Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 148
October 30, 2012
Barack Obama by Pete Souza
Photographer Pete Souza has a portfolio of photos of Barack Obama’s rise. Not all of them are as reverential as this one, but they’re still excellent photojournalistic works.
See more here at It’s Nice That or at Souza’s Web site. For our friends on the other side of the aisle, Souza also has a portfolio of equally excellent photographs of President Ronald Reagan, too.
To follow me on Twitter click here.
October 23, 2012
Mutual Mobile Feed Sponsorship
Why work for Mutual Mobile? We’ve grown from a core 5 people in 2009 to just over 200 at the turn of 2012, and we’re poised to double that figure over the next year. Our client list includes companies like Google, Cisco, and Audi, and your skills help build what we offer. It’s an exciting time to be in Austin’s tech scene, and we work to keep things interesting.
Check out our open positions and apply today.
The Laws of Subtraction
I’d blog about this book for the title alone, but the premise is compelling in and of itself: in a world where there is more of everything than ever before, how do we pare down to just the essentials, the things that really matter, thereby simplifying our work, our lives, our thinking? The author, Matthew E. May has written a string of excellent books around the concepts of minimalism and elegance — his previous book, “In Pursuit of Elegance,” made a masterful case for the importance of omission in the act of creating — and is probably the most articulate writers on minimalism of the past decade. Even better, “The Laws of Subtraction” contains a brief contribution from yours truly. Get your copy from Amazon (affiliate link).
To follow me on Twitter click here.
October 22, 2012
Arrow in the Face
This turn of events in the career of Lance Armstrong is stupefying and tragic. But this lead image at the top of one news article about his seven Tour de France titles being taken away from him is unnecessary, if you ask me.
[image error]
I see this kind of thing a lot. As browser-delivered news integrates more and more multimedia, it’s been surprising how little editors, photographers and visual journalists pay attention to this particular detail. More often than not, the preview frame of the playable media is a headshot — just a person’s head and shoulders with a play arrow superimposed on top — and almost always unceremoniously planted right smack-dab in the middle of the person’s face. If you ask me it’s not just unflattering but it’s also frequently inappropriate, even if the subject is undergoing a colossal public shaming of the sort that Armstrong is experiencing.
No one at these news organizations sets out to deface these subjects of course, and certainly no harm is intended. It’s just carelessness in the production process. But it can’t be that hard to find an image where the subject is off-center, thereby avoiding this aesthetically unpleasant and completely unnecessary effect. Generally speaking, that would be more visually interesting than a dead-center shot anyhow, even without the superimposition of the play arrow on top.
To follow me on Twitter click here.
October 19, 2012
Poynter: Clay Shirky on the Nostalgia for Journalistic Centrism
Why is there no longer a consensus understanding of which journalistic organizations are reliable sources for ‘the truth’?
“There’s no way to get Cronkite-like consensus without someone like Cronkite, and there’s no way to get someone like Cronkite in a world with an Internet; there will be no more men like him, because there will be no more jobs like his. To assume that this situation can be reversed, and everyone else will voluntarily sign on to the beliefs of some culturally dominant group, is a fantasy. To assume that they should, or at least that they should hold their tongue when they don’t, is Napoleonic in its self-regard. Yet this is what the people who long for the clarity of the old days are longing for.”
In other words, the 20th Century is really over. Read the rest of this remarkable essay at Poynter.org.
To follow me on Twitter click here.
October 17, 2012
Theaters by Hiroshi Sugimoto
A series of wonderful portraits of American movie screens by the renowned Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The project began in the mid-1970s, and was shot on a 4 x 5 camera, usually surreptitiously.
See more from the series at C4 Gallery.
To follow me on Twitter click here.
October 16, 2012
Sifter Feed Sponsorship
Sifter is a simple project management tool for small teams. It frees you up to focus on shipping better software instead of checking in on team members.
It’s perfect for serving as your team’s central location for capturing and managing all of a project’s issues, questions, bugs and new features. No more swimming through emails or multiple applications to check on the status of an issue. Sifter’s powerful search and filtering make sure you can easily find what you need.
Also, by keeping things obsessively simple, Sifter helps ensure that even the least technical team members feel welcome and comfortable participating so that they can be actively involved in both development and testing without any training.
The result is increased participation working hand-in-hand with a focus on accountability to ensure projects get delivered on time and that nothing slips through the cracks.
The Beauty of the Airline Baggage Tag
This article from Slate calls modern airline baggage tags “a masterpiece of design” for satisfying a myriad of complex and often contradictory manufacturing and usage criteria: they must be cheap and disposable yet reliably durable; they must be easy to attach but impossible to detach — until the user is ready to detach them; and as when they were first introduced they were meant to be compatible with older tracking systems as well as newer systems. Full story here.
To follow me on Twitter click here.
October 15, 2012
TWA Flight Center
From Kathryn Yu, marvelous shots inside the famous and now-shuttered TWA terminal designed by Eero Saarinen.
See Kathryn’s full set on Flickr.
To follow me on Twitter click here.
Khoi Vinh's Blog
- Khoi Vinh's profile
- 5 followers
