Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 79

Sparkles and Wine

This simple, striking video from filmmaker Nacho Guzman for the electronic band Opale is a demonstration of the power of lighting to alter our perception. A single light source rotates around actress Stella Stocker’s face and continually, dramatically alters her appearance. The effect is an homage to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unfinished 1964 film “L’Enfer.” + Share…

Behind the Relaunch of The New York Times Magazine

For some months, The New York Times has been readying a “relaunch” of its Sunday magazine, and in this column editor Jake Silverstein talks about its impending debut, this weekend: We have used the hammer and the tongs but perhaps not the blowtorch; we sought to manufacture a magazine that would be unusual, surprising and…

Photoshop at 25

Amazingly, Photoshop is twenty-five years old. Adobe is celebrating that quarter century of manipulating our understanding of reality with a micro site honoring the software’s illustrious past. It includes this commemorative video featuring Aerosmith performing “Dream On,” below. As the video demonstrates, Photoshop is responsible, on the one hand, for some amazing strides forward in…

Glacier Icons

This set of twenty-three replacement icons for OS X Yosemite was designed by two high school-age aspiring designers. They can be downloaded for free, and Sketch source files are available for US$5. I’m not entirely sure if these were a class project, or if the designers were actually in high school or what, as the…

“How They Got There” on The Big Web Show

Tomorrow at 11:00a Eastern, I’ll be joining the estimable Jeffrey Zeldman on his wonderful podcast The Big Web Show. You can tune in at that time to hear us chat live or, starting about an hour or so later, you can grab the episode via iTunes and listen to it in your favorite podcast player.…

iPhone 6 Plus Orientation Problems

People often ask me how I like my iPhone 6 Plus, as if its gargantuan size were some kind of burden that can only be tolerated, at best. It’s true, the Plus’s overall girth is really more than I need, and I occasionally wish it were more easily handled. On the whole though, I enjoy…

Visualizing the Bechdel Test

Despite its origins as a joke in a comic strip, the so-called Bechdel Test has turned into a useful, if imperfect, metric for understanding how women are portrayed in film. As a refresher, the test asks whether any given movie features at least two female characters in it, whether the two talk to each other,…

Seagull Skytracks

U.K. videographer Paul Parker made this transfixing video that captures the flight pattern of birds in a novel way. He used After Effects to duplicate each bird many times along its flight path. The end result reveals a wonderful, almost mathematical, hidden beauty. Or, if you prefer, they bring to life a Hitchcockian horror sequence.…

On the Set of Batman, 1966

The blog Vintage Everyday has a trove of really wonderful photos from the set of 1966’s “Batman: The Movie” film starring Adam West and Burt Ward. As I wrote back in November, the TV show upon which this movie was based only recently managed to escape legal limbo; read about it in this post. More…

Paul Rand at The Museum of the City of New York

Starting in less than two weeks The Museum of the City of New York will open an exhibition called “Everything Is Design: The Work of Paul Rand” highlighting the career of the famous graphic designer. Its scope seems ambitious, being organized into five major sections: “Early Life and Career,” “Transforming Madison Avenue,” “Books and Publications,” “Creating…