Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 66

Design Tools News No. 4

Though I’ve been trying not to make these roundups of design tool-related news too complicated (something I do with just about every project; such is the wont of fussy designers), this latest edition is pretty hefty. So I’ve decided to parse out the stories into loose categories, at least for this week. First up: some…

Animated Logos

How has one of those “listicles” rounding up sixteen animated logos. In and of itself that’s nothing special, but it’s rare to see this many animated logos in one place and to see the animators credited. Animation is going to become increasingly important to all kinds of design (despite the advice of some) so we…

Type Reinvented (Sort Of)

Monotype commissioned design studio Field to create a series of experiments that use digital technology to play with typographic forms. The results are beautiful, though claiming that they’re a “reinvention” of type is perhaps a bit much. The Field team is less than shy about comparing this work to art, but what I see instead…

Discovering Spotify’s Discover Weekly

This Wired article looks at Spotify’s attempts at generating “perfect playlists” to suit its customers’ various moods and life moments. It includes a look at the music service’s new Discover Weekly feature, an algorithmically generated playlist tailored for each user that’s refreshed every Monday. Combined with what the company calls your ‘taste profile,’ an internally…

Job Spotlight: ESPN

Designer John Korpics was a hero of mine early in my career, when I was focusing on print design. Korpics was at Entertainment Weekly at the time, where he created some of the most vivid editorial design I had seen; it was brash, elegant and continually inventive. He later went on to amazing runs at…

Designers and Books Fair 2015

Coming this fall, 2-4 October, to New York City: the 2015 Designers and Books Fair. This event includes publishers and booksellers from the U.S. and Europe displaying and selling new titles as well as notable, hard-to-find titles, all related to architecture, experience design, fashion, graphic design, industrial and product design, interior design, landscape architecture, web…

Azel Phara Video by Bif

Jules Janaud and Fabrice Le Nezet, who work together as directing team bif, created this music video for French electronic musician Azel Phara. It combines motion capture and procedural animation to create a strikingly realistic world composed solely of simple geometric shapes—the vast majority of which are circles. The effect is pretty remarkable. See more…

Design Tool News No. 3

I’m still on vacation through the end of this week, and haven’t been paying very close attention to what’s happening out there. Nevertheless, plenty of design tool news still found its way across my desk. Design hand-off tool Zeplin is out of beta. Their official launch apparently refreshes the user interface and requires some transition…

On Vacation with an Unlocked iPhone

We’re on vacation in France this week and next, visiting family, and it’s the first time I’ve traveled abroad with an unlocked iPhone. Quelle différence, as they say. Two years ago I resolved to stop buying phones on contract from wireless carriers; the short term pain of buying a new iPhone at the much higher,…

Design Tools News No. 2

After I wrote my first design tools news roundup last week I had a momentary bout of panic. Even though it seems like there’s a lot of news in this arena, maybe in truth there isn’t really all that much happening each week? As it turns out, there was no reason to worry. As I…