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.
This is a very nice project from designer Lucas Heinrich. He uses the Random Article button Wikipedia to come across books he’s never heard of before, and then he designs jackets for them. It’s a totally self-initiated endeavor, intended in part to get him professional work designing book jackets. Here are a few examples.
I emailed Heinrich to get more background on it, and he was nice enough to answer a few questions.
Where did the idea come from?
Lucas Heinrich: Book cover design has been an obsession of mine for a while and I’ve always been someone prone to falling down the Wikipedia rabbit hole for hours at a time. I also liked the idea of simulating how real world book design works—the topics aren’t chosen by the designer and may be something they know nothing about, so there’s a period of research before you even begin. Which, of course, Wikipedia is great for!
Do you keep hitting the Random Article button until you get an article about a book, or do you use the first reference to a book that you come across?
Lucas Heinrich: I tried to stay faithful to what the Random Article button spit out. If it was a completely unusable topic—like a page about a small German town with two lines of info about it—I let myself hit the button again. I made up the book titles myself and pulled the “author” names from the references section. Sometimes I just kept the article title, sometimes I went with something a bit more playful that looked good on a book cover.
Is it your goal to be a book designer?
Lucas Heinrich: Book design is very much where I want to be going forward. I spent the past year at Chicago Portfolio School to build up new projects—like this one—so that I can transition out of marketing work. I’m moving to New York in early April and have spoken with a few publishers and book designers there. I’ve gotten good feedback, but I’m definitely still available for any opportunities in the field. Hopefully this project shows off my abilities and my enthusiasm for book design as I try to get a foot in the door!
Steven Heller—design historian, author of countless books about design, and a national treasure, if you ask me— interviewed me briefly for his column The Daily Heller. The subject is my new book, How They Got There: Interviews With Digital Designers About Their Careers. He asked me what makes this book different from other collections of designer profiles, why I chose to self-publish it, how I selected the interview subjects, and what surprised me most about the conversations I had. Steve is a hero whom I’m lucky enough to call a friend (we were colleagues at The New York Times), and I’m grateful to him for the opportunity.
Designer Scott Savarie created this iOS app that lets you compose design comps entirely on your iPhone. At heart, Napkin is not too dissimilar from Project LayUp, the iPad app that I’ve been collaborating with Adobe on for the past year-plus. Or, at least, it shares some of the same goals: creating a touch-optimized interface that makes the design process viable on a mobile device.
Napkin is an impressive piece of work for a solo production—Savarie created it after taking a class called “iOS for Designers.” A Flash video of the interface in action at designwithnapkin.com demonstrates that it’s straightforward and intuitive to use.
Nevertheless, Napkin runs into the fundamental challenge of building productivity apps on touch devices: the absence of a keyboard and mouse can significantly impede task completion. That core problem has consumed tons of design and development cycles for LayUp; it took lots of trial and error with simplified tools and controls before we realized that a drawing engine was necessary to allow touch manipulation to keep pace with a designer’s brain. It’s not an exact replacement for a keyboard and mouse, but for some aspects of the design process drawing the elements that you want to work with and having them instantly translated into live objects can be liberating. I’m looking forward to getting LayUp into lots of people’s hands so they can see for themselves if it works or not.
The Wildcard offices are located in downtown Manhattan, where what’s left of Little Italy blends into Chinatown. I’ve worked in a lot of neighborhoods in New York City but this one is by far my favorite of them all. It’s got the best blend of historical character and the widest variety of authentically prepared cuisines in Manhattan—deciding on where to eat lunch each day is an embarrassment of riches. Also, the neighborhood is deeply urban, full of all the quirkiness of congested, ad hoc populations of people trying to get ahead in life.
There are infinite ways for artists to capture a place this interesting, but photographer Lisa Weatherbee, who lives in Chinatown, has one of the most novel. Her series “Chinatown in $5” documents what can be bought in Chinatown for a five dollar bill. The results are extremely charming.
Posted to Imgur yesterday: a huge stash of behind-the-scenes photographs from the “Blade Runner” model shop. This movie was so influential and distinctive that looking at these pictures now, even more than three decades later, is like a revealing peek at a mysterious, incredibly advanced craft.
More after the jump, but you can see all 142 images at imgur.com.
Streaming education Web site CreativeLive sat eight Photoshop experts in front of the original 1.0 of the product and video recorded them as they tried to use it. The experts’ remarks are riddled with disbelief—“No live preview? Just one level of undo?” It’s pretty amusing, and a stark illustration of just how far the product has evolved in twenty-five years.
Happy Friday the 13th, the day things are supposed to go wrong and, if Adam Engst, publisher of the venerable TidBITs newsletter for all things Apple, has his way, it’s also occasion to observe a new holiday: International Verify Your Backups Day. Engst first announced this idea back in February when he wrote:
The best defense against entropy is a good backup strategy. To quote a long-ago ad campaign from backup software maker Dantz Development, ‘To go forward, you must back up.’
But as those of us who have had to rely on our backups in the past know, the act of backing up is only the first small step in the full equation—it’s being able to restore that really matters…
I humbly submit that Friday the 13th, whenever it rolls around, should be considered International Verify Your Backups Day. (The United Nations is welcome to make this official.) In 2015, we’ll be celebrating in February, March, and November. If you’re reading this article on some other day, I’d encourage you to verify your backups right away and then continue with the Friday the 13th schedule.
I missed the first one but I did in fact check my backups today to be sure that everything is running as expected. I’m actually a bit of a fanatic when it comes to backups, as I have at least four systems in place to cover my data. First, I use Apple’s TimeMachine software to backup incrementally to an external hard drive attached to my desktop Mac at home, which I consider to be my main computer. That machine is also running CrashPlan, which does a full backup to the cloud. I also run a nightly SuperDuper! script which clones the entirety of my desktop Mac’s contents to one of two alternating 1 TB portable hard drives—I always keep one of them off site, just to be safe. And finally, most of my active projects are saved in DropBox.
Today’s “holiday” helped me realize that I had inadvertently excluded an important directory from CrashPlan’s script, so there was about 10 GB or so that wasn’t getting backed up to CrashPlan’s servers. With all that redundancy, it probably wouldn’t have been too big of a deal if I hadn’t detected it, but I was very glad that I did. So I heartily recommend you verify your own backups today too. The next International Backup Day will be Fr 13 Nov, so don’t wait that long. And if you don’t have any backups of your data—well, just wow.
“Calvin & Hobbes” creator Bill Watterson recently gave an apparently extensive interview for his new collection called “Exploring Calvin & Hobbes.” The Washington Post is running an excerpt of it here. Watterson is famously press shy, so any interview is gold for the many longtime fans of his famous comic strip. His attitude towards his creation’s success is refreshingly humble:
I honestly assumed that the books would go out of print within a few years, once they didn’t have the strip in the newspaper to create the readership for them. But people kept buying the books anyway, and now parents are showing them to their kids, and a new generation is coming up reading the strip. That’s something I never anticipated at all.
As for why it continues to speak to people, I don’t really know. I always tried to make the strip entertaining on several levels, so one aspect might appeal even if others don’t. But really, I was writing to amuse Melissa (my wife) and myself. That’s as far as I understand.
