Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 160
March 23, 2012
The Mad Men Fairytale
I bet I know what many of you will be doing this Sunday night: tuning into the season 5 premiere of "Mad Men," AMC's pop cultural (if not exactly popular) hit about the advertising world of the 1960s. Anticipation for this delayed season has been running high; I know at least one person who has been re-watching the previous season's episodes to 'get ready."
That level of dedication astounds me. I count myself as a "Mad Men" devotee, but personally I couldn't justify spending another thirteen hours of my life simply studying up on it. But, hey, more power to those who can afford the time.
It's still not exactly clear to me why this show, whose ratings are modest, exerts such a strong pull on our collective imagination. I tried to unpack some possible reasons for this last year when I wrote that "Mad Men" was really about furniture, and suggested that it taps into the interior decorator fantasies that many of its fans hold. I still think that's true, but I think the larger point may be that the series is not really a daydream that all of its fans share, but rather it's a daydream of old media. In this age when the old brands that once ruled American commerce are now diminished, and with so much of the coming century feeling unsettled and uncentered, "Mad Men" is a kind of bedtime story that media tells itself about how powerful it used to be. It's something like the inflated tales of lost motherlands that immigrants tell their children; we're in an age now when the landscape of "Mad Men" seems like a grand old folktale of kings and queens. This is what happens when old ways die; we start telling nostalgic fairy tales about what they used to be.
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March 22, 2012
Get on the Bjango Wagon
Marc Edwards over at Bjango is an extremely knowledgable and talented app designer and developer. If you make apps and you're not reading his blog, you're missing out on a great education. Last year he wrote a phenomenally helpful article on "pixel-perfect vector nudging" in Photoshop that was probably the single most useful tip I read anywhere in 2011. These articles are free, but I'd pay real money for them, just as I paid for his excellent Skala Preview, a Mac OS X desktop application and iOS app that lets you send real-time previews of your Photoshop work to your iPad or iPhone. It's simple, elegant and awesome. This morning he also updated his shockingly comprehensive iOS Photoshop Actions and Workflows to version 1.2, with some minor tweaks and support for Photoshop CS6 (already!). In short, Marc is making incredible contributions to the field; give him a bit of your attention and, if Skala Preview strikes your fancy, a bit of your money. You'll be well rewarded.
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March 21, 2012
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Mag+ on Retina iPads and File Size
One of the creators of the Mag+ platform for publishing content in the form of magazine-like tablet apps has some thoughts on the new iPad and the file size implications of its high-definition screen. This is in response to some speculation that when Retina-optimized magazine apps hit the market, the file size of these already bandwidth-hungry apps will balloon even further. The writer argues:
"I don't believe people actually give a flying frog about file size — they care about value."
Personally, the only tablet magazine app that I still use with any regularity is The New Yorker's iPad app. As I've said before, I only download it to read the text and could care less about whatever value-add that its enormous download size is supposedly delivering. I've also said many times before that I believe most people don't care about the value-add, that they would be just as happy to get a plain text version of the content without all of the design fussiness that these apps seem to think is indispensable. In fact, I would prefer a plainer version of the content, as I can't tell you how often its heavy download demands have proved to be inconvenient; few things are as irritating as trying to get out the door in the morning when this app is leisurely downloading superfluous ads that I could care less about.
That said, Mag+ is essentially right that file size does not matter — or at least that it will matter less in the long-term. Eventually we will get enough bandwidth so that we can download the 150 megabytes or more that these apps ask us to retrieve. Though what I fear is that when we have that capacity, publishers will be asking us to download gigabytes per issue; this is after all an industry that cannot resist imposing greater and greater demands on its users in order to impress itself.
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Last Week at The Walker
Last week, after attending SXSW in Austin, I flew to Minneapolis to give a talk at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, as part of their amazing Insights series. The folks at the Walker are incredible; not just as designers and propagators of design culture, but also as hosts, I had a great time.
Let's Go to the Videotape
A couple of days ago, they posted the video of my talk on their site at The Walker Channel for those who could not attend. You can find plenty of older, amazing talks there, as well, but here's mine.
From my perspective the talk went well, but it would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge some of the negative feedback I got: the talk came across as more of a product pitch for Mixel than some people expected. In retrospect, I should have been more aware of that possibility, but I have been so consumed with Mixel for the past eighteen-plus months that it didn't occur to me to talk about any other subject. Aside from my family, Mixel is the central thrust of my waking life (and often a prominent feature of my sleeping life too, for that matter), and to me at least it's then most interesting thing I've ever done.
I think there's an interesting discussion to be had here about the tension between an audience's expectations and what interests speakers (and as an aside, Y-Combinator's Paul Graham posted a somewhat relevant essay about the tension between being a good writer and being a good speaker earlier this week). But one thing this has taught me is that an entrepreneur's preoccupation with self can be alienating if left unchecked.
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March 14, 2012
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When High-Def Goes Low-Res
It used to be that we assumed companies had access to better technology than consumers did, and therefore understood it more deeply than us, but I think that's no longer the case. Very often, it seems to me that 'regular' people now understand technology better than many companies do.
This occurred to me over the past few days as I traveled to Austin and then Minneapolis. In each city I stayed in a pretty nice hotel, both of which had flat-screen televisions in the rooms. Of course it's not unusual that hotels will have LCD or plasma televisions these days, but what I've found is that no matter how nice the hotel is or how many stars it might rate, they all fundamentally misunderstand what a flat-screen television is for.
>Picture This
If you turn on this kind of TV in any given hotel, the signal coming through the cable and being displayed on the screen will almost certainly be a standard-definition signal, and that signal will almost certainly be a 4:3 aspect ratio picture that is inelegantly stretched to fit a 16:9 screen. That is, the hotel did not opt to upgrade their service to a full HD signal, and even worse, they're showing the lower-resolution signal in the worst possible way. Looks terrible.
Often I even go to the trouble of adjusting the aspect ratio myself, to display the standard definition signal in its 'true' 4:3 format, which I personally find to be much more pleasant, even with the two black bars on either side of the picture that that format necessitates. But what I've found is that if I turn off the TV, the next time I turn it back on it will revert to 16:9. It's almost as if the hotel believes that filling up the screen, even if the result is worse than what you'd see on an old tube-style TV set, is the preferred presentation.
I guess that to a proprietor of one of these hotels what's critical is just the hardware, the physical TV itself — and showing their customers that they have acquired this object of a certain status. Meanwhile, the importance of the software, the signal quality and its presentation, completely escapes them.
All of this is nitpicking to a certain extent, but what I find remarkable is that this circumstance — high-quality TV, low-quality TV signal — is so prevalent at big, reputable, high-end companies like these. I mean, these are serious businesses that purport to put a premium on customer experience values. Meanwhile, I can't remember when I've seen a flat-screen television in the home of a friend or acquaintance that suffered from the same problem. Everyone who gets one of these modern televisions also seems to figure out how to get the right kind of picture out of it. It's really not that difficult.
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March 13, 2012
Moebius, R.I.P.
The artist and comic book illustrator Jean Giraud, known to most as Moebius, passed away Saturday at the age of 73.
As a young comic book reader I remember how striking his work looked in comparison to his contemporaries. Comics are by nature fantastic, or at least they strive to be, but in Giraud's hands even the most mundane took on a beautiful, otherworldly quality. The truth is that he was a true visionary of science fiction and fantasy, not just in comics but in concept work he did for major films like "Alien" and "Tron," among many others. It would't be an overstatement to say that he has had a profound effect on the way we all picture the future. More here.
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March 9, 2012
Vintage Movie-style Titles for Video Games
Graphic designer Bao Nguyen designed these gorgeous imaginary movie titles for famous video game franchises, in the style of old movies.
Sadly, he's only created three of them so far, but it might be possible to urge him to make more. See the titles in greater detail on Flickr.
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