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.
Google the film writer and director David Ayer and you get the standard results: an IMDb dossier, a Wikipedia page, assorted reviews of his past movies, and various news items about his future releases. None of the links suggest that Ayer is building one of the most vital and distinctive bodies of work going.
The oversight is understandable. His résumé is full of titles that raise eyebrows: the inaugural “The Fast and the Furious,” the film adaptation of “S.W.A.T.,” and a Keanu Reeves actioner that barely made a mark called “Street Kings.”
There is one exception: “Training Day,” from 2001, for which Ayer wrote the script. Largely favorable reviews and an Oscar-winning performance from Denzel Washinigton have made it Ayer’s most prominent credential by far. Even in films where he writes and directs, his movies are usually marketed under the tagline “From the writer of ‘Training Day.’”
Nevertheless, almost all of his works evidence a singularly fascinating, uncompromising vision. Just as John Ford returned again and again to the 19th century West, Ayer’s world is contemporary Los Angeles. Not Hollywood and points West, but South Central, Compton, the Rampart district — the unglamorous side of the sprawling city, where police and gangs collide, commingle and kill one another. His films are deep dives into a domestic war zone that goes largely ignored.
Christian Bale in “Harsh Times”
Few other filmmakers are capable of immersing audiences as deeply into the treacherous bureaucracy of the L.A.P.D., or as authentically into the brutal realities of gang life. If you’ve ever seen the eye-opening documentary “Bastards of the Party,” which investigates the history of L.A.’s dominant gangs and, in doing so, humanizes the landscape, Ayer’s world will look and feel fully convincing, even accounting for the artistic license he invokes in the name of drama. In fact, the central figure of “Bastards” is former gang-member turned filmmaker Cle Sloan, who has appeared in a number of Ayer’s films in small roles.
Where to start with Ayer’s work? For those who haven’t seen it, “Training Day” is his most accessible movie. For those who have, “Harsh Times,” which was his directorial debut (and which was Christian Bale’s first role after “Batman Begins”) shows the full, unfiltered power of Ayer’s vision. “End of Watch” which I wrote about last August is almost literally a ride along-style tour of Ayer’s world. “Dark Blue,” which was almost completely missed when it debuted twelve years ago, is flawed but thoroughly captivating. And even “Street Kings,” which is not Keanu Reeves’s best work, is nevertheless well worth watching, and what convinced me that even the least coherent of Ayer’s work is never less than fascinating.
In December I wrote a piece on Medium called “What Streaming Music Can Be,” rounding up some of my thoughts on the missing potential in today’s streaming music services like Spotify and Rdio. That piece achieved a modest level of popularity, and was well circulated. Now an Italian publication, Internazionale, has published a translation: “Le Potenzialità Della Musica In Streaming.” Posted for posterity.
Update: Pierre Choffé also translated the article into French: L’avenir du streaming. He did this last month but I missed it. Thanks, Pierre!
My friend Brent Almond, whom I worked with many, many years ago, runs a site called Designer Daddy, which is all about life as a father for designers. Today he posted this interview with me on that very subject. I got a kick out of this part where Brent declares:
I can’t think of a designer whose style (and personality) is more different than mine.
Still, we get along, practically like ebony and ivory. The interview was conducted over email last year, partly while I was working at Etsy for a brief time, but there is a bit in there towards the end about my new project, Kidpost, which is conveniently relevant to Brent’s audience. Read the interview here.
To some extent the whole real estate industry is predicated on a form of voyeurism, but this site, from independent U.K. real estate agency The Modern House, is probably a bit more voyeuristic than most. The agency specializes in a particular brand of property:
Whether it’s a Modernist house, a cutting-edge contemporary apartment or anything in between, we specialise exclusively in modern properties. No-one understands this sector of the market as intimately as us. This is what we do. It is all we do.
Their site, which is appropriately better built than the vast majority of real estate listings sites, is basically pr0n for lovers of Modernist or “architect-designed” residences. The property photos tend to look not much like your house. For example:
For parents of young kids, like my wife and me, photos have become an inextricable part of how we think about our family, both within our household and amongst all of our relatives. Photo documentation for the benefit of all of our loved ones — grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, family friends of all kinds — is now a part of raising kids in a way that it never was before the advent of the digital camera.
In some ways, it’s easier than ever for us to get images of our kids to those who care about them most, but in other ways it’s still much harder than it should be, too. I know for a fact that the sheer number of venues for sharing has made it difficult for my parents and in-laws to keep up with the images that Laura and I post to Facebook, Flickr, Instagram and other services. And truth be told, even I frequently miss some of the photos that Laura posts, too.
I started thinking about this problem last fall; why shouldn’t it be possible to knit these services together via email, the most universally accessible channel that we have? All we’d really need to solve this problem would be an automated service that rounds up all of the kid-related content that Laura and I post each week and then sends it out in a summary email. It wouldn’t require either of us to post to any new services or change our current sharing behaviors, and it would only ask our relatives to do something they’re already doing: check their email. It seemed like something that really ought to exist.
After talking this problem through with my friends Matt and Mike and finding that everyone we asked thought it was a good idea, we decided to go ahead and build it for real. Today we’re pre-announcing Kidpost, a service which bundles up your kid-related content from your social network accounts into a private, weekly email that gets sent to family members and friends of your choosing.
Sign up today for early access and a discount.
We’re deep in development for it right now, but our ambition for Kidpost is to build something incredibly simple and lightweight. Once you authorize Kidpost to access your various accounts, it will simply watch for posts that you tag appropriately, and will aggregate them automatically. That’s all you have to do. As the account holders, parents control the content of the emails and who receives them — you can add as many people as you like to your email group, and the recipients don’t need to sign up for new accounts or download apps or visit a new service of any kind.
Kidpost will be ready this spring, but as we build it we want to solicit feedback from interested parents and relatives. If you sign up on our home page now, we’ll give you early access, and we’ll also give you a discount on the paid plan when it launches. Just head on over to Kidpost.net. And watch this space for future updates!
This is everything I love and hate about Andy Warhol. On the one hand, I despise the way he created a self-perpetuating framework for the continual worship of celebrities. On the other hand, these simple Polaroids he took of his contemporaries were just phenomenal and retain a singular beauty that’s both naive and deeply penetrating all at once.
For the historically minded, this post at Cartoon Brew rounds up ten NSFW animated works from the dustbins of history.
“For a brief decade-long period in animation history, between the late-1960s and late-1970s, feature animation filmmakers cast aside their inhibitions and created films that aimed to titillate and shock audiences with the novelty of sexual cartoon imagery… The diversity of graphic approaches was impressive: some of the films made pretensions to high art while others aspired to match the energy of underground comix.”
Thanks to the power of YouTube, you can watch all ten from a private corner in the coffee break room at your office. Read more here.
This makes me sad, because I know both Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. They built an amazing company and have already made more than their share of indelible contributions to typography, if not to Western culture. Now their partnership seems broken forever, as the latter is suing the former over a dispute in company ownership.
“In a blistering lawsuit filed today in New York City, Frere-Jones says he was duped into transferring ownership of several fonts, including the world-famous Whitney, to Hoefler & Frere-Jones (HFJ) on the understanding that he would own 50% of the company.”
I have no insight into this matter, but it seems inevitable that someone will emerge from this as a bad guy, and someone will emerge from this as a loser. Read the full article at Quartz.
Designer Jeremiah Shoaf went through the sites featured last year at Typewolf, his superb design inspiration site, and came up with this list of the most popular web fonts used among them. It’s not a scientific list by any means, but it’s a useful insight into what some of the best designers were using last year. I hope he keeps doing this annually; as web fonts evolve and become more pervasive, this kind of survey is bound to get more interesting. Read the full list of the ten most popular web fonts of 2013 here.
Even as tablets get ever more popular, it still strikes me that we’re not fully tapping their inherent, unique potential to get people making things. To some extent, the early indictment that they are primarily consumption devices is more true than I thought would be the case four years after their debut.
We tried to change this perception with Mixel, but we didn’t make nearly as much progress as I had hoped. That’s why I was so excited when my friend Mark Kawano started a company with the express purpose of transforming the iPad into an intuitive, powerful, emotionally immersive storytelling platform. Today, Storehouse debuts in the App Store and it’s beautiful.
Storehouse bills itself as “The easiest way to way to create, share, and discover beautiful stories.” It lets you pull in your images from everywhere and arrange them into superbly elegant narratives — all within one of the most amazingly supple editing environments ever built on iOS (and that’s saying something). It’s a total joy to use.
Full disclosure: aside from being a friend of Mark’s, I’m also an advisor to Storehouse Media Inc. But that shouldn’t stop you from downloading it and deciding for yourself, because Storehouse is completely free.
