Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 109

Gender Inequality at Tech Companies

This visualization of the disparity in male and female engineers employed at roughly one-hundred fifty tech companies is unsurprising but astonishing nevertheless. Whether the companies are large or small or young or old, the split tends to look something like this: Less than one in ten companies can claim that even a third of their…

Gentlemen of Letters

A superb, engrossing, sixteen-minute documentary about the multi-generational tradition of hand-painted signs in Dublin, Ireland and the men who still brave cold, rain and terrible parking to carry it forward. The word “typography” isn’t uttered once (or I didn’t catch it, anyway), which says something about how these practitioners think about their work: it’s a…

Sanchez Slab

I have a conflicted relationship with slab serif typefaces — sometimes called Egyptians. On the one hand, I find their bold forms enticing; they definitely don’t lack for personality. But it can be difficult to use them tastefully; their emphatic shapes often easily overpower the content. I often see designers turn to perennial slab favorite…

The Seduction of the Superficial

Peter Merholz notes how the discourse around digital product design has shifted towards the superficial. To him, debates over flat versus skeuomorphic, color schemes, parallax scrolling and other presentational techniques are a distraction from the lower strata of his colleague Jesse James Garrett’s five planes of user experience rubric. His position is not altogether condemnatory,…

Dear Massimo Vignelli

The great Massimo Vignelli, legendary designer who shaped much of the late Twentieth Century’s visual language, is seriously ill. Creative Reviews says that he “will be spending his last days at home.” This makes me terribly sad; Vignelli is a personal hero and his work means a lot to me. Michael Bierut, who worked at…

Building a Better Umbrella

Springtime means rain, which means umbrellas. Except, a few years ago I resolved not to carry an umbrella with me unless it was really pouring out. It’s rare that I’ll head out in the morning with one now, and since then I’ve found that in most cases when there’s rain in the forecast one of…

Mother’s Day 2014

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Writing for Interfaces

John Zeratsky of the Google Ventures design team recently posted this article about writing good copy for user interfaces, and it’s well worth a read. Zeratsky sets out five high-level principles: Clarity is king Personality doesn’t matter as much as you think Just tell me By the way, people do read Writing is part of…

Illustrations by Stéphane Manel

These portraits by Parisian illustrator Stéphane Manel are wonderful — the linework is supple and organic without being ostentatious, and of course his ability to capture likenesses is uncanny. I also enjoy that a contemporary illustrator is finding opportunities to render the stars of yesteryear — just because I’m an old codger, I guess. Lots…

Not Available on the App Store

This got a tremendous response when I tweeted it last week so I thought it was worth repeating here. A trio of friends had the idea to distribute these stickers that riff on the prevalence of apps — their goal is to encourage people to put down their smartphones and engage with the physical world.…