Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 106

Unquiet Film Series on Times New Roman

In keeping with the newspaper industry’s fashion for value-add subscription offerings (which I wrote about last month), The Times of London commissioned this short film based on their nearly ubiquitous typeface Times New Roman. It’s part of a video series that’s among the exclusive benefits offered to the paper’s subscribers, though apparently they’ve made it…

John Oliver on Net Neutrality

On his HBO show this past Sunday night, John Oliver let loose this amazing, hilarious, inspired tirade against the FCC’s planned changes to Internet regulation. It runs a bit longer than most TV clips, but it’s highly entertaining and worth every second. +

Social Planes

The team behind the surprisingly popular “Not Available on the App Store” stickers, who are ostensibly studying digital media and interaction at Hyper Island, seem to have a knack for playful ideas that emphasize getting offline. Their newest project is Social Planes and it’s a very simple concept: pre-printed templates for paper airplanes that you…

Two Guest Openers for The Simpsons

Even though I stopped watching “The Simpsons” a long time ago, I’m glad it’s still turning out new episodes—it’s become sort of like background music that I don’t pay much attention to, but that I’ll miss the moment it stops. The producers seem to be trying to keep it lively too, by inviting guest animators…

Remembering Gordon Willis

The amazing cinematographer Gordon Willis passed away two weeks ago. Willis was a monumental talent and one of my personal heroes. I deeply admired the distinctiveness of his vision—and the fact that many of the movies he shot number among my favorites of all time. A brief list includes “The Landlord,” “Klute,” “All the President’s…

The iOS Block

Designer Jay Machalani has a slew of ideas on how to improve iOS, but the best of them is probably what he calls “iOS Blocks.” They’re essentially a card-like mode that allow users to peek into an app for a high-level reading of its most relevant information. This concept video makes a very compelling case…

Andy Warhol’s Lost Floppy Disks

In 1985, Andy Warhol was commissioned to show off the graphics capabilities of the Amiga 1000 personal computer from Commodore. He produced a handful of works which were stored on floppy disks and only recently rediscovered. Here are three of them. The files were apparently saved in an unorthodox fashion, and their recovery required a…

Cover Art for the Muddle Ages

One addendum to yesterday’s post about Elvis Costello: almost without exception, the covers for every one of his post-1980s albums were just terrible. It was hard for me to muster much enthusiasm for “When I Was Cruel,” for example, when the art for it was so unenthusiastic itself. So here’s a cover I made for…

Elvis Costello: The Muddle Ages

Funny things happen to you when you get older, like developing an appreciation for the later efforts in your favorite musicians’ discographies—the ones that you always dismissed as being tired and uninspired when you were too young and foolish to acknowledge that anyone over thirty could do anything interesting. This is what happened to me…

Peter Mendelsund’s Cover

Prolific designer Peter Mendelsund has a “design monograph” coming this August, collecting his many fantastic book covers for Knopf. It’s called, appropriately, “Cover,” and appropriately the design of its cover is genius. Read more about the book on Mendelsund’s blog, or pre-order it at Amazon. Via It’s Nice That. +