Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 76

TIE Fighter

I hesitate to post this here because in general I don’t endorse my generation’s excessive devotion to the Star Wars franchise. I enjoy the original films and characters, but the nearly religious devotion that they inspire in others is lost on me. That said, this short tribute to Star Wars from animator Paul “OtaKing” Johnson…

Fantastical 2

For the past few weeks I’ve been using beta versions of Flexbit’s Fantastical 2. It sports a handsome new interface with a dark left pane that flanks a light reworking of the standard iCal day/week/month/year view. There’s also a natural language engine for freeform creation of new events—these are becoming standard for calendar software, but…

Typewolf’s Typography Cheat Sheet

Jeremiah Shoaf put a ton of work into assembling this comprehensive single-page overview of most everything you need to know to get the finer points of typography right—including keyboard shortcuts for Mac and Windows, HTML entities, FAQs about when to use certain characters, and even a downloadable, 1-page PDF that you can print out as…

Bind and the Problem of Version Control for Designers

This project from designer Alasdair Monk is intriguing. Bind takes as its premise the idea that the design tools we have today suffer for their inability to support truly robust collaboration. Where developers benefit from rich technical ecosystems optimized for multiple contributors to any given project, the software that designers use is essentially isolated and…

Random Book Covers

This is a very nice project from designer Lucas Heinrich. He uses the Random Article button Wikipedia to come across books he’s never heard of before, and then he designs jackets for them. It’s a totally self-initiated endeavor, intended in part to get him professional work designing book jackets. Here are a few examples. I…

How They Got There at The Daily Heller

Steven Heller—design historian, author of countless books about design, and a national treasure, if you ask me— interviewed me briefly for his column The Daily Heller. The subject is my new book, How They Got There: Interviews With Digital Designers About Their Careers. He asked me what makes this book different from other collections of…

Design Comps on Your Phone with Napkin

Designer Scott Savarie created this iOS app that lets you compose design comps entirely on your iPhone. At heart, Napkin is not too dissimilar from Project LayUp, the iPad app that I’ve been collaborating with Adobe on for the past year-plus. Or, at least, it shares some of the same goals: creating a touch-optimized interface…

Chinatown in $5

The Wildcard offices are located in downtown Manhattan, where what’s left of Little Italy blends into Chinatown. I’ve worked in a lot of neighborhoods in New York City but this one is by far my favorite of them all. It’s got the best blend of historical character and the widest variety of authentically prepared cuisines…

Interview with Me at O’Reilly Radar

O’Reilly Radar’s Mary Treseler interviewed me about my new book “How They Got There: Interviews With Digital Designers About Their Careers” recently for this article, just posted today. The book was just the jumping off point, though; we also talked about what we’re trying to build at Wildcard, and the pluses and minuses of the…

Business Town

Denizens of the tech industry, illustrated in the style of famous children’s book author Richard Scary. More at welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com. + Share Facebook Twitter Google+