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.
My iPod has instilled in me a disturbing insatiability for more music, more often. Where once I was satisfied with a new CD or two each month, I now find myself on an endless trawl for MP3s to add to my hard disk. It’s a sickness; I have more music now than I could possibly have time to enjoy — my iTunes library alone is 8.5 GB, and I have stacks of Squat CDs that haven’t been ripped yet, plus all my old CDs from my pre-MP3 days — and yet it never seems enough.
On the other hand, I’m enjoying music more than I have in a long time, probably. I went through a period when I just couldn’t bear the character of most of the music that I heard, but I think I’ve come back around. Or, at the least, I’ve been lucky enough to come across a few oldies and some decent new stuff that I’ve found engaging enough to listen to more than a few times.
Heavy Rotation
My latest acquisition is Beyoncé’s “Dangerously in Love,“ which is calculated and commercial but also proof positive that this woman is going to become one of the biggest stars of this decade. Neither this solo début nor her previous Destiny’s Child albums are 100% solid, but there are more moments of shockingly confident song-writing and vocal performances than one has a right to expect from someone barely in her twenties.
Julie Gerstein’s Squat CD is one of the better mixes I received this round, and it turned me on to The Postal Service. It’s one of those dream combinations of electronic beats and indie vocals that, well, indie kids tend to fantasize about and electronica fans aren’t much impressed by, and in that respect it’s vaguely untrustworthy. It also happens to be fairly irresistible.
A friend sent me a copy of The Raveonettes’ “Whip It On,” which is actually quite good, in a Jesus & Mary Chain/Spacemen 3 kind of way. I think they’re a lot of fun, though they make me wonder if I’ve reached the age where the music I really want to listen to isn’t just the music that I heard in high school and college — a condition to which I’ve seen too many past-their-prime hipsters succumb.
Speaking of unbecoming nostalgic tendencies: for no specific reason that I can cite, in the last twenty-four hours I’ve become preoccupied with Joy Division and old New Order (no pun intended). I’ve been playing “Unknown Pleasures” over and over again on my stereo and last night I ripped it and copied it to my iPod. I’m also absolutely obsessed with the song “Hurt”; I can’t get enough of its abrasive, primitive-techno churning.
My iPod has instilled in me a disturbing insatiability for more music, more often. Where once I was satisfied with a new CD or two each month, I now find myself on an endless trawl for MP3s to add to my hard disk. It’s a sickness; I have more music now than I could possibly have time to enjoy — my iTunes library alone is 8.5 GB, and I have stacks of 
