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.
Yesterday we officially launched a brand new version of AIGANY.org which was beautifully and smartly designed by the dynamic duo of Greg D’Onofrio and Patricia Belen over at Kind Company. They’re a small but extremely talented shop in Brooklyn that’s doing some stellar work, including a terrific and invaluable resource commemorating the work of Alvin Lustig.
AIGANY.org is the official site for the New York chapter, not to be confused with AIGA.org which was famously and wonderfully redesigned earlier this year by Happy Cog for the national organization. Naturally, our site is focused on all the design-related events that the chapter puts on in New York City during the fall, winter and spring of each year. All modesty aside, it’s really a hell of a lot of stuff; you’d have to TiVo the majority of a television season just to attend half of these events each year.
So to help keep everyone apprised of what’s going on, this redesign features a new blog called, somewhat cheekily, DESIGNY (RSS feed). Get it? DESIGNY, design-y and design-New York? Corny puns aside, we’ve staffed this blog with a hand-selected coterie of up-and-coming design tastemakers: Randy J. Hunt, Louise Ma and Michael Brenner. Between them, they’ll be covering all of the events we put on, and more.
Like everything that a non-profit organization does for the first time, DESIGNY is a work in progress, so we’ll be fine-tuning it over the coming months. I should say that the blog and the site have also all been done with very little or absolutely no money… contrary to AIGA’s image as the premier trade organization for design, we have very little cash to spend even on something as important and high profile as our Web site. I say that to encourage folks to keep this ascetic reality in mind when providing feedback on what we’ve done on the site — constructive criticism, good or bad, is always welcome, but please remember that a hell of a lot of financially unrewarded volunteer hours went into getting us this far. I also say that to point out that these folks — Kind Company, Randy, Louise, Michael and our tireless Web maestro, Thomas Hines — deserve a special commendation for stepping up in service to the design community. They did awesome, as far as I’m concerned.
Geof: that’s a fair question. I definitely had a hand in this project, but I didn’t do much if any art direction. The extent of my involvement was primarily in the aren of writing the request for proposal that we sent to several design studios (and Kind Company returned the best response). So in the sense that I helped choose a company with whose design sensibility I felt comfortable, I think it’s fair to say the Subtraction.com-ness factored in at least subtly.
But the majority of the aesthetic was Kind Company’s own, based in large part of the new brand identity that the chapter rolled out last year. That identity was developed by fellow board members Mike Essl, Emma Presler, Alan Dye, our chapter President Carin Goldberg and others… I definitely did not have a hand in that.
All of which is to say that the credit goes to others for both the brand and the Web site. In these, I was just a cheerleader from the sidelines.
AIGA has been good to me for as long as I’ve been involved and it only gets better when I put as much energy back into it.
It’s an exciting development for the NY chapter, and I’m proud to be involved.
Thanks, Khoi.
josh althorpe
nice job. i generally shy away from too many colours on the web, however in this case i think the authors have acheived a neat balance that still seems to belong in some kind of theme.
it may just be me, but the verticals of the ‘N’ on the aigany page seem a little feral. somebody should redo that .gif with some more greys.
David
Hmmm. Simple structure, few images…This site looks to me like it was designed to be read on an iPhone. Mr. Vinh?
Yesterday we officially launched a brand new version of 
Excellent job, Greg and Patricia! Stark contrast is always a winner in my book; Swiss is sexy! “Designy”Ё I love it!
Not to take away from the final product, which is gorgeous, but was having you involved part of the reason why it so closely resembles Subtraction?
Geof: that’s a fair question. I definitely had a hand in this project, but I didn’t do much if any art direction. The extent of my involvement was primarily in the aren of writing the request for proposal that we sent to several design studios (and Kind Company returned the best response). So in the sense that I helped choose a company with whose design sensibility I felt comfortable, I think it’s fair to say the Subtraction.com-ness factored in at least subtly.
But the majority of the aesthetic was Kind Company’s own, based in large part of the new brand identity that the chapter rolled out last year. That identity was developed by fellow board members Mike Essl, Emma Presler, Alan Dye, our chapter President Carin Goldberg and others… I definitely did not have a hand in that.
All of which is to say that the credit goes to others for both the brand and the Web site. In these, I was just a cheerleader from the sidelines.
AIGA has been good to me for as long as I’ve been involved and it only gets better when I put as much energy back into it.
It’s an exciting development for the NY chapter, and I’m proud to be involved.
Thanks, Khoi.
nice job. i generally shy away from too many colours on the web, however in this case i think the authors have acheived a neat balance that still seems to belong in some kind of theme.
it may just be me, but the verticals of the ‘N’ on the aigany page seem a little feral. somebody should redo that .gif with some more greys.
Hmmm. Simple structure, few images…This site looks to me like it was designed to be read on an iPhone. Mr. Vinh?
Mike, it’s great to see you involved in such a fun project…looks great!