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.
Nick Veasey does some novel things with good, old fashioned, dangerous-to-your-health X-ray technology. By his own account he’s photographed thousands of everyday items, with stunning results like this:
I’ve worked on more projects in the past seven months than I have in a long time, and as a result, I’ve designed more logos than I have since my early, dark days as a print designer. I thought I’d share two of them.
Here is the brand new logo for Wildcard, the startup where I’m leading user experience design. I designed this with the amazing Stephen Meszaros, with whom I share design duties there.
Hopefully it’s obvious that the mark is composed of three cards forming a W shape. But on a more subtle level, it’s also meant to represent the promise of what we’re trying to do at Wildcard: build a “third way” between today’s mobile browsers, which offer great breadth but poor user experiences, and native apps, which offer rich user experiences but poor breadth and relatively cumbersome access. The middle card, the gold one, is meant to represent the Wildcard alternative. The typeface is Chester Jenkins’ versatile and remarkably underused Galaxie Polaris, which we’ve adopted as our official font family.
Late last month I announced Kidpost, which was so early in its life that my partners and I had selected the name just days before. Well in the weeks since, we’ve made lots of behind-the-scenes progress on the backend, and I managed to cook up a logo, which looks like this:
As a reminder, Kidpost will be a simple service that aggregates your kid-related pictures, status updates, tweets, videos etc. from any of your social networks, and bundles them into a weekly, private email that gets sent to friends and family members. In designing this mark I tried to evoke a family’s refrigerator door, where lots of kids’ drawings, photos and other ephemera might be posted. The dot in the letter I doubles as the magnet, with the tile shapes beneath representing all the things the service will gather together.
By the way, we’ll be seeding previews of Wildcard in the coming months, so if you’re interested you can sign up at trywildcard.com. And sometime in the next few weeks, we’ll be looking for a small number of users to help us test Kidpost, so sign up for that at kidpost.net.
In the month or so since The New York Times officially launched its new site design, I’ve found that I like it more and more. As I said back then, it’s impossible for me to be objective, but after repeated, daily use, I’m thoroughly convinced that it’s a good design.
I don’t agree with every decision that went into it, but I find that most of them work very well. In particular, the use of the company’s proprietary cuts of the typefaces Cheltenham and Franklin Gothic elevates their news presentation significantly. Articles and headlines are now a real pleasure to read.
That said, I can’t help but lament the fact that the site did not undertake even more substantial changes to its overall experience. Specifically, as a reluctant, intermittently enthusiastic and resentful customer of the Times’ famous pay wall, I find myself wishing that the redesign had delivered a bit more value for subscribers.
I have a list of half-formed feature ideas along those lines, but here is my favorite.
On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of “This Is Spinal Tap,” film writer Ali Arikan pens this warm tribute to the much-beloved “mockumentary,” digging out its underlying themes.
At its core, ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ is a film about failure, and therefore emblematic of one of man’s greatest dichotomies: The gap between who we think we are, and who the world knows we are…
We usually think we are the stars of our own movie when in fact we are extras in everyone else’s. We go through our lives as if we were the nexus of existence, yet there is an entire universe that is happening all around us, one in which we are hardly noticeable. Our greatest catharses tend to be insignificant compared to the daily crises of others…
The designer of the kids app Jungle Picnic recounts what he learned when choosing a kid-friendly typeface.
I compiled a string of characters that includes all of the problem glyphs we need to look out for in our search for a typeface. The string we ended up using to test typefaces on various type websites looks like this: agjJlLiIqbd69
This font, which was apparently drawn for last month’s 30 Years of Mac celebration, consists of elegant line drawings of every single model of Macintosh ever shipped.
Every Mac ever, in a font.
Unfortunately, the font doesn’t work like conventional typefaces. Once installed, you can only access it via Apple’s Font Book utility, where you must copy the specific model you want and paste it elsewhere. It also doesn’t seem like the font has been officially released, as there’s no official web page for it. You can download it here for the time being. Via Cult of Mac.
From Kirby Ferguson, the prolific net documentary filmmaker behind the very well-regarded series “Everything Is a Remix,” comes this new series that seeks to understand “the hidden forces that shape our lives.” This new series is “delivered in episodes.” The first one is free, but subsequent episodes are available only to those who pay the US$15 subscription price, though there is an introductory discount available right now. Have a look for yourself.
Last year I read Lawrence Wright’s riveting, frightening book, “Going Clear,” which goes deep inside the world of the Church of Scientology. When I finished, I was inspired to re-watch P.T. Anderson’s “The Master,” which was ostensibly based on a Scientology-like cult. In the course of watching, I took these screen captures of the many gorgeous, haunting close-ups of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in the role of Lancaster Dodd.
What a remarkable performance in a truly remarkable film. Thinking back now, I can’t recall a Hoffman performance that didn’t leave a mark. He was truly one of the most gifted actors of our time. Rest in peace, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
We’ve been busy working on the fundamental building blocks of Kidpost, our upcoming service that bundles up parents’ kid-related social media posts into weekly emails. There’s nothing particularly visual to show for most of that work, but today we hit a sort-of public-facing milestone: our first Kidpost email successfully went out at 9:32a EST this morning:
Obviously, it’s still very rough. It doesn’t yet include the pictures themselves (or any kind of, y’know, design) and, for the time being, only gathers posts from Facebook. One step at a time! If you’re interested, you can find out more and get access to the preview soon at Kidpost.net.
Benedict Evans is one of the smartest people currently thinking and writing about what it means to move to a mobile dominated world. His post yesterday, “Interaction Canvases and Ecosystems,” tackles the question of what usage patterns we’ll see on phones in five years. It touches a bit on the emerging concept of card-based metaphors (something he also talked about in this post from last summer), and is nicely in line with what we’re thinking at Wildcard. Read the full post here.
