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.
In 1985, Andy Warhol was commissioned to show off the graphics capabilities of the Amiga 1000 personal computer from Commodore. He produced a handful of works which were stored on floppy disks and only recently rediscovered. Here are three of them.
The files were apparently saved in an unorthodox fashion, and their recovery required a lot of digital forensics work from The Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club. A documentary about the recovered experiments called “Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Amiga Experiments” debuted a few weeks ago in a special screening at The Carnegie Museum of Art. Hopefully it will be available online at some point.
One addendum to yesterday’s post about Elvis Costello: almost without exception, the covers for every one of his post-1980s albums were just terrible. It was hard for me to muster much enthusiasm for “When I Was Cruel,” for example, when the art for it was so unenthusiastic itself.
So here’s a cover I made for my playlist of Costello’s best songs from 1990 on, with an illustration of Costello courtesy of artist Justyna Wycislak. You can see more of her amazing work at Deviant Art.
And in case you missed it, the playlist is on Rdio and embedded courtesy of that service below. It’s also on Spotify—except for one of the tracks, “When I Was Cruel No. 2,” which is missing from their streaming catalog.
Funny things happen to you when you get older, like developing an appreciation for the later efforts in your favorite musicians’ discographies—the ones that you always dismissed as being tired and uninspired when you were too young and foolish to acknowledge that anyone over thirty could do anything interesting.
This is what happened to me recently when, out of the blue, I suddenly started actually enjoying Elvis Costello’s post-1980s albums. Costello’s first decade of work produced a nearly unbroken string of masterpieces that I listened to obsessively in my youth. But after I exhausted those I waded into the cloudier waters of his later albums—more or less everything after 1989’s “Spike”—more out of loyalty than genuine interest, and they left me generally unmoved. At some point I stopped paying attention to his new output altogether.
Then, one day recently, and for no apparent reason than just being old, I started playing them again and hearing something I had missed entirely before. These later works weren’t just pale echoes of lost adolescence, but something different altogether: they were the products of a mature, thoughtful, yet still restless songwriting talent that had become interested in more than just the primal cravings of youth. Which is to say that most young people still won’t enjoy them, but if you’re willing to give them a chance, you’re likely to discover that they’re teeming with gems that rival his classics.
To make my case to the skeptics, I’ve assembled this playlist of some of my favorite tracks from these albums. I call it “The Muddle Ages,” and it’s available on Rdio and embedded courtesy of that service below. It’s also on Spotify—though for some reason one of the tracks, “When I Was Cruel No. 2,” is missing from their streaming catalog. I sincerely think you’ll enjoy it if you keep an open mind, but if after a fair listen you remain unimpressed, then maybe bookmark this page and come back when you’re a little older? You may be glad you did.
Update: Unfortunately, Rdio is no more as of Nov 2015.
Prolific designer Peter Mendelsund has a “design monograph” coming this August, collecting his many fantastic book covers for Knopf. It’s called, appropriately, “Cover,” and appropriately the design of its cover is genius.
In this forthcoming book, award-winning Swiss photographer Catherine Leutenegger captures the decline of Rochester, New York, home to the headquarters of Eastman Kodak—once the biggest photography brand in the world, now a dwindling memory. The photographs are billed as “attentive, deadpan studies” of the ghost town-like city and the mausoleum-like Kodak buildings.
They’re beautiful works and stylistically right up my alley, but there is a schadenfreude-like perversity in their aesthetic precision. They seem focused on an idea of post-industrial decline that’s attractive, maybe even irresistible to the digital classes. Who among us, including myself, can resist looking away from photos of a town ravaged by its failure to comply with the rules of the Internet age? It all seems too convenient and simplistic.
Gary Chou’s new Orbital is part co-working space and part accelerator program—though Chou would likely frown at both characterizations. He’s trying to do something genuinely new that combines elements from both concepts but focuses squarely on independent creators—in teams of no more than three, and bootstrapped rather than venture-backed—and giving them the physical and mental opportunity to turn side projects into reality. He’s also open to more than just tech-focused undertakings; Orbital is meant for creators and projects that can be artistic, civic, social, educational, or experimental in nature, not to mention the good old-fashioned commercial variety.
Located in New York City’s Lower East Side neighborhood, Orbital occupies three floors of what is basically an old tenement building, now made desirable by the city’s rampant gentrification. The space also happens to be the former headquarters of Kickstarter, Inc., so it has proven DNA for being a place where “awesome stuff” is made, as Chou puts it. It’s kind of a remarkable set of offices in a vibrant, thriving neighborhood.
But for now, anyway, the space is only open to students of Chou’s forthcoming Orbital Boot Camp, an intensive 12-week course that gives students first-hand exposure to the process of getting ideas to launch. The curriculum includes instruction, lectures and individualized feedback from Chou and a small team of teachers and advisors. Admission to the program is by application only—the deadline to apply is midnight this Friday.
I found the whole Orbital concept so unique and intriguing that I asked Chou a few questions over email about it.
Orbital is both a space and a course—or a “boot camp.” I want to ask about both, but first, what makes the Orbital boot camp unique?
There are a lot of opportunities to engage in instructional learning either online or offline, but not many opportunities to engage in experiential learning. So much of what we really need to learn emerges only in the moment of making, so the course is about coaching you through that process and helping you make sense of it.
You talk about “getting your idea out of your head and into the world.” How mature—or nascent—do you expect the ideas to be when a student shows up for day one?
I’d expect that the idea is something that the student’s lived with for some time. But nascent ideas are sometimes great, though, because we place fewer expectations on them. You’re much more willing to see where the idea takes you. If you are willing to at least take one step in any direction, you can always course correct.
Does taking that single step mean that each student’s “side project” idea must lead to something more intensive, if not a full time commitment?
I think that’s where the program differs as well. You may very well discover that you really aren’t that excited about the thing that you’re working on, or that what you have is a nice hobby vs. a business vs. an art project. All of these outcomes are valid. That’s also why the boot camp concludes with a public talk on lessons learned, rather than a demo day.
So the expectation is not that the boot camp results in a finished product, but rather that you’ve had the experience of it, been through the process?
That’s right. I think the real lessons come from negotiating the intent of the creator with the behavior of the audience, which is really hard to do, because it means we have to put our ideas out there in their vulnerable imperfectness. Besides, nothing we do is ever really finished unless we’ve decided to stop working on it.
Could this boot camp vision have worked remotely, or on a traditional college campus?
I think what you’re asking really gets at something that is slightly different.
Most of our educational system is still geared towards the acquisition of knowledge and skills—it’s instructional learning. It’s this idea that if you do A and then B that you’ll get C. It’s hard for students to get outside of that because that’s also part of the institution. Go to college, get a degree, and you’ll be prepared to enter the work force.
We’re at a time of tremendous uncertainty. I don’t think we need to do a better job of creating more factory workers, we need to help people learn how to navigate their own uncertain futures. It’s highly individualized learning, it’s very confrontational, and you’re likely to get lost along the way. But that’s okay. Launching a side project is a great way to do this. It’s much more experiential.
That sounds very much in keeping with the Orbital space itself, which is kind of raw and just happens to be the former headquarters for Kickstarter. Is it safe to say that it’s more than just a random space, that it has some “spiritual” meaning, if you will?
Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons why I jumped on it. There’s a certain feeling in the space that I wanted to preserve, so I’ve done a lot of work to restore rather than rebuild the space. It’s kind of perfect in its imperfection. The stairs are creaky, the floor boards are warped, there are flaws everywhere. But, I think it’s kind of a relief. It’s so easy to get caught up in the idea that everything we make must be shiny and perfect, when in truth the process is often awkward and ugly. We could push pixels around forever. So, when you walk around here and think “Kickstarter came from here,” seeing the imperfections of the space helps you stay focused on what really matters.
Last week MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey posted this state-of-the-union-style rumination on the site’s recent past and prospective future. He goes in-depth on life as an ad-supported, Google-dependent community, and how changes to that search engine’s undisclosed indexing practices changed the economics for Haughey and his team dramatically in late 2012:
The money situation changed one day in November 2012, when I saw a drastic reduction in traffic and revenue to Ask MetaFilter. I double-checked to make sure the initial estimates were correct, and it appeared that Ask MetaFilter lost 40% of its traffic overnight.
Haughey goes into some detail on trying to cope with the changes and get back into Google’s good graces, as it were. The experience sounds somewhat Kafkaesque, but sadly not unique to Metafilter. In January, Aaron Harris wrote this postmortem on the demise of his startup, Tutorspree, which did really well with Google—until it didn’t. As a result of unspecified Google changes, Tutorspree lost eighty percent of its traffic overnight. From that experience, Harris took away some valuable lessons on the dangers of relying principally on Google and search engine optimization to build a scalable business:
Because of how successful SEO was, it was the lens through which we viewed all other marketing efforts, and masked the issues we were having in other channels along with important realities of how the tutoring market differed from how we wanted to make it work. We were, in effect, blinded by our own success in organic search. Even though we saw the blindness, we couldn’t work around it.
Thankfully, in Metafilter’s case, an alternative to SEO presented itself in the form of user contributions to the site. Haughey writes:
I previously estimated a small population of maybe a couple hundred people might pony up a buck or two each month, which wasn’t really enough to change our situation. Much to my surprise, several hundred people have already given money as one-time contributions and/or set up monthly subscriptions, with the average contribution at nearly $10. The dream of maybe replacing some of our ad revenue with member support is looking like it could actually happen.
I’ve been using Metafilter for years and years, and I’m very grateful for its continued existence, so I just donated. If you feel the same, you can donate at this link.
Coming this fall: “Film Noir 101” a lavish compendium of “the 101 best film noir posters from the 1940s-1950s.” Written by noir scholar—and graphic designer—Martin Fertig, the book compiles beautifully reproduced poster art alongside critical commentary. It’s interesting to note that while noir films of that era were almost exclusively in black and white, the posters are almost all in color, and as such employ an entirely different visual language to advertise their wares. They’re louder and more fiery than the movies themselves, bordering on operatic in many instances.
In case you can’t wait until the September release, back in 2011 Fertig picked his one-hundred greatest film noir posters of all time over at his excellent noir-focused blog Where Danger Lives, though Fertig painstakingly provides insightful commentary for each one. In fact, if you scroll all the way down to see his pick for number one, you’ll find that he makes some surprisingly broad declarations about it:
From the perspective of the graphic designer this is the greatest film poster of all time. No example from another era, nor one in another style, genre, or whatever you want to call it so perfectly (or simply) communicates the content of its film nearly as well as the poster for…
The mid-season finale of “Mad Men” airs tonight on AMC; it’s the last episode of the show’s seventh and final season, which was annoyingly cleaved in two by the network, before resuming next year for its concluding run. I’ve still been enjoying each episode as it airs, but even setting aside the unnatural pause, I’m ready for the show to be over. It’s taken quite a long time to get wherever it’s going, and with each passing episode I become less and less sure that where it’s going will offer a worthwhile payoff.
That’s not to take away from its accomplishments to date, though. It’s a terrifically well-made show that works on a number of interesting levels. As I wrote three years ago, my theory is that “Mad Men” is in truth principally about its distinctively realized sets. This article over at Interior Design Magazine seems to bear that out. It interviews the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, who admits that he looks at the set design of “Mad Men” as an integral part of the storytelling. A great slide show accompanies the text.
