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.
From time to time, I get asked to bring back the “Hel-F’ing-Vetica” shirts that I first ran many years ago. Last week I finally got around to accommodating those requests via Spreadshirt, which allows users to print tee-shirts on-demand. They have a process called flex printing that is very close to traditional silkscreening, which even allowed me to run the design with a bit of silver, shown here on a heather gray American Apparel tee:
Even better, because the Spreadshirt route allows me to sell without having to hold inventory, customers can now get this design on long-sleeved tees, hoodies and — finally — women’s tees, too. You can visit my Spreadshirt shop here to get yours for the holidays!
This new book written and gorgeously designed by my friend Francesco Franchi is an awesome argument for print and editorial design and the continued existing of beautifully produced books — basically a superb refutation of many of the things I’ve found myself arguing against (even though I don’t really mean to) on this blog.
You can read more about it at Gestalten or order your copy at Amazon.
Hugo Award-nominated author Ben Rosenbaum spins this tale of a zombie apocalypse, told through Facebook postings within a circle of friends dealing with an infection and internal Facebook company emails debating on adding a feature to identify friends as zombies. It’s hilarious but incredibly specific to the worlds of using and building social networks. What’s also interesting, to me, is how the writing emulates the interfaces of status updates and user emails, almost replicating them — user interfaces as fiction. Read the short story here; you probably won’t be able to stop scrolling.
John Hilgart’s 4CP blog takes a detailed look at this amazing cover from the original Mad Magazine.
“Disguised to look like an interior page full of novelty ads, it is so dense with tiny print as to be almost illegible at original printed size. Business matters are handled in two small boxes at the top (with a delightful splash of color), while forty-six novelty ads cover the rest of the space. It is so true to the originals that it parodies that it’s almost indistinguishable from them from more than a foot away.”
We are accustomed to satirical graphic design these days, but I imagine this issue must have confused lots of stockists if not readers.
Hilgart has details of all forty-six ersatz ads in his blog post. I’ve actually written about Hilgart’s vintage comics blogs many times on this blog, and I’ll probably continue to do so as long as he blogs because I’m such a big fan. Even better, he’s just started a version of 4CP on Tumblr.
For four-plus years, Adrian Curry has been turning in a regular column at MUBI Notebook called “Movie Poster of the Week.” The name is a bit of a misnomer, because every entry features at least a half dozen fascinating specimens of posters past and present; it’s as compelling a survey of the intersection of cinema and graphic design as any out there.
If weekly strikes you as insufficient, Curry also maintains a Tumblr called Movie Poster of the Day, which as the name suggests presents a single poster once a day. It’s great too, but the writing at MUBI is a reward in itself, so visit Movie Poster of the Week first. Oh, also, MUBI is phenomenal.
Two decades ago, U-Haul moving vans and trailers started sporting surprisingly engaging illustrations on their sides. Granted, they weren’t high art, but they were tasteful, at least, and they were a commendably restrained use of what amounts to thousands of highly mobile, highly visible billboard spaces. According to the company:
“The space each graphic occupies on our trucks is priceless. It’s not for sale. We could sell this space to corporate America, but U-Haul believes we must give something back to the communities we serve…Over 250 different images have been created since the Super Graphics program began, each one honoring individual states and provinces, and saluting North America’s public.”
Now someone clever over at U-Haul has finally compiled all the graphics into one place on U-Haul’s Web site. Go spot the ones you know well, and/or the ones from your home state.
“The ‘International Review of graphic design and related subjects,’ was initiated by designer Josef Müller-Brockmann and published in eighteen issues between 1958 and 1965 by an editorial collective consisting of him, Richard Paul Lohse, Hans Neuburg und Carlo Vivarelli. The complete volumes are now available in an excellent facsimile reprint from Lars Müller Publishers.”
The reprints come case-bound, obviously intended to be displayed prominently on your bookshelf so that visitors can see how hardcore Modernist you are.
Now, in the past I’ve been guilty of a certain, design-centric flavor of conspicuous consumption-oriented blogging in which an artifact of mid-Century Modernism like this one is presented along with a declaration of purchasing intent. The tone is usually flagrantly concise, as in “Must have!,” or “Sold!” or, “Just bought it,” as if to imply that the object is so essential, so unimpeachably critical to the worldview of any designer that it simply must be owned, and if you didn’t know that already, you’re not a real designer.
But this reprint goes for US$300, and to be frank, most of these things are incredibly boring, not particularly relevant any longer, and highly overrated. Don’t get me wrong; I’d be very keen to get my hands on one of these sets to peruse it, and maybe spend a few hours reading through its pages. But after indulging in many of these sorts of things over the years, I feel now that I understand that they are really more about showing off than studying up.
Don’t let that stop you from buying a set, though, if you are so inclined. Read more here.
This new, seven-minute short film from director Wes Anderson is “presented by Prada” and is an homage to the work of Federico Fellini. Imagine the set of a Fellini film as a backdrop for Andersonisms, and you get the idea.
By the way, I find it fascinating how ostensibly indie directors are free to make obviously commercial contract work like this with no loss to their credibility. Imagine Lorde, say, writing a song “presented by Prada.” We hold different kinds of artists accountable to different kinds of standards, apparently without a unifying logic.
“Apple’s maps have turned out to be a hit with iPhone and iPad users in the US — despite the roasting that they were given when they first appeared in September 2012. But Google — which was kicked off the iPhone after it refused to give Apple access to its voice-driven turn-by-turn map navigation — has lost nearly 23 million mobile users in the U.S. as a result.”
The article argues that the power of incumbency is apparently difficult to resist. Google’s offering is superior in accuracy and, arguably, in user experience, but “all roads lead to Apple’s maps” throughout the operating system, which is a tremendous advantage.
For my part, I’m incredibly frustrated by the whole maps ecosystem on my phone. I’m one of those tortured souls who would prefer to avoid giving Google more of my information if I can, though my efforts to do so are not exactly thorough. But using Apple Maps is not a realistic option, in my view, because it’s so frequently wrong. Worse, Apple missed a terrific opportunity when Google acquired Waze last summer. That’s my favorite maps app by far and would have injected a much needed sense of populism into Apple’s ivory tower approach to mapping data.
The Toronto studio, who have rightly received a lot of acclaim for crafting and maintaining Photoshop templates of the iOS graphical user interface, just released a version of their work for Sketch. This new pack, which was prepared largely by designer Tyler Howarth, is an invaluable resource for those of us who have moved to Sketch for the majority of our design work.
As always, Teehan + Lax are releasing it entirely free. Accordin to Geoff Teehan, an iPad version is forthcoming.
