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.
I’m a fan of designer and illustrator Oliver Munday and an even bigger fan of “The Wire,” so I’m surprised I don’t like this project as much as I expected to.
“The Wire Poster Project consists of 60 typographic posters, each one representing one of the 60 different epigrams preceding every episodes of HBO’s critically acclaimed series, ‘The Wire.’ Produced by graphic artist Oliver Munday, each purchase will benefit the Baltimore Urban Debate League. ‘Wire’ fans might remember the organization from the series’ fifth season when (just after being taken in by Howard “Bunny” Colvin) character Namond Brice gives an award-winning speech about HIV and AIDS in Africa in a BUDL event. Each WPP purchase will help real, at-risk kids like Namond Brice in Baltimore.”
The posters are very well designed but somehow don’t feel particularly true to the source material. Here are the first six.
Swiss comedian and artist Ursus Wehrli has a book called “The Art of Clean Up: Life Made Neat and Tidy.” It was released earlier this year but apparently I missed it entirely, until now. The book is full of photos of things that Wehrli has reorganized.
This ninety-minute documentary, directed by Kathy Brew and Roberto Guerra, looks at the career and fifty-year marriage of hugely influential Modernist designers Lella and Massimo Vignelli. It starts a week-long run this Friday at the IFC Center in New York City.
There is a long history on the Internet of novel, post-adolescent Lego creations, but I find this one to be particularly nifty.
“Created by Vitamins Design, The Lego calendar is a wall mounted time planner that the team invented for their studio. It’s made entirely of Lego and while others have used Lego to visualize complex logistics systems in a simple and tangible way, Vitamins’ solution allows you take a photo of it with a smartphone; all of the events and timings are synchronized to an online, digital calendar.”
I imagine it must be kind of inconvenient to have to physically update the calendar, but these sorts of Lego creations are rarely about the practical.
German-born photographer Michael Wolf’s photographs of Hong Kong urbanism are beautiful and horrifying. They are architectural abstractions of the city’s towering apartment buildings and the endless pattern of windows that cover them.
His entire portfolio is stunning, really. See it here.
Author Matthew Chojnacki collected two hundred posters from designers in twenty countries, each interpreting famous cult and classic movies. These works are independently generated and not sanctioned by the Hollywood studios that in most cases owns the films. Chojnacki claims “the artwork is essentially in the same vein as music gig (concert) posters, and is the first book to be written on this topic.” The work is certainly as vividly illustrative and frequently muscular as gig posters often are. Some of the winners I spotted:
With each passing day, my unfinished writeup of thoughts on iOS 7 seems less and less like it’s going to happen. Hopefully in the next week sometime.
Meanwhile, here’s something I discovered in iOS 7 last night: if you pull the speech bubbles in Messages to the left just slightly, the interface reveals time stamps for each individual message. There’s also a subtle but noticeable color change in the blue bubbles, drawing attention away from them towards the new information coming onto the stage. Fantastic.
When I mentioned this on Twitter, some folks complained that, clever as it is, it’s not very discoverable. Normally, hiding this feature in this way would seem somewhat user-unfriendly. But I think this is an elegant solution to a long-running but minor complaint about this app.
Since its inception, Messages has only selectively displayed time stamps, usually after a long lull between exchanged messages. I admit having wanted to see the time stamps on plenty of occasions, but not so much so that it broke the experience of using the app for me. In fact, I think that Apple made the right call originally: only show time stamps where they add meaningful value; anything more is superfluous. I still regard these time stamps as superfluous; but this new availability is the best of both worlds: the time stamps are there, but they add no visual clutter until the user actively calls for them.
I still take issue with iOS 7’s many glaring imperfections, but I admit that I’m finding it really enjoyable too. Stuff like this, small as it is, counts for a lot.
Google posted this design document to Behance. The company says:
“Google’s brand is shaped in many ways; one of which is through maintaining the visual coherence of our visual assets. In January 2012, expanding on the new iconography style started by Creative Lab, we began creating this solid, yet flexible, set of guidelines that have been helping Google’s designers and vendors to produce high quality work that helps strengthen Google’s identity.”
Some people like specific letterforms from specific fonts for their minds, but all Matt Mitchell thinks about is the way they’re shaped.
In this single-purpose Web site, he highlights a particularly lovely character from a given typeface and gives it its moment in the spotlight, displaying it big and bold, adding a little background and a short, loving appreciation of its curves. Completely charming. See the first few letters at Nice-letterform.com.
The new icon style in iOS 7 — pencil thin, and line- rather than shape-based — has received its share of criticisms. Aubrey Johnson argued at Medium.com that they produce unnecessary “cognitive fatigue.” In this article, Alla Kholmatova tests this out, timing recognition speeds in a set of icons in the “line” style versus another set in the “filled” style. The results are not particularly definitive, and go to illustrate the point that every icon is different, and people will probably continue to argue about this forever. Read the full article at Boxes and Arrows.
