Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 125

Our Drone Future

My friend Alex Cornell made this short movie speculating on what a future with drone technology might be like.

Because I know Alex as a friend and designer, it’s hard for me be objective — do I find this remarkable because I know the filmmaker, or because it’s genuinely impressive? It’s not just the camerawork and effects that I think are so good; Alex and his crew really nailed the voiceover work too. At the very least, it’s an entertaining three minutes.

Watch the video on YouTube.

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Unbearably Light Icons

Love it or hate it, the wispy, thread-like aesthetic of iOS 7’s icon language is here to stay, at least for a while. Designers of stock icons are embracing it too, and if the sheer volume of new icons they’re turning out is any indication, this visual vernacular is probably not the most laborious style to work within.

Morphix Design Studio’s long-standing Picons catalog has just released a Picons Thin set, which includes five hundred icons for just US$49. That’s less than 11¢ each!

Not to be outdone, Vincent Le Moign’s new Streamline Icons pack comes with one thousand, six-hundred and forty icons for US$67 — but they’re on sale at a “launch price” of US$47 until this evening.

Which one is the better set? I’m not sure there’s a value judgment to be made between them. You can buy both and cover all of your icon needs for less than a hundred dollars, which is a ridiculous bargain. Let’s take stock: we live in a time when designers’ tools have become almost unreasonably plentiful and inexpensive.

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Helvetica: The Perfume

Someone clever is very proud of themselves:

“In 1957, Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann set out to create a new sans-serif typeface for the Swiss design market. Their goal: to create a highly legible and completely neutral expression of the Modernist design movement to which they belonged. This typeface was to have no intrinsic meaning, allowing the content to convey the message… It is in this spirit that Guts and Glory have created the ultimate Modernist perfume — a scent distilled down to only the purest and most essential elements to allow you, the content, to convey your message with the utmost clarity. Air. Water. You.”

Available in a numbered, limited edition of 3,000 for US$62 per bottle from Moss Pop.

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Solo

Beautiful work from this two-year old studio founded by Óscar Germade in Barcelona. I’m particularly fond of the way the work samples are photographed.

More work at Solofficial.com. Via Typewolf.

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Skew

A charming, hand-animated ode to a passing era in interface design. “As skeuomorphism fades from popularity, ‘Skew’ turns the idea on its head: we re-made some well known skeuomorphic interface designs in the materials and objects they were trying to imitate.”

Watch the video here.

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Nelson Mandela on Apple.com

Nelson Mandela’s passing at age ninety-five is being honored everywhere, including the Apple home page.

This is going to seem churlish of me, but I can’t help but think that it would be more in keeping with Mandela’s legacy if, rather than waiting until a truly great black man dies to put his image on their home page, Apple could routinely allow a worthy living black man to appear on this page:

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Offline Magazine

Among the many things I’ve been working on for the past six months is spending a bit of time helping entrepreneurs Tom Smith and Brad Flaugher realize their very canny vision for mobile publishing. It’s called Offline Magazine, and it debuts today in the App Store.

Each month, Offline delivers five essays about culture, comedy or design, curated as a proper issue (I wrote one of the pieces in the debut edition). The Offline app itself is beautifully designed (not by me, but by Trevor Baum) and purpose-built for mobile reading. That last bit is incredibly important; this is a reading experience expressly designed to complement reading habits on phones and tablets, not demand new, unnatural ones.

Reading on the Go

The five essays are packaged together so that they add up to about an hour’s worth of content, and so they can be read on commutes or in short bursts on the go. Even better, each essay is accompanied by a spoken word audio version — delightfully read by a professional voice actor. The audio experience is fantastic, in my opinion, and a much more useful expression of ‘multimedia’ than what is usually passed off under that rubric.

What makes Offline even more interesting is its model for compensating writers. As TechCrunch explains it:

“The payment scale will be based on giving each writer 10% of the app’s revenue. Smith says that he hopes to eventually pay up to $5,000-$10,000 for an article this way, far above the industry averages of $0.50-$2.00 a word. The pieces typically run around 1,000 words, though some are longer and some are shorter.


“Offline’s pieces are initially all sourced from writers and personalities with large online followings. Because the payment for articles comes in the form of a percentage of revenue, there is incentive for those contributors to promote the app as much as possible. This ‘word of audience’ is what Smith is counting on to spread the word about the app initially.”

Who knows if this will work, but it’s as adventurous and savvy a guess as to what will work in the new landscape for paid content as any publisher has come up with. What’s more, this kind of big picture thinking, in which creative (but not overbearing) problem solving is applied to both the user experience as well as the author experience is what so many content ventures are missing, if you ask me.

Find out more at Offline Mag or download from the App Store.

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Eighty-five Years of the Projection Booth in Movies

This is lovely. It’s a super-cut called “Projection: Eighty-five Years of the Projection Booth in Movies.”

“This 12-minute film created by Joseph O. Holmes features clips from forty-six different films that take place in a projection booth, from Buster Keaton’s ‘Sherlock, Jr.’ all the way up to Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Basterds.’ The short debuted at the Redstone Theater at The Museum of the Moving Image on October 4, 2013, as part of the opening reception for Holmes’s ‘The Booth: The Final Days of Film Projection,’ an exhibition of photographs which continues through January 2014.”

You can watch “Projection” on Vimeo.

By the way, images from “The Booth” are included in Holmes’s 2013 Annual, which is available for order now.

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User Onboarding

This “frequently-updated compendium of web app first-run experiences” could turn into a valuable resource. Its purpose is to break down the design, user experience, marketing and customer touchpoint aspects of how various successful Web products bring first-time users into the fold. The list of teardowns so far is not enormous, but each is thoughtful and revealing. My biggest complaint, though, is that these are focused on the desktop Web; teardowns of mobile native apps are much more critical, I find, and would make for a much more revealing survey.

Visit Useronboard.com.

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Hel-F’ing-Vetica Shirts Are Back

From time to time, I get asked to bring back the “Hel-F’ing-Vetica” shirts that I first ran many years ago. Last week I finally got around to accommodating those requests via Spreadshirt, which allows users to print tee-shirts on-demand. They have a process called flex printing that is very close to traditional silkscreening, which even allowed me to run the design with a bit of silver, shown here on a heather gray American Apparel tee:

Even better, because the Spreadshirt route allows me to sell without having to hold inventory, customers can now get this design on long-sleeved tees, hoodies and — finally — women’s tees, too. You can visit my Spreadshirt shop here to get yours for the holidays!

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