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.
Photographer Thierry Cohen creates these fantastical images of urban cities made to look dark, combined with rich night skies borrowed from other, less light-polluted locations. The results suggest what New York City, say, would look like.
I’m actually a big fan of Courier, so I’m intrigued by this project from screenwriter John August, who regards the ubiquitous typeface as a key tool of his trade. August writes:
“In July 2012, I asked type designer Alan Dague-Greene to come up with a new typeface that matched the metrics of Courier — thus protecting line breaks and page counts — while addressing some of its weak spots… Alan rose to the challenge, creating a typeface that is unmistakably Courier, but subtly improved in ways you wouldn’t necessarily notice at first.”
Courier Prime is available now for free. Read more and download it at JohnAugust.com.
Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch died this morning at 88. It’s a sad moment because he was the first New York City mayor that I was aware of as a kid. The mayors who came before seem like names from a history book, whereas the name “Koch” will always sound contemporary for me.
“Koch presided over New York City from 1977 to 1989, almost exactly the years during which hip-hop went from a small scene of Bronx block parties to a global cultural phenomenon. During those years, the history of hip-hop is the history of Ed Koch’s New York: Until the last couple years of his reign, nearly every major hip-hop artist rose out of one of the five boroughs or Long Island.”
Definitely worth a read for children of the Eighties.
Research in Motion’s make-or-break Blackberry 10 is out today. It sports a completely new operating system, with a user interface designed by RIM-acquired The Astonishing Tribe. Ahead of the official announcement, there’s a cache of screen grabs over at BGR that reveal the UI to be remarkably… okay.
The Blackberry brand has never been synonymous with outstanding design, and RIM seems intent on at least acknowledging the new reality of highly designed smartphone interfaces — but it can manage little more than that, judging from these screens. None of what is on display here — the clean yet unremarkable typography, the tasteful but de rigueur color gradients, the straightforward but rudimentary iconography, the communicative but nearly featureless spinners, arrows and other visual cues — is particularly distinctive or unique to Blackberry. In fact, they demonstrate a startling lack of character, almost a willful desire to be mistaken for any other random operating system.
In a market this tight, where Apple and Google’s duopoly relegates players like RIM to merely vying for third place, this feels like a tremendous missed opportunity. Here was a chance for RIM to emphatically and visually declare how Blackberry 10 was clearly, dramatically different from its competition.
It’s true that, given time, what we see here, combined with what would need to be superb execution on the business side, could possibly become distinctive to RIM. But as Windows has shown, and as Palm notably showed, it’s entirely possible to establish a unique design language from the first.
Of course, that hasn’t done nearly as much as one would like to think for the former, and did almost nothing to save the latter. Design is not everything, I have to keep reminding myself.
Happy new year everyone! Let’s start things out Down Under, where friend and illustrator Oslo Davis, one of my favorite artists, has put together “Melbhattan,” a wonderful, animated valentine to his native city of Melbourne. The artwork is distinctively his own, but the short film is “part homage, part pastiche of the opening sequence of Woody Allen’s seminal 1979 film ‘Manhattan,’” complete with a Gershwin-esque soundtrack. Here are a few select stills.
Friends of mine run this business designing and producing beautiful glass objects for “the kitchen and table.” Their hand-blown decanters, cruets and carafes all feature an ingenious double-lip construction that recapture drips and run-off back into the main body of the bottle. Plus, they’re exquisitely crafted.
Through tomorrow, everything is 10% off with discount code “NORO10.” Browse their wares at Noroshop.com.
Photographer and director Larry Clark’s new film, “Marfa Girl,” is pushing the envelope on digital distribution. Not only will it not be screened in theaters, but it won’t even be available on Blu-Ray or DVD either. You can stream it from Clark’s Web site for US$5.99 — but only for twenty-four hours, starting about two hours ago. After that, it’s gone, or so Clark claims. I find it hard to believe that “Marfa Girl” won’t eventually show up on disc or become continually available for paid download or streaming at some point in the future, but as marketing gimmicks go, this one caught my attention, anyhow. Read more about it at Slashfilm.
This is the nicest and most attractive case I’ve owned for any of my digital devices. It’s made of selvedge denim and has a leather snap closure that’s surprisingly satisfying. I wish they made like it for MacBook Airs too, but they apparently only have a Southwest-style wool one, which I haven’t seen but could be nice too.
This attractive storage compartment for both the Apple TV and its accompanying remote control is made of solid wood and aims to remedy a very common drawback of digital hardware: it often weighs so little that it’s hard to keep in place. I find that this is true of lots of network hardware: my cable modem, for instance, is so physically sleight that it gets nudged out of place by the inflexibility of its own coaxial cable. The weight of the bloc, along with the grips attached to its bottom, are intended to prevent that kind of slipping.
Blocs come in cherry, hard maple and walnut. You can buy yours at Blocs.tv.
Age aside, what’s really remarkable is the lifespan consistency of major recording formats: “ If you look at the last 110-115 years, the major formats all have about 20 to 30 years of primacy.” Read more at NPR.
