Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 112

Sketch Generator Plugin

This plugin automatically creates placeholder content for design mockups within Bohemian Coding’s Sketch. Once installed, selecting a menu item will instantly generate photographic avatars, hypothetical user names and geo location data. This animation demonstrates how ridiculously easy it is to turn standard rounded rectangles into user avatars. The plugin was created by Timur Carpeev and…

Questioning Design-driven Products

This excellent essay by Mills Baker questions the premium placed on designer-driven products over the past year or two. It cites Dropbox’s Carousel and Facebook’s Paper in particular for delivering high touch design solutions that have managed to achieve only poor adoption rates. And if our best designers, ensconced in their labs with world-class teams,…

Wireless Savings Calculator

The Wall Street Journal tries to make sense of the intricate, often confounding wireless service options available from the major North American carriers with this interactive calculator/wizard thingy. I wanted to call this tool “simple” but nothing about wireless plans is simple, and one look at it would belie such a label. So maybe it’s…

Moves Acquired

I wrote about the amazing mobile app Moves — billed as the “activity diary for your life” — last year and praised it immensely. For me, it was then and remains today a sterling example of software that is not only unique to the mobile experience, but transcendent because it is inherently mobile. In my…

iPotty

I’m a big believer in the transformative power of the iPad, but there is no way that I’m buying this potty training seat with an integrated iPad stand for my twin 15-month boys: Its official name is “The 2-in-1 iPotty with Activity Seat for iPad,” and the geniuses responsible for it are called CTA Digital.…

Fold Yard

French designer Benoit Challand believes that the monotony of office cubicles can be remedied with typography. His project “Fold Yard” imagines workspaces as large-scale typographic forms. At standing or sitting height the shapes are not recognizable, but their variety theoretically breaks up the office landscape enough to please the eye. When seen from above, they…

Brand Minimalism

Art in America Magazine has this look back at an exhibition from 1980 that examined the striking similarities between minimalist art and corporate identity design. Titled “Objects and Logotypes: Relationships Between Minimalist Art and Corporate Design” and curated by Buzz Spector, the show juxtaposed identities for companies like the Aluminum Company of America, Chase Manhattan…

Typekit Practice

Adobe’s Typekit team recently launched this pedagogical microsite devoted to helping their customers hone their typographic skills. It’s built around practical lessons — there are two so far — that dive into the finer details of setting type for the web. It already looks like a good resource; if Adobe remains committed to it and it keeps…

The Last Record Shop

A community artspace in Hamtramck, Michigan is planning this fall to turn its gallery space into a fictional record shop, replete with fictional albums. They’re soliciting the public at large — designers, really — to create made-up record sleeves for made-up bands, which they will use to stock the shop’s bins. The finished sleeve should…

Nikki Sylianteng’s NYC Parking Signs

It wasn’t that long ago when New York City’s parking signs were famously redesigned by Michael Bierut at Pentagram, but that apparently didn’t satisfy designer Nikki Sylianteng. She took it upon herself to craft an altogether new design that eschews Pentagram’s textual approach and opts for a visual representation of parking schedules. On her portfolio…