Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 128

Lou Reed, R.I.P.

I don’t have a great Lou Reed story, though I wish I did. I saw him around downtown Manhattan a few times, but never talked to him. The closest I really ever got to him was through his music. When I was fourteen or fifteen and living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., my family took a trip to New York. I was already in love with the city at that time, and I remember stopping by an open air market — probably the one on Broadway near Fourth St — and bought this album:

Actually I bought it on tape, which tells you how old I am. I think I was a dollar short of the cost, but the vendor let me have it anyway, almost like an elder hipster passing along an heirloom to a wannabe hipster.

It didn’t change my life the way rock albums are supposed to do, but I did fall deeply in love with it, listening to it constantly for years. It was a big part of that era of my life, as were the other Velvet Underground albums and many of Reed’s solo albums. Thanks, Lou.

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ThinkUp Transforms

Since leaving Etsy over the summer I’ve had the good fortune of working on lots and lots of interesting things with lots of interesting people. At some point, I will provide a more thorough accounting of what that stuff is, but one of the best projects on my plate is helping my friends Anil Dash and Gina Trapani with their new company ThinkUp.

ThinkUp was actually an app before it was a company. In fact, you can download the open source version right now, which you can install on your own server. Even with that old school distribution model for Web software, the product has already gained a devoted following of tens of thousands of users. Now Gina and Anil are transforming it into a centrally hosted service, easy enough for everyone to use without having to wrestle with the complexity of running your own server.

What is ThinkUp? Anil and Gina answer that question in great detail here and here, but I like to think of it as an insight engine for your social network activity. It looks at your postings and returns a myriad of fascinating statistics and revelations about the who, what, where, when, why and how of your tweets and updates. Aside from being really smart, it’s also loads of fun.

Gina and Anil’s ambition is not just to transform ThinkUp into a much easier to use, much more robust product, but also to build a new company in the process — a different kind of company. Like any startup, they want to achieve hockey stick growth, but they also want to do that in the framework of “a great tech company that’s focused on doing the right thing for our users, our community, and the Web.” They are just as proud of the list of privacy-compromising features that ThinkUp doesn’t engage in as what the software does do.

To pull this off, they are in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign that will fuel this journey. I encourage you to read all about it on the campaign page to get a sense of how unique their mission is, and join the campaign.

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Designing Modern Women, 1890-1990

A new exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

“Modern design of the twentieth century was profoundly shaped and enhanced by the creativity of women — as muses of modernity and shapers of new ways of living, and as designers, patrons, performers and educators. This installation, drawn entirely from MoMA’s collection, celebrates the diversity and vitality of individual artists’ engagement in the modern world, from Loïe Fuller’s pulsating turn-of-the-century performances to April Greiman’s 1980s computer-generated graphics, at the vanguard of early digital design.”

Included: Linder Sterling’s still awesome design for the Buzzcocks’ “Orgasm Addict.”

More information at MoMA.

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AIGA’s “False Choice”

AIGA recently put forward a proposal to sell its not quite iconic but still spiritually critical national headquarters, situated in a hugely desirable lot on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The building was bought in a fundraising campaign in 1994 — “The money was raised through blood, sweat and tears, and it was a grand moment in the organization’s then 80-year history” — and is now worth nearly twenty times what was paid for it.

A list of notable designers including Michael Bierut, Hugh Dubberly, Steven Heller, Paula Scher and others believe this proposal is ill advised, and in this blog post on Design Observer, come out squarely against it.

“In short, we believe the proposed choices outlining the future of AIGA are misguided, misinformed and manipulative, and should be regarded skeptically by our fellow members. We want you to know what’s going on with your organization. We urge you to reject this false choice.”

You don’t see much dissension in the graphic design community, so this is conflict of the highest order. Every signatory to this objection is a former AIGA board member, president and/or medalist. The public nature of this dispute between actors who have been historically aligned so closely is unprecedented. Read the full post here.

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Interdisciplinary Interaction Design

Yesterday I took the train to Baltimore to moderate a panel with three of that city’s leading digital design practitioners, as part of the local AIGA chapter’s ambitious Design Week. On stage with me were Andy Mangold of Friends of the Web, April Osmanof of Fastspot, and James Pannafino of Millersville University. It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed meeting the Baltimore chapter immensely.

It was also my first introduction to James, and his book “Interdisciplinary Interaction Design: A Visual Guide.”

The book’s title is more than a mouthful of syllables, but its contents are expertly succinct and useful. It is truly a “visual guide” to the sometimes amorphous concepts that guide work in our profession, from affordances to Fitts’s Law to user errors. Each concept is explained clearly and thoughtfully, with crisp, unfussy illustrations that help root its central idea in real world examples. It’s truly excellent, and highly recommended. Find out more at the book’s site and order it from Amazon.

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Recreating iOS 7 in Microsoft Word

The hook of this is “Was iOS 7 created in Microsoft Word?,” which is slightly provocative but not really the point. Rather, this time lapse video actually shows the upgraded operating system’s entire home screen — app icons and all ” being recreated using the infamously tetchy and primitive design tools in Microsoft Word. It’s surprisingly compelling to watch. See it at YouTube.

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Domaine Display

The font co-op and marketplace Village recently relaunched its Web site (beautifully designed by Oak). I find that Village is the font source that I return to most consistently — the quality of typefaces there is superb. My current favorite is Domaine Display.

The Domaine family is from typographer Kris Sowersby. It comes in a full array of weights, but Display is by far the most interesting. More here.

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Night Mode for Mobile

If you’re reading a book late at night on your phone or tablet, being able to set the interface to night mode is essential. Dimming the screen to black and reversing the user interface elements and text out of that background is much easier on the eyes in a darkened room, and easier on relationships, too, if your partner is trying to sleep next to you. I use this all the time in both Kindle and iBooks (the latter, by the way, is my preferred reading app because of the former’s eye-gouging use of justified text — how do people read in that app?!).

But if you’re reading your email, Instapaper, Twitter, your RSS client, or just about anything on your mobile device, there’s no night mode. In fact, outside of these book reader apps, I can’t think of another app that acknowledges the fact that sometimes users open devices in dimly lit environments, and that an interface with a single level of brightness may not apply to every situation.

Dim the House Lights

I’ll go even further and say that I believe it’s not just individual developers who are remiss here, but the operating system vendors themselves. There should be a globally available night mode option embedded into iOS, Android, etc., and that makes this concept a central tenet of mobile app design. Few things strike me as more integrally mobile than software that allows its hardware to respond to its environment, much as GPS chips and accelerometers do. The iPhone clearly has the ability to detect ambient light and adjust its screen automatically, which is helpful, but it does relatively little with this use case.

Right: iBooks’ night mode theme.

Apple should offer an API that lets developers specify a night mode interface for their apps, and that mode should be available from a system-wide switch. So instead of turning iBooks or Kindle to night mode individually, one flip of that switch would turn the whole device to night mode. In the beginning, of course, not every app will support this, but if Apple provides dim-light versions of the home screen, Mail, Messages, iTunes, Settings and other essential apps, that in itself would be a huge boon.

To some extent, this functionality exists already. Included among iOS’s accessibility controls is a switch that will allow you to invert the colors of the screen globally, turning everything dark to light and vice versa. It’s not a bad approximation of a true night mode, but it’s somewhat kludgy.

What would be even better is a setting with truer sensitivity to the user’s environment. I thought of this when I saw that the f.lux utility was recently upgraded after a long interregnum. F.lux adjusts the color temperature of your Mac, Windows or Unix desktop to match the ambient light in your environment, adapting to the cooler light of morning and the warmer light of the evening so that the screen you’re looking at feels like what’s around you.

I don’t use it myself, partly because as a designer the idea of messing with color temperature in so variable a way seems anathema to working with color. But it’s also true that since the advent of the iPhone and iPad I have little use for my laptop and desktop in low light situations — I don’t need this functionality in OS X, I need it in iOS. Everyone I know who uses f.lux, is a huge fan of it; I suspect similar functionality on iOS would be even more enthusiastically received.

Correction: folks point out that there are in fact a number of reading apps that have night mode, including Instapaper, Pocket, and at least one Twitter client, Twitterific. Still, I’d like to see more, and see OS-level support for it.

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Pierre Omidyar and Glenn Greenwald’s New Journalism Venture

Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar has joined forces with Guardian civil liberties/U.S. national security columnist Glenn Greenwald to form a new journalism venture. Jay Rosen talked to Omidyar about this and offers early details, though the shape of the new company and its products is still very much undetermined.

Combined with Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post, this seems to indicate that we are in for some innovations in news in the next year or two. It’s also interesting how these events replicate the old pattern of successful entrepreneurs in other industries turning to journalism and media to help cement their legacies.

Read Rosen’s write-up of Omidyar and Greenwald’s venture at his Press Think blog.

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