them. More importantly, it’s absolutely right that Adobe is doing some truly substantive development for the iPad right now. What I’ve seen in my first few weeks since joining the company confirms this.
When I bought my iPhone 6 Plus last fall, lots of friends and acquaintances wanted to know what I thought of its absurd girth and did I regret my purchase? I intended to write up a critical appraisal, but time is not kind to procrastinated product reviews and much of what I would have written was eventually said better by other writers: it’s a really big phone but not so big you don’t get used to it quickly; its screen is a gorgeous luxury that makes using other phone sizes feel like peering through peepholes; its landscape modes are a nice bonus that don’t seem critical until you try to rotate other phones and realize they’re not available; its battery life is reasonable but far from spectacular; it’s far easier to carry around with you in the winter when you have more pockets than in summer when you have fewer; etc. Nothing particularly insightful.
And now a new set of iPhone models are already available for purchase, which you would think further obviates any review I might write of the 6 Plus. That’s true except for one thing; it’s the single most important thing I learned about the the phone in my ten months of owning it, and in my mind the most important thing to consider when evaluating its direct successor: the iPhone 6 Plus has just 1 gigabyte of memory, and 1 gigabyte of memory is just not enough.
Being old, I recall a time when that much memory seemed like a lot—especially for a device you carry around in your pocket! But in practice, it’s not nearly enough for the 6 Plus (and maybe not for the 6, either; I have no firsthand experience). Apps are constantly getting dropped from memory as I switch between them. If I load a page in Safari, jump to Maps to plot a trip, then turn back, the whole page needs to reload. If I’m reading a book in iBooks, switch to Messages to reply to a friend who has a question, switch to Mail to check on the answer, then return to iBooks to pick up where I left off reading, I’ll have to wait for the iBooks library view to reload and then launch the book all over again. And so on and so on. It makes for many irritating, unpleasant experiences, especially if I’m in a rush and need a series of quick answers from the contents of my phone.
Mercifully, Apple has apparently decided to double the RAM in the iPhone 6s Plus, as detailed in this article at Ars Technica. If you want one of these two oversized phones, I would strongly encourage that you buy the 6s Plus for its RAM alone. As it happens, two gigabytes is what’s available in my iPad Air 2 and I rarely see unwelcome app refreshing on that device, so hopefully this will remedy the situation on the new phone too.
Still, it’s my opinion that the 6 Plus should never have shipped with just 1 gigabyte. What’s more, the whole thing makes me more skeptical than ever of Apple’s decision not publicize their mobile devices’ memory specifications. The implication is that users shouldn’t have to worry about counting RAM anymore, and while that may be closer to being true than it ever was before, it’s still not quite realistic. The amount of RAM that Apple shipped with the iPhone 6 Plus last year was just enough memory to get by in 2015; what they should have shipped was twice that. The same may prove true of the 6s Plus; as apps get more and more ambitious, it may turn out that 2 gigabytes of RAM will barely cover what we’ll need for the mobile computing we’ll do next year. Whatever the case, in order to really get away with deprecating this particular specification, Apple should be shipping more than enough, rather than just enough.
Spotify’s Found Them First is a clever, web-based tool that mines your streaming music play history to show you the artists that you “discovered” before they hit it big. It’s a terrific idea showcased beautifully with an impressive, slightly over-the-top video background that does its best to make up for the fact that Found Them First is not quite deserving of having its own site.
To be clear, I’m of the mind that this is the kind of functionality that Spotify and similar services need more of. As I argued almost two years ago in this essay, if streaming music is becoming a commodity (it is) then robust metadata is the best way for services like Spotify to distinguish themselves. A few weeks ago I wrote about the company’s excellent Discover Weekly feature, which automatically generates an uncannily well-tailored playlist for each user once a week, based on patterns that the company’s Echo Nest technology derives from analyzing listening habits.
Found Them First is another worthy contribution to this genre of tailoring music libraries specifically for individual users, but it should be built right into the main Spotify app. It’s a shame to strand it on a web site, no matter how beautifully designed, as most users are unlikely to ever visit it more than once.
Moreover, once integrated, Found Them First should notify me whenever an artist I’ve listened to has crossed various thresholds of fans following them and plays counted. What would be even better would be to show me which artists I discovered before my friends did, because relatively few people will ever discover artists before they get popular. You could extrapolate from there a whole raft of similar ideas that would make the listening experience at Spotify a lot richer: artists that my friends discovered before me who have not yet hit critical mass; friends who discovered the same artists as me at roughly the same time; artists that the artists I follow discovered on Spotify, etc. There’s a world of interesting data that could be unearthed here; the potential is only limited by our ability to turn data into meaningful insight for humans. While I’m encouraged by Found Them First and Discover Weekly, I’m eager to see Spotify—or Apple Music, or Rdio, or whomever—really take the plunge and create the next major evolution of the way we listen to music.
Way back in early June I put together a survey on Typeform all about design tools. The questions asked about the preferred software that designers are using today for tasks like brainstorming, wireframing, user interface design, prototyping and more.
The survey was open to the public for nine days, and in all I got just over 4,000 people from all over the world to take it—a pretty wonderful response, especially since I had started the whole thing as a bit of a lark.
In fact, my original plan was to share the survey results as a simple blog post. But as I began to see the volume of responses, and the intense interest in the results from many people, I realized that I could do something a bit more elaborate and illuminating with the data I was collecting.
So I called my friends at Hyperakt, a design studio in Brooklyn, NY who have done lots of projects in which they extract interesting stories from raw data. I asked them if they would like to take a crack at doing the same for this survey; that is, would they distill the data into actual findings, and also, while they’re at it, take artistic license to design a beautiful presentation out of the results?
The result is what you see today at tools.subtraction.com, where you can you explore each of the categories that the survey asked about through Hyperakt’s wonderfully produced information graphics. I could’t be happier with the outcome; even though the survey is very unscientific, I think it offers a very revealing look at what’s happening in this quickly changing, highly volatile, golden age for design software.
My many, many thanks to the Hyperakt team including Deroy Peraza, Jason Lynch, Eric Wang, Radhika Unnikrishnan and Wen Ping Huang, all of whom put so much exquisite effort into every tiny detail of these findings. Also tremendous thanks to Typeform and its co-founder David Okuniev; their brilliantly elegant survey software was essential in making all of this happen.
Finally, if you find these results interesting please sign up at the site to be notified about next year’s survey as well. Yes, I plan on making this an annual event if for no other reason than, based on what we’ve seen in the design tools market recently, the best is still ahead of us.
Update: Here are some links to coverage of the survey findings:
The headline items from the iPad segment of today’s Apple Special Event were hardware: the company announced a new, integrated keyboard, the first ever Apple-sanctioned stylus, and of course the long-rumored, ginormous iPad Pro. Alongside the impending iPad-specific software improvements coming in iOS 9, we now have what basically constitutes Apple’s response to the downward trajectory of iPad sales.
Will it be enough? I certainly hope so, but what’s also interesting is the extent to which Apple is leaning on its developer community to help sort out the iPad’s near term future via software innovation. Both Microsoft and Adobe made central appearances during this morning’s iPad segment. A few people have remarked how old school it seems to have two icons of the old wave of computing trying to map out the future of what Tim Cook described on stage today as Apple’s “clearest expression of our vision of personal computing.”
Microsoft spent its time showing off how well its mobile version of Office works with the new hardware, which seemed fine to me. Of course, as of three weeks ago, I’m now naturally biased towards Adobe’s contribution to the event. The company is doing some really significant work in bringing viable creativity solutions to mobile devices, and that was on display in a vivid way today when my colleague Eric Snowden, who leads design for Adobe’s mobile apps, took the stage.
Eric demonstrated a key piece of technology that has been cooking at Adobe for some time: round-trip capability for the company’s burgeoning suite of mobile software—we call it “360º workflows.” In his demo, Eric used Adobe Comp CC, the layout app that I created with Adobe (before I joined the company), to quickly mock up a layout with text and images. Comp CC is a useful hub of sorts in these workflows because it deals in assets of many different kinds. With a few taps, he placed a photo into Comp CC, then “sent” that photo to the newly announced Photoshop Fix app, made some edits, and then had those changes instantly reflected back in the original layout. It’s now significantly easier than ever before to work with assets that need to be handled by multiple mobile apps.
What’s even more interesting is that Apple is allowing Adobe to create its own foundation for this inter-operability; though it takes advantage of iOS 9’s split screen features, the round-tripping itself is based on an infrastructure that is deeply integrated with Adobe’s Creative Cloud ecosystem. Right now this feature is available primarily to Adobe’s first-party apps, but the hope is that soon many more developers will be working with Adobe’s Creative SDK and thereby benefiting from these innovations.
All told, we now have iPad-specific features in the operating system, new iPad-only hardware peripherals, a new, significantly larger iPad and, with Adobe’s software, a very adroit integration of all of the above into a robust workflow. For my money, it all makes for a pretty compelling argument for the iPad as a work device. It may not convince everyone just yet that an iPad Pro can satisfactorily replace a MacBook—that’s still a steep hill that will require lots more work to surmount—but the potential is there, and clearly within reach.
