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.
I went to see “Mission: Impossible–Rogue Nation” over the weekend. It’s the fifth installment in a franchise that’s nearly twenty years old and yet I was shocked by how improbably good it is; it may be the best one of the lot.
This video by Sean Witzke for Grantland (part of their recent Tom Cruise Week) makes a case that at least part of this series’ surprising longevity is owed to its unique conception as a kind of auteurist playground. Over five installments, these movies have been helmed by five different directors, each of whom brought his own distinctive vision to bear, and largely to good effect. Few characters and even fewer plotlines persist from sequel to sequel, and so much emphasis is given to each director’s own stylistic voice that the five films barely seem connected to one another.
What unites them all is Cruise himself—not just his centrality as the principal character, but also his sensibilities as producer. Though few would call him an auteur, Cruise has created a unique franchise in which his charismatic center of gravity allows the fictional world around him to be continually re-imagined by others who are more commonly acknowledged as film visionaries. In an age when studios are desperate to create “universes” of shared actions and consequences, the “Mission: Impossible” films stand out for being episodic in the loosest sense—more like an anthology than the bombastically scaled serials currently in favor.
It’s also notable how the series’ gender politics have evolved in unexpected and strange ways. On the one hand, the only characters who make it from sequel to sequel are men; each new movie discards the female characters from the previous one entirely.
In and of itself that’s disappointing but not unprecedented; the James Bond series takes almost exactly the same tack. But in 007’s world, that’s largely done so that Bond can move on to new and different romantic interests. By contrast, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt may have started with some nominal Lothario-like qualities at the beginning of the series, but as the franchise wore on, the scripts became less and less interested in not just romance, but the notion of Cruise as a sexual being.
After trying to marry off Hunt in the third installment and then quickly discarding that conceit altogether, Cruise’s character now seems not at all capable of any meaningful human intimacy. He barely acknowledges the sexuality of his female co-star in the fourth installment, and while his character makes a significant emotional connection with (the amazing) Rebecca Ferguson in “Rogue Nation,” its culmination is no more intense than a hug. Seriously; a hug. Not only that but—spoiler alert—the plot conspires such that Ferguson does most of the rescuing in the film, rather than vice versa.
There’s a lot that you can read into the subtext there, especially if you factor in the many rumors about Cruise’s personal life into the on-screen content. But what’s interesting to me is how the “Mission: Impossible” series has unexpectedly turned into the very best kind of genre film. On it surface, it has a formulaic approach to good guys, bad guys, girls with guns, and MacGuffins, but as you look deeper, you see not only real auteurs at work but lots of interesting ideas, both intentional and unintentional.
This Stereogum article looks at the less well publicized drawbacks of the putative resurgence in vinyl sales of the past several years. In short, with few factories able to actually produce vinyl, the limited production capacity can make it very difficult to actually ship discs. This is not much of a problem for larger labels that sell the format (The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” is a best-seller on LP) than it is for the folks for whom vinyl should really be a benefit: small, independent labels, for whom production times can run as long as six months, dangerously tying up their already constrained capital.
I’ve long been skeptical of vinyl’s second act. In spite of the surprising growth in sales figures for the format over the past few years, it has rarely had the feeling of an authentic revival—more like the feeling of a bubble among people who are desperate to buy authenticity, artificially inflated by those who profit from selling it. Stereogum quote’s indie musician Kip Berman’s incisive comments on that specific quality:
The vinyl revival is brought to you by the same industry that wanted everyone to buy their record collections AGAIN on CD/tape.
That seems about right to me. You know what also sounds about right? The fact that vinyl doesn’t sound better than digital music.
In 1990, designer Susan Kare, who created the original fonts, icons and graphics for the Macintosh, designed the artwork for Microsoft’s version of Solitaire that shipped with millions of copies of Windows 3.0. Now Areaware, purveyors of hipster tchotchkes, have produced, in collaboration with Kare, a real playing card deck modeled after her Solitaire designs. The printed fronts and backs of the cards feature pixelated card designs and the corners even feature “chunky” die-cutting.
Carbon3D’s premise is the question “What if 3D printing was 100X faster?” Just two years old, the company has already raised over US$50 million in funding towards its goal of modernizing on-demand manufacturing through “transformational advances in 3D hardware, software, and resins.” Their belief is that what we call 3D printing today is actually a misnomer for what is in actuality “2D printing, over and over again”—inkjet printing, basically.
This TED talk from Carbon3D CEO Joseph M. DeSimone, a chemist and material scientist, shows this concept in action, live on stage. DeSimone talks about how his team was inspired by the T-1000 from “Terminator 2” to essentially “grow” printed objects from a puddle of source material. It’s quite amazing to see how he’s able to fabricate an object that is impossible to print with current 3D printing technology, and even impossible to create with traditional injection-molded processes, in less time than it takes for him to finish his ten-minute speech.
Design is a central part of the company’s plan to get fulfill this mission, and Carbon3D is hiring its first designer now. I talked to Carbon3D’s Nathalie Pretzer about the opportunity.
What makes this job unique?
We’re ramping up our organization to introduce our first product to market later this year, and the scope for design is huge! As the first hire on our design team, the right candidate will be spearheading all of our design efforts from product interfaces, to marketing materials, and interior design. We are looking for a UI designer to be a key stakeholder in the definition of the overall customer experience—how they use our products inside and outside the software—leveraging his/her ability to translate ideas about experience into meaningful UI concepts.
What special skills or unusual experience are you looking for in a candidate?
You should be driven by a high level of craft in visual design—you may have 3D modeling and motion design chops—along with the ability to create interaction models. I wouldn’t describe this as unusual but it’s certainly hard to find. You’ll get to stretch your design skills as you assist with video, photography, environmental design and ecommerce.
What’s the role of design at the company now?
You’d be the first hire on our design team. Design is integral to how we think about marketing and product. There is still plenty of room to define and represent design practices in our process.
The right candidate will play a major role in demonstrating the power of design to impact experience. He or she will work very closely with the software engineering team and head of marketing. We are a highly cross-functional group—you’ll get the chance to work with our hardware, software, materials science, marketing, sales and print studio teams.
What’s the first big challenge?
Launch our product! The designer will partner with the head of marketing and the engineering team to build world class web-based and printer-based interfaces while providing design guidance/feedback to agencies across marketing projects.
If you’re interested in this opportunity, read more at Authentic Jobs.
This is the fifth in my occasional series spotlighting interesting job openings for designers. See also my interviews with ESPN, The Coral Project, Digg and Toca Boca.
I’m very happy to announce that Kidpost, the service some friends and I are building to make it easier for parents to share their kid photos with tech-challenged friends and family, is rolling out a major upgrade today. This new version sports a sleeker, cleaner design, but more importantly, it lets you send your first Kidpost in just a minute or two. Give it a try now at kidpost.net.
Before this, Kidpost worked solely via hashtags. Parents would post photos of their kids to Instagram, Facebook, Flickr and/or Twitter with the hashtag #kidpost (or a user-defined custom hashtag) and the service would automatically send those photos out to their friends and family. It worked great as a very lightweight, easy method of making sure what parents post to social media also makes it into the email inboxes of their loved ones.
In fact, we’re not changing how that works at all (it’s still our favorite way to send Kidposts). What we’re adding is the ability to also send Kidposts without hashtags, which is faster and more immediate—especially for new users. With this update, once you create a Kidpost account we immediately show you thumbnails of your recently posted photos. That looks like this:
All you have to do is select the ones that you want to send out, and Kidpost does the rest. Of course, as always, you get to decide who gets these emails—no one sees them unless they’re on your list of friends and family, and you can add and remove people at any time.
Kidpost has been a labor of love for us, and we’re so grateful to the many folks who have been using it as we’ve been evolving it over the past year and a half. We’re also incredibly gratified by the many, many times we’ve heard our users tell us, “My family loves Kidpost! They can’t get enough!” If you have kids and you’ve got tech-challenged friends and family, or just folks whom you know would love to get the kid pictures you share on Instagram, etc., please give it a try—and tell a friend!
This 2014 typeface designed by Wei Huang is a contemporary grotesque that comes in ten screen-optimized weights, ranging from Hairline all the way through Black. It looks fairly versatile even if it currently lacks italic styles. Work Sans is released under the SIL Open Font License which basically means it’s free for personal and professional use. Even better, Work Sans is now hosted by Google Fonts—Jeremiah Shoaf of Typewolf says, “Prepare to see it everywhere.”
Oregon’s George Fox University IT department took three dozen iMac boxes and turned them into a human-sized wheel, then made this charming video demonstrating it in action. Silly but fun.
A quiet week or so in design tools news, but still plenty to note, including the beta of a new UI design app for iPad. See, that’s how far this market has come—we’re so spoiled by new contenders in this space that we find it unremarkable that “only one” new app was announced!
ProtoSketch is a new vector graphics application for iPad (an OS X version is also in the works). It classifies itself among full-fledged drawing apps like Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw, claims to be suitable for web and app design, icon design, print design and vector illustrations, but specializes in user interface and user experience design. You can see a working prototype in action in the video below. If the team can pull this off on an iPad, I’ll be very impressed; creativity software on tablets and phones is of particular interest to me. The app is currently in private beta; I haven’t been able to get my hands on it yet. protosketch.co.
Amber Bravo of Google Design moderated a fascinating roundtable with Matias Duarte, Paul Colton (Pixate) and Max Wiesel (Relative Wave, makers of Form) on “How a new generation of prototyping tools at Google will help designers build better software.” Bravo has also posted this appendix of sorts to the conversation. The big takeaway here is that Google is gearing up to make a splash in the design tools space.
Prototyp is a browser-based app that lets you create interactive prototypes quickly. It’s built on Framer.js, so knowledge of JavaScript or CoffeeScript is required. prototyp.in.
This weekend at the Joseph Gross Gallery in New York City: the sixth in an apparently annual series of art exhibitions in tribute to director Wes Anderson. The show’s subtitle is “Bad Dads”:
Comprised of original painting and sculpture as well as a multitude of limited edition prints, ‘Bad Dads VI’ is a wide-ranging display of artistry from all over the world. Exhibiting a host of different styles and talents, each artist approaches their work with the same meticulous detail that Anderson approaches his. Drawing upon the stylized world that Anderson has set forth, each artist was free to choose their own film for subject matter, resulting in a spectacular range of character portraits, highly detailed environments and iconic themes and motifs, prominent in each of Anderson’s films.
Three years ago, before his most recent film, I wrote about Anderson’s previous release, “Moonrise Kingdom” in this blog post. In it, I lamented how paper thin its characters were, and I worried that Anderson had lost his way:
[‘Moonrise Kingdom’ is] ninety-four minutes of starvation if you’re hungry for any kind of substantial character development. The protagonists (and by the end, nearly everyone is a protagonist, undermining any real dramatic tension the plot had going for it) are little more than inventories of their scripted eccentricities…
This is perhaps how we should think of Anderson’s films from here on out: technical marvels engineered to show off endless quirk. That’s a legitimate credential; it’s just not the one I would have hoped for right after I saw [his breakthrough film] ‘Rushmore.’
I still can’t be bothered with “Moonrise Kingdom,” but I was pleasantly surprised by Anderson’s return to form with last year’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Where the former seemed to lack for even one fully rendered character, the latter is full of an almost electric comedic energy courtesy of the amazing Ralph Fiennes’s warm portrayal of M. Gustave, a creation worthy of “Rushmore”’s Max Fischer. “Grand Budapest” is as wonderful, thoughtful and rewarding film as “Moonrise” (and before it, “The Darjeeling Limited”) were not. I’ve watched it twice and I look forward to watching it again.
This infographic from The British Film Institute is a handy, thorough overview of the basic tenets of film noir, a style of post-War American filmmaking that is referred to often but frequently misunderstood. I’m linking to it (after the jump) because, well, I love film noir, but also because it’s such an influential concept that shows up repeatedly in the movies and television and media that we watch, and understanding its fundamentals helps us appreciate the vocabulary that the style uses to signal its intentions.
The graphic is also a really good introduction, for those who aren’t familiar with the genre, to a host of the very best movies ever made; at the bottom there’s a section that charts the “most noir” of all the movies that can be classified as film noir. The winner is, unsurprisingly, director Billy Wilder’s 1944 movie “Double Indemnity.” That masterpiece is a must watch if you haven’t seen it already; if you have and you enjoyed it, there’s a score of similar richly rewarding works in the film noir canon that awaits you.
