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.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about comic books, in a way that I haven’t since I was fifteen. This kind of started when I bought “The Comics Journal Library: Jack Kirby,” a compendium of interviews with and essays about the legendary Jack Kirby, who is often referred to as the most influential artist to ever work in comic books. The book is LP-sized and loaded with terrific samples of Kirby’s singular, hyper-dynamic brand of art, but it’s also wonderfully rich in its essays and musings on Kirby’s place in history. You would expect no less from the laudably literary minds at The Comics Journal.
I’m a big fan of the comic book artist Mike Mignola, who brings a noirish sense of design to his Jack Kirby-esque compositions. His Hellboy series is destined for the silver screen sometime next year — with the help of Guillermo Del Toro — and I can’t wait.
It’s hot enough to fry an egg in New York, and therefore hot enough to fry a dog’s brain. It’s so hot it’s got to be unhealthy.Anyway, I’m staying indoors, staying cool, and reading crap like the hilarious adventure of Buddy Weiserman and the Gold Treasure of Sierra Leone. The name Buddy Weiserman, a riff on ‘Budweiser,’ is a prankster’s invention, and this site details Buddy’s hilarious email exchanges with a so-called prince that claims to have a stash of gold to unload at below-market prices. It’s a classic Nigerian 419 crime, and you may have received spam along these lines yourself, which makes it funnier to see someone turn the tables on the con artists. [Human error screwed up this post, which was supposed to have appeared on Wed 03 Jul, so I’m appending it here.]
On a whim, I went to see Margaret Cho’s new concert film, “Notorious C.H.O.” on Wednesday evening. It’s frequently hilarious and I admire the nose-to-the-grindstone way she has rebuilt her post-“All-American Girl” career. I didn’t realize until arriving at the theater that it was opening night, or that Cho would be there in person, or that she was going to be actually standing at the theater door, greeting moviegoers and taking each person’s ticket. It was a cute gesture.
On my way home from a weekend trip to Washington, D.C., I passed a guy selling random goods — used books, used records, discarded knick-knacks — on the First Avenue sidewalk. I’m not talking about a flea market table, even; this stuff was literally spread out on the concrete. Among the items he had for sale was this beautiful 1974 NYC Transit Authority subway map, based on the original 1972 design by Vignelli Associates. He sold it to me for US$2, a real find! I’m totally elated to have a copy of this design classic.
WorldCom, only the most recent company to fess up to its scandalous accounting practices, has got me thinking. First, I can’t imagine that this is the last accounting scandal we’ll see, and not just in the corporate sector. There are lots of economic numbers that the government has been churning out for the past several years that will be similarly re-adjusted, further undermining our struggling economy. Much messiness lies ahead.Second, I think this terrible economic hangover is the result of an MBA culture run amuck. We’re emerging from an age now wherein corporate officers have no idea how to run the businesses for which they are ostensibly responsible; they’re self-styled deal makers who are interested only in moving money around, cutting deals and talking in the abstract about ‘vision.’ (I know this from working at my last job at a major Web services agency, where neither the CEO nor the COO had a clue about how to run a services company, much less how to put up a Web page.)The next generation of successful CEOs will be much more hands on, will know how to use and sell their own services, will roll up their sleeves and become engaged in the development and the marketing of their own products. Less the Jack Welch-style of leadership, more the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs-style of leadership.Finally, isn’t “WorldCom” a completely ridiculous name, when you stop and think about it? It’s the kind of name they’d give a fictional, evil multinational in a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
For kicks, I installed a copy of the Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice.org 1.0 on my laptop running Windows 2000. The installation process is notably slick for an open source project, and it’s a nice feeling knowing that one can download, install and use this software suite for the price of absolutely zero. The programs performed acceptably, too — my Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents were passably (though not perfectly) translated by their OpenOffice.org counterparts. With luck, this suite will become a viable alternative to Microsoft’s, but it has a long way to go before it can quit playing catch-up merely to achieve parity with Office’s ever-widening range of bloatware features. I wish them luck.
Last week I helped some friends out by resurrecting their original Bondi-blue iMac, which was dogged by corrupted system files and extensions conflicts. All it took was reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling the system software — I updated it to Mac OS 9.1. It struck me how incredibly easy it is to perform maintenance on the ‘Classic’ flavor of the Mac OS, and how, in spite of its kludgey late history, it remains in essence an incredibly elegant system. I’m still looking forward to moving over to Mac OS X, but I’ll miss the structural transparency of its predecessor.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about comic books, in a way that I haven’t since I was fifteen. This kind of started when I bought “
Congratulations to Gicheol Lee of 
I’m a big fan of the comic book artist Mike Mignola, who brings a noirish sense of design to his Jack Kirby-esque compositions. His 
It’s hot enough to fry an egg in New York, and therefore hot enough to fry a dog’s brain. It’s so hot it’s got to be unhealthy.Anyway, I’m staying indoors, staying cool, and reading crap like the hilarious adventure of 
On a whim, I went to see 
On my way home from a weekend trip to Washington, D.C., I passed a guy selling random goods — used books, used records, discarded knick-knacks — on the First Avenue sidewalk. I’m not talking about a flea market table, even; this stuff was literally spread out on the concrete. Among the items he had for sale was this beautiful 
WorldCom, only the most recent company to fess up to its 
For kicks, I installed a copy of the Microsoft Office alternative 
Last week I helped some friends out by resurrecting their original Bondi-blue