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.
Hey, it’s time for the Friday Free-for-All round-up again! Just kidding, this is the first one ever. A round-up blog post isn’t something I usually do, but what the heck, right? These are a few things I’ve been keeping in Mori that I’ll never be able to turn into full-fledged weblog entries before they go stale.
Plain Is the New Black
There’s a new air of simplicity in the air in the design of blogs, the best, most elegant example being Gilbert Lee’s new, gorgeous Plainsimple.org. It’s a fantastic piece of work that I’ve spent a lot of time poring over.
The Beauty of Heaps
The new ShaunInman.com isn’t quite as aggressively minimalist, but it does something really wonderful that makes so much sense for a single person’s blog: throw everything together (in tumble log fashion) and imbue that heap with organic, rather than architected, meaning. Brilliant.
Intelligencer Design
Speaking of blogs, New York Magazine’s not-so-new-by-now blog, The Daily Intelligencer is nothing to sneeze at. Building blog brands inside parent brands isn’t easy — believe me, I know — but they’ve done a very nice job of it. Note the ingeniously informative Previous and Next buttons on the article level. They’re doing a lot of things right, over there.
Let’s Make a DealBook
Over at NYTimes.com, we launched a new version of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook blog. The original version was one of the first projects I tackled with the design team here — that was way, way, way back this spring — and now we’ve cleaned up a lot of the shortcomings that crept their way in as a result of how green a design director I was at the time. Check out the smooth scrolling transitions on the “More sections” pull-downs.
Drawing Is Sexy
The American Illustration 25 party will happen this coming Thu 09 Nov on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I started out my career as a wannabe illustrator but never made it. Recently, after spending a more time on the Illustrator scene here in New York, I’ve been surprised — shocked, really — to find out how freakin’ sexy this industry is. The illustration parties I’ve been to lately have been chock-full of hipsters right out of Paper Magazine. It’s insane. So if you’re planning on attending this Thursday, look sharp.
A New Friday Tradition?
Actually, that was really fun and relatively easy, especially for a Friday. Given how exhausted I am by the end of the week, I’ve always had a hard time to knocking out weblog posts, which often means at least a three-day radio silence (at least) before I post again on Monday. So maybe I’ll turn this Friday Free-for-All into a regular feature. If you haven’t left for the weekend already, let me know what you think.
I’ve been thinking about doing something like this, too. Lots of bloggers do a “link round up” style post, where they collect recent favorite links into a normal post instead of feeding them all into the “links” content type of their blog system, or loading them into their social bookmarking system of choice. This is kottke’s most common mode of operation, actually. I wonder, though, if there isn’t some other new content type that needs to be invented to achieve this.
I’ve been thinking about doing something like this, too. Lots of bloggers do a “link round up” style post, where they collect recent favorite links into a normal post instead of feeding them all into the “links” content type of their blog system, or loading them into their social bookmarking system of choice. This is kottke’s most common mode of operation, actually. I wonder, though, if there isn’t some other new content type that needs to be invented to achieve this.
Another +1, and as Mr Fahey mentions (and some other sites do, at least visually) presenting them as a distinct type of “element” other than a post would be ideal. At least in terms of keeping ducks in a row; until then dumping them in a regular post does the trick. You could abuse the title and come up with a shared prefix/acronym whatever for all “link dump” posts perhaps…
Yes please, but just once a week. No one wants to read 14 blogs selling round-ups of the all the same links on a daily basis. Your review of Inman’s heap got me to subscribe to him. I’d seen his piles before but the ‘organic’ quality of them had never jived with me.
So I guess it works…
Hey, it’s time for the Friday Free-for-All round-up again! Just kidding, this is the first one ever. A round-up blog post isn’t something I usually do, but what the heck, right? These are a few things I’ve been keeping in
I’ve been thinking about doing something like this, too. Lots of bloggers do a “link round up” style post, where they collect recent favorite links into a normal post instead of feeding them all into the “links” content type of their blog system, or loading them into their social bookmarking system of choice. This is kottke’s most common mode of operation, actually. I wonder, though, if there isn’t some other new content type that needs to be invented to achieve this.
I’ve been thinking about doing something like this, too. Lots of bloggers do a “link round up” style post, where they collect recent favorite links into a normal post instead of feeding them all into the “links” content type of their blog system, or loading them into their social bookmarking system of choice. This is kottke’s most common mode of operation, actually. I wonder, though, if there isn’t some other new content type that needs to be invented to achieve this.
I definitely like this, Khoi. Do it! 🙂
Another +1, and as Mr Fahey mentions (and some other sites do, at least visually) presenting them as a distinct type of “element” other than a post would be ideal. At least in terms of keeping ducks in a row; until then dumping them in a regular post does the trick. You could abuse the title and come up with a shared prefix/acronym whatever for all “link dump” posts perhaps…
Yes please, but just once a week. No one wants to read 14 blogs selling round-ups of the all the same links on a daily basis. Your review of Inman’s heap got me to subscribe to him. I’d seen his piles before but the ‘organic’ quality of them had never jived with me.
So I guess it works…
Yes please, but just once a week.
This is as good idea, please continue with it. Everything you linked to (except Inman’s site) was new to me.
Thank you!