Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 115

Watchmaker at Work

This promotional video looks over the shoulder of a modern watchmaker as he assembles a NOMOS Glashütte time piece. These high-end German watches are built in-house by the company and assembled using a combination of high tech tools and human craftsmanship. If you enjoy things that are small, beautiful and precise, this video will hypnotize…

Home Improvements

Last weekend I found some time to make some tech improvements to our house which are probably only mildly interesting to most people but hey, that’s why I have this blog. The headline item was probably replacing our generic thermostat with a Nest thermostat. The physical installation was easy, but I was surprised by some…

Businessweek on the Hoefler & Frere-Jones Split

Did you ever think you’d see a 3,500-word article on type design in Businessweek? And did you ever think that piece would be about a contentious $20 million lawsuit over the ownership of a type foundry? Joshua Brustein penned this lengthy overview of the whole messy “divorce” between type designer superstars Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias…

Rein Grotesk

From type foundry The Northern Block: Rein Grotesk is an attractive, sharply modern typeface “with a strong, neutral personality. Its tall structure and open counters make Rein Grotesk a versatile typeface which is both readable at small sizes and legible in any display environment.” Northern Block’s PDF specimen for the typeface is also more playful…

Comic Neue

Designer Craig Ozynski decided that hating Comic Sans wasn’t enough — he wanted to do something about it, too. So he set about reinterpreting the core promise of Comic Sans — a typeface that is distinctly casual and widely accessible — and created Comic Neue, a new typeface that “aspires to be the casual script…

Apple’s Agency

Thanks to the current Apple vs. Samsung trial, this highly revealing email exchange between Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller and his ad agency TBWA/Media Arts Lab became public. It illustrates a contentious relationship between the two parties early last year, when Schiller complained to TBWA about an article in The Wall Street Journal that asks,…

ScanLAB Projects

“Noise: Error in the Void” is an exhibition at London’s Surface Gallery by 3D scanning experts ScanLAB Projects. It includes two films made using the company’s scanning technology, “NOISE//01” and “NOISE//02.” Each film is composed of “a series of orbits around a single, unedited, scan captured in Berlin in November 2013.” While this technology is…

Tax Man

Greg Storey has a painful tale of working with his accountant: Earlier today I wrote out two checks to the IRS and neither of them were for the current tax season. Both were for mistakes that were made in last year’s filling. The mistakes were made by my CPA at the time. This is one…

David Letterman to Retire in 2015

After thirty-two years in late night television, David Letterman announced today that he will retire in 2015. When I was a kid, his original “Late Night with David Letterman” show had already been running a number of years on NBC before I was even aware of what late night talk shows really were. But after…

Milton Glaser Interviewed by Steve Heller

This is a fifty-three minute interview of the legendary graphic designer by the legendary design historian and writer, conducted for the Dublin design conference OFFSET. Early in the discussion, Glaser offers this surprisingly sweeping criticism of “design”: The most corrosive thing about the relationship between design and the public has been the idea that design…