Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 122

Lítio

For a while now, I’ve worried that the very specific “wireframe” visual language of iOS 7’s icons would cause a stylistic hegemony in which all icons would look essentially the same. Designer André Gonçalves’s new Lítio icon pack is a convincing counter-argument; they fit in nicely with the iOS 7 style book but have a unique, playful personality.

Gonçalves is selling them for just US$19, but you can grab a selection of forty of them for free.

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Should Designers Trust Their Instincts or the Data?

A thoughtful article from Braden Kowitz, design partner at Google Ventures, who has worked extensively with early stage startups for the past several years.

“From my perspective working with over 80 product teams, data is important, but there’s no replacement for design instincts built on a foundation of experiences — including failures. As engineering and design become ever closer collaborators, the biggest challenge is to make decisions through a careful balance between data and instinct.”

His argument for a balanced approach is unlikely to settle this issue definitively, but it’s well worth reading in full at the Google Ventures site.

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The Modern House

To some extent the whole real estate industry is predicated on a form of voyeurism, but this site, from independent U.K. real estate agency The Modern House, is probably a bit more voyeuristic than most. The agency specializes in a particular brand of property:

“Whether it’s a Modernist house, a cutting-edge contemporary apartment or anything in between, we specialise exclusively in modern properties. No-one understands this sector of the market as intimately as us. This is what we do. It is all we do.”

Their site, which is appropriately better built than the vast majority of real estate listings sites, is basically pr0n for lovers of Modernist or “architect-designed” residences. The property photos tend to look not much like your house. For example:

They’re also priced accordingly. Feast your eyes at themodernhouse.net.

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Announcing Kidpost

For parents of young kids, like my wife and me, photos have become an inextricable part of how we think about our family, both within our household and amongst all of our relatives. Photo documentation for the benefit of all of our loved ones — grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, family friends of all kinds — is now a part of raising kids in a way that it never was before the advent of the digital camera.

In some ways, it’s easier than ever for us to get images of our kids to those who care about them most, but in other ways it’s still much harder than it should be, too. I know for a fact that the sheer number of venues for sharing has made it difficult for my parents and in-laws to keep up with the images that Laura and I post to Facebook, Flickr, Instagram and other services. And truth be told, even I frequently miss some of the photos that Laura posts, too.

I started thinking about this problem last fall; why shouldn’t it be possible to knit these services together via email, the most universally accessible channel that we have? All we’d really need to solve this problem would be an automated service that rounds up all of the kid-related content that Laura and I post each week and then sends it out in a summary email. It wouldn’t require either of us to post to any new services or change our current sharing behaviors, and it would only ask our relatives to do something they’re already doing: check their email. It seemed like something that really ought to exist.

After talking this problem through with my friends Matt and Mike and finding that everyone we asked thought it was a good idea, we decided to go ahead and build it for real. Today we’re pre-announcing Kidpost, a service which bundles up your kid-related content from your social network accounts into a private, weekly email that gets sent to family members and friends of your choosing.

We’re deep in development for it right now, but our ambition for Kidpost is to build something incredibly simple and lightweight. Once you authorize Kidpost to access your various accounts, it will simply watch for posts that you tag appropriately, and will aggregate them automatically. That’s all you have to do. As the account holders, parents control the content of the emails and who receives them — you can add as many people as you like to your email group, and the recipients don’t need to sign up for new accounts or download apps or visit a new service of any kind.

Kidpost will be ready this spring, but as we build it we want to solicit feedback from interested parents and relatives. If you sign up on our home page now, we’ll give you early access, and we’ll also give you a discount on the paid plan when it launches. Just head on over to Kidpost.net. And watch this space for future updates!

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Polaroids by Andy Warhol

This is everything I love and hate about Andy Warhol. On the one hand, I despise the way he created a self-perpetuating framework for the continual worship of celebrities. On the other hand, these simple Polaroids he took of his contemporaries were just phenomenal and retain a singular beauty that’s both naive and deeply penetrating all at once.

Found via It’s Nice That.

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Animated Sexploitation Features from the 60s and 70s

For the historically minded, this post at Cartoon Brew rounds up ten NSFW animated works from the dustbins of history.

“For a brief decade-long period in animation history, between the late-1960s and late-1970s, feature animation filmmakers cast aside their inhibitions and created films that aimed to titillate and shock audiences with the novelty of sexual cartoon imagery… The diversity of graphic approaches was impressive: some of the films made pretensions to high art while others aspired to match the energy of underground comix.”

Thanks to the power of YouTube, you can watch all ten from a private corner in the coffee break room at your office. Read more here.

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Quartz: Frere-Jones Vs. Hoefler

This makes me sad, because I know both Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. They built an amazing company and have already made more than their share of indelible contributions to typography, if not to Western culture. Now their partnership seems broken forever, as the latter is suing the former over a dispute in company ownership.

“In a blistering lawsuit filed today in New York City, Frere-Jones says he was duped into transferring ownership of several fonts, including the world-famous Whitney, to Hoefler & Frere-Jones (HFJ) on the understanding that he would own 50% of the company.&#8221

I have no insight into this matter, but it seems inevitable that someone will emerge from this as a bad guy, and someone will emerge from this as a loser. Read the full article at Quartz.

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Ten Most Popular Web Fonts of 2013

Designer Jeremiah Shoaf went through the sites featured last year at Typewolf, his superb design inspiration site, and came up with this list of the most popular web fonts used among them. It’s not a scientific list by any means, but it’s a useful insight into what some of the best designers were using last year. I hope he keeps doing this annually; as web fonts evolve and become more pervasive, this kind of survey is bound to get more interesting. Read the full list of the ten most popular web fonts of 2013 here.

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Storehouse

Even as tablets get ever more popular, it still strikes me that we’re not fully tapping their inherent, unique potential to get people making things. To some extent, the early indictment that they are primarily consumption devices is more true than I thought would be the case four years after their debut.

We tried to change this perception with Mixel, but we didn’t make nearly as much progress as I had hoped. That’s why I was so excited when my friend Mark Kawano started a company with the express purpose of transforming the iPad into an intuitive, powerful, emotionally immersive storytelling platform. Today, Storehouse debuts in the App Store and it’s beautiful.

Storehouse bills itself as “The easiest way to way to create, share, and discover beautiful stories.” It lets you pull in your images from everywhere and arrange them into superbly elegant narratives — all within one of the most amazingly supple editing environments ever built on iOS (and that’s saying something). It’s a total joy to use.

Full disclosure: aside from being a friend of Mark’s, I’m also an advisor to Storehouse Media Inc. But that shouldn’t stop you from downloading it and deciding for yourself, because Storehouse is completely free.

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The Pain of Previewing iOS Apps

We’re starting to roll out preview builds of our iPhone app at Wildcard. If you’d like to get your hands on one, sign up for access on our home page and we’ll add you to the list.

Distributing previews of iOS software is notoriously difficult and has gotten only incrementally easier over the years. There’s no method that anyone would call elegant or even low-friction, TestFlight, HockeyApp and corporate IT-brewed solutions included.

Worse, the logistical complexity of getting a preview build on a device that belongs to a novice user can often spoil the mindset of that tester. If you’re building an app that’s ostensibly trying to make life easier for someone, yet the very act of installing it on that person’s device is fraught with points of failure, you stand a pretty good chance of losing their faith in your product.

This happens so often that at Wildcard we decided that the least we could do was to explain how it works with much greater specificity, to try and fill in all of the gaps in the process. My colleague Steve Meszaros put together this preview installation guide, which includes detailed instructions and screen grabs from the key UI elements to be found throughout the whole, convoluted process. We revised it several times, and will probably keep revising it, as we try to make it as helpful as possible for our users.

Still, as we worked on it, we were practically laughing with incredulity that something like this was even necessary. It seems to me that Apple’s desire to keep developer-distributed software on a tight leash, which is at the root of the complexity in this process, is in no way inherently opposed to the idea that a test user’s installation experience can be simple, elegant, even delightful. Things should be much easier than this.

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