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.
Oof, I’m embarrassingly late on posting about this: English-born, Barcelona-based illustrator Patrick Thomas will be featured in a one-man exhibition at The New York Times building here in New York City.
This is something that is going to happen very soon. And when you see me say “very soon” in this context, you should read that as “The show’s opening reception is tonight, at 7:00 PM, hors d’œuvres served.” So if you’re here in the city and have a penchant for gorgeously screened, conceptually challenging graphic design as commentary, you should R.S.V.P. and come on by, meet the artist and mingle a bit with the Times art department. I’ll be there.
His graphics are rooted in popular iconography that is routinely re-purposed and re-composed; he transforms the most common visual artifacts into commentary on society and politics. Take his ‘Africa’ whereby all the nations and continents of the earth are reformed in an absurdist collision of plates to form an entirely new Africa. Thomas’ imagery is recognizable yet surprising, disturbing yet comforting — even in the context of his many guns and skulls. His screen prints are beautifully crafted, subtly colored, and smartly conceived
You can see more samples of his work here. I’ve taken a close look at the pieces as they were in the process of being hung over the past two weeks, and they’re quite lovely. They’re both vividly graphic and subtly tactile — you won’t be able to touch them, obviously, but a close-up look at the hand-screened quality of the larger pieces reveals their true beauty.
What’s more, the show is on the 7th floor of our still-remarkable-to-me, Renzo Piano-designed tower, where we’ve transformed Piano’ magisterial hallway into a makeshift gallery. I should also say it was curated and hung by my talented and over-achieving colleagues on the art department staff, Nicholas Blechman and Kim Bost; they’ve done an amazing job and you should come by and have a look.
