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.
As mentioned earlier this month, a brand new version of Subtraction.com is coming soon. Very, very, very soon, maybe as early as next week. I’ve been diligently working with my friend Allan Cole to sort out a ton of kinks, rewiring a lot of the site behind the scenes. I’ll talk about that in greater detail soon, but one major change that we’ve made is that, in this new design, user comments will be no more.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. In 2011 I wrote this post about how the volume of comments had dwindled on my blog, and extrapolated from that some observations on how blogging in general has changed. If anything, that change has accelerated in the intervening three years, and now commenting on Subtraction.com is a tiny fraction of what it was at its peak.
Moreover, it just feels like the time for comments has passed. At least for me, it has. I’m frequently and conspicuously absent from comment threads on my own blog, a byproduct of my ridiculously crazy schedule. That situation makes for a less than stellar commenting experience for everyone; commenters feel as if I’m not paying attention, and I feel embarrassed that my name is missing from threads entirely.
Old posts will still display their old comments, but going forward no new comments will be accepted on any posts at all. In fact, fair warning: I probably won’t be migrating any comments that have been made to this blog over the past month or so.
However, the comment form itself isn’t quite going away, at least not entirely. In fact, it may stick around for a while. What we’ve done is hack it so that, instead of being an invitation to post a public comment, it’s now an invitation to send a note about a given post directly to me. It will look something like this:
The redesigned comment form, which will send remarks only to me.
As you can see, it’s basically the same functionality, but different phrasing, and different end result. When you enter remarks into this form, it goes to me directly, and never gets posted publicly. I have no idea if this will function as an effective channel between readers and myself, which is what I hope, or if it will just be an open doorway to more comment spam, which is what I’m guessing. But I figure it’s worth a try.
Anyway, if you’ve been a commenter on this blog in the past, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for contributing and making this blog a much richer, more rewarding experience for me than it would have been otherwise. I learned so much from the wealth of knowledge that appeared in the threads on this site over the years, and I’m quite sad that the climate has changed so much that this has become the best decision for everyone. But it’s time. Blog comments, R.I.P.
Randomly, I came across this arresting image of Heath Ledger, probably taken for a magazine piece or something, wearing what looks like an impromptu version of his makeup from “The Dark Knight.” It has a really sad quality to it.
I tried to find the source via the remarkable “reverse image search” engine Tin Eye but didn’t come up with anything definitive. Anyway, I thought it was worth sharing.
Tiffany Bridge explains that the recent change in Dropbox’s terms of service, which on its face it looks very much like the kind of thing most of us are inclined to ignore, actually carries at least one very meaningful implication:
No matter what they do (delete your data, privacy breach, overcharging, whatever), you don’t get to sue. Instead, they get to choose the arbitrator according to whatever criteria they want, and thus any dispute is decided by someone they’re paying.
Dropbox has become so widely used and such an indispensable utility largely with the enthusiastic boosting of its many happy users. I hope that changes like this, which seem to be quite customer unfriendly, aren’t indicative of the company moving into a phase of malicious business practices, which happens so often to runaway successes in the tech industry.
Bridge points out that you can opt-out of the arbitration clause at this link, but that you only have thirty days to do so. Read her post here.
A new exhibition at The Museum of the City of New York:
Martin Wong, an East Village artist and collector of graffiti art, amassed a treasure trove of hundreds of works on paper and canvas — in aerosol, ink, and other mediums. The artists, including Keith Haring, Lee Quiñones, LADY PINK, and FUTURA 2000, were seminal figures in an artistic movement that spawned a worldwide phenomenon, altering music, fashion, and popular visual culture. The exhibition ‘City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection’ includes over 150 works on canvas and other media, along with photographs of graffiti writing long erased from subways and buildings. Wong, who died of AIDS in 1999, donated his collection to the City Museum in 1994.
Are the winter Olympics over yet? Apologies to those who have had enough, but here is a very nice overview of visual branding for forty-nine Olympic games, “from ancient to current.” What’s particularly fascinating is that they trace not just the evolution of the games, but how we think about branding and what a logo is. The early games were basically illustrated; in the mid-Twentieth Century the games were represented practically like multinational corporations; and in recent years logos have gone abstract — some might say horribly, horribly abstract. See for yourself here.
LayerVault, the version control system for designers, has added support for Bohemian Coding’s Sketch. This is apparently the first deep third-party integration that Bohemian Coding has done for its up and coming interface design app, and it’s yet another encouraging sign that Sketch is gaining traction among designers everywhere. Read more here.
Step back into the land of my youth: Future City Records is an “electronic music label and collective for production and synthesizer enthusiasts, bedroom producers and dream designers. We have a serious appreciation for the magical era of music, culture, fashion and film from the 1980s and it is a big influence on this label from our design to our music.”
Say what you will about retro, but the musicians and designers behind this label are able to recreate the Reagan era with almost shocking accuracy. I’m both fascinated and repelled by the beautiful and grotesquely faithful artwork that adorns their releases.
“Science of the Night” by Shio-z“Midas Hand EP” by Mirage“Never Say Never” by Sam Hägbladd“Autumn Skies” by Lolski“Find Me at the Bay Tonight” by Cosmic Sand
All of their releases are available on Band Camp, so you can stream full tracks as well as buy and download the (very reasonably priced) albums for your Walkman.
Published on Medium: this truly superb memo from Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield to his team on the challenge that they faced several months before launch. There’s so much good stuff in there, so it’s hard to pick out the best quotes, but here are two of my favorites:
Therefore, ‘understanding what people think they want and then translating the value of Slack into their terms’ is something we all work on. It is the sum of the exercise of all our crafts. We do it with copy accompanying signup forms, with fast-loading pages, with good welcome emails, with comprehensive and accurate search, with purposeful loading screens, and with thoughtfully implemented and well-functioning features of all kinds.
And…
The reason for saying we need to do ‘an exceptional, near-perfect job of execution’ is this: When you want something really bad, you will put up with a lot of flaws. But if you do not yet know you want something, your tolerance will be much lower. That’s why it is especially important for us to build a beautiful, elegant and considerate piece of software. Every bit of grace, refinement, and thoughtfulness on our part will pull people along. Every petty irritation will stop them and give the impression that it is not worth it.
Penguin Books is relaunching its Pelican Books line, an imprint devoted to accessibly written books on contemporary ideas that was shuttered in 1984. New Pelican books will debut in the U.K. this May, sporting a redesigned logo:
On the occasion of Valentine’s Day, film site The Dissolve posted a discussion about Leo McCarey’s 1937 sublime screwball comedy “The Awful Truth.” I’ve watched this comedic masterpiece over a dozen times and it never stops being thoroughly charming; I’d rank it among my top five — probably my top three — favorite movies of all time.
I’m not sure if The Dissolve’s extensive dissection of the movie will make a lot of sense if you haven’t seen it, but that can be remedied easily. A Google search yields plenty of online spots where it’s available for streaming in its entirety (Veoh, for instance) and some of them look like they’re maybe even quasi-legal or better. You can also purchase it from iTunes, and if you’re an Amazon Prime customer, you can stream it for free. However you do it, it will brighten your Valentine’s Day.
