Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 70

O’Reilly Design Conference Call for Proposals

O’Reilly Media is holding its first ever O’Reilly Design Conference next January in San Francisco. The team organizing it is committed to delivering “the nuts-and-bolts foundations for sharpening your skills—the latest tools, techniques, and technologies you need to create innovative products and service—alongside forward-looking insights and inspiration.” (Full disclosure: I’m a member of the program…

Line Posters

If you find something transfixing and lovely about public transportation maps then you’re not alone. You can now buy a notecard with the Washington, D.C. Metro System on it, or a pint glass with Brooklyn, NY bike routes on it, or a tee-shirt of the London Underground. All these maps (and many more from many…

The Designer’s Guide to New York

This is one of those terrific, wish-I’d-thought-of-that ideas that you can’t help but be charmed by: a neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide to New York City put together by Hyperakt, a design studio in Brooklyn. Each guide is curated by one of the city’s prominent designers or design shops—there are some great names here. The first four are…

The Subtraction.com Design Tools Survey

TL;DR: Today I’m launching a survey of the tools that digital designers are using in their work. It will run for a week and the results will be made public. Click here to take the survey. Background Last month I shared what I learned about popular design tools during an informal mini-tour of several New…

Visual Effects in Mad Max: Fury Road

Director George Miller’s unexpectedly fantastic “Mad Max: Fury Road” has been touted as a triumph of so-called “practical” visual effects over CG, but that’s not exactly the whole story. In this extensive article on the effects work in the film, visual effects supervisor Andy Williams says: I’ve been joking recently about how the film has…

How Dropbox Remains Relevant

During the mini tour of New York design teams that I conducted several weeks back, one of the things that came up often was that most designers manage their work files through Dropbox, and not through ostensibly more sophisticated version control systems. Dropbox’s high quality synching and near ubiquity have improved life dramatically for design…

Google I/O Countdown

I’m more of an admirer of Google’s Material Design than a true fan, but I have to admit that the company is commendably dogged in its ambitions to become a leader in design. Their products started out looking defiantly ugly, struggled their way towards respectability, and now seem poised to achieve a distinctive aesthetic that’s…

Web vs. Native: A Call for the Web to Concede Defeat

Peter-Paul Koch, who describes himself as a mobile platform strategist, wrote this excellent appraisal of the state of web apps, which for years have been getting more and more complicated in order to match the richness of apps written expressly for iOS, Android, etc. The web cannot emulate native perfectly, and it never will. Native…

Fontstand Lets You Try High Quality Fonts for Free

If Typekit dragged the type industry into the daylight of the modern Web, then the brand new Fontstand aims to finish the job of modernizing it. This new service allows, for the first time, on-the-fly trial and rental of quality fonts from foundries such as Commercial Type, Process Type Foundry, Type Together and a small…

Joanna Gruesome’s Peanut Butter

Joanna Gruesome is not a person but a band from Wales, and their just-released second record (titled “Peanut Butter,” okay whatever) clocks in at just twenty-two minutes. Allowing for commercials, that’s basically a sit-com’s worth of your time, but it will yield you much more pleasure than any episode of “The Great Bang Theory” because…