Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 101
July 18, 2014
Google, Roboto and Design PR
Google’s endeavors in typography are the subject of an article this week at New York Magazine’s Web site called “Google Is Designing the Font of the Future.” Writer Kevin Roose details the company’s recent history of crafting a proprietary typeface for its Android platform, starting with the little-loved Droid typeface, then the moderately more successful…
Drunk User Testing
This witty bookmarklet simulates the effect of looking at your site while inebriated. It uses JavaScript to seesaw any web page back and forth and slightly blurs the text, recreating with reasonable accuracy a feeling that will be familiar to many of you reading this right now. It claims to give designers and developers “insight…
July 17, 2014
Calculating the True Cost of a Cheeseburger
New York Times columnist Mark Bittman, who has been steadily producing a superb body of work on the hidden implications of the food we eat, details the “true cost of a cheeseburger” in this column. His accounting is based on the economic concept of “externalities,” defined by Wikipedia as a “cost or benefit that affects…
Wrong Answer
This week’s issue of The New Yorker has the story of an epic cheating scandal centering around Parks Middle School in Atlanta, Georgia, where teachers changed answers on standardized tests in order to improve overall results for their school. The article digs beneath the superficial narrative—that Parks teachers forged test answers in order to save…
July 16, 2014
Bélo from Airbnb
Here’s the new Airbnb logo. They call it “the Bélo.” Apparently no one checked for inadvertent sexual connotations. The mark looks like an abstraction of ALL the private parts. I can’t pretend to know what went into designing the Bélo, but the end result is surprisingly tone deaf. This seems like a case of a…
July 15, 2014
The Computer Virus Catalog
Amsterdam-based designer Bas van de Poel created this “illustrated guide to to the worst viruses in computer history.” He asked about two dozen artists to create illustrations of famous offenders like Melissa and Stuxnet. The results are a bit uneven—some are much better than others—and not fully representative of the destructive nature of these viruses—they…
[image error]
Black Dogs Project
Fred Levy’s Black Dogs Project photographs dark-coated canines in hopes of helping to counter black dog syndrome, a phenomenon in which black dogs are adopted at a lower rate—and euthanized at a higher rate—than dogs with lighter coats. The portraits are beautiful, ennobling and, well, humanizing. +
July 14, 2014
Boyhood
Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” out now, was shot over the course of twelve years, for just several days each year, with the same cast. It begins in 2002 with its central protagonist, played by Ellar Coltrane, and follows him through high school graduation and his first day at college. Along the way, you witness time work…
July 12, 2014
LeBron in The New York Times
This is how the front page of today’s Sports section in The New York Times covered LeBron James’s decision to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Pretty clever. +
July 11, 2014
Bayhem
When I wrote my post “Understanding Michael Bay’s Cruel Joke,” I completely forgot that I had bookmarked this fantastic video essay about Bay’s directorial tropes from Every Frame a Painting’s Tony Zhou, posted to YouTube earlier this month. Zhou, a wonderfully literate and accessibly articulate film thinker, dissects Bay’s staging and gets at the heart…
Khoi Vinh's Blog
- Khoi Vinh's profile
- 5 followers
