Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 80

Is Design Bound to Get Cheaper?

Today I found myself browsing the many After Effects project templates available at creative marketplace Envato, in particular the ones that offer the sort of make-believe user interfaces that are popular in action and sci-fi films. I was impressed by their quality. Here are a few examples, as represented by their demo reels. UI Future…

Tobias Frere-Jones on Typeface Mechanics

Celebrated type designer Tobias Frere-Jones is apparently offering a master course in the finer details of making typefaces viable over at his blog. Our conscious minds want to draw one shape, but our eyes need to see another. Part of typeface design is managing this eternal friction between logic and optics. It’s always there, no…

Nomad Goods

San Francisco’s Nomad Goods makes some of the niftiest smartphone gadgets I’ve seen. Each of their charging accessories has a novel twist, just enough of inventiveness to set it apart from the pack. Their diminutive Nomad Key is a compact, rubberized USB-to-Lightning (or, if you insist, USB-to-Micro USB) cable that fits onto your key chain,…

Going Clear

I read Pulitzer Award-winner Lawrence Wright’s “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief” when it was first published a few years ago and couldn’t put it down. It’s a riveting, often horrifying account of the history of Scientology, but also an unstinting look at what motivates the church’s followers. One assertion that Wright…

Ryo Takemasa

Japanese illustrator Ryo Takemasa is adept at a vibrant, naïve aesthetic that recalls the warmth of mid-Century children’s book illustrations. There are a lot of illustrators who work in this idiom, but what sets Takemasa’s work apart, for me, are the pieces that display a wonderful mastery of exaggerated, deep perspective. In the examples below,…

The Simpsons in Pixels

This reinterpretation of the opening credits to “The Simpsons” as early video game-style pixel art, complete with an appropriately glitchy soundtrack, is just wonderful. Via cartoonbrew.com. + Share Facebook Twitter Google+

A Hidden Reference in “Before Sunrise”

With all of the accolades that director Richard Linklater has (justly) collected recently for “Boyhood” it’s easy to forget that his previous work on the so-called “Before” trilogy is equally impressive. This article by Sheila O’Malley at Movie Mezzanine does a very nice job paying tribute to the first entry in that series, the unexpectedly…

A Lucky Girl

This video was made for Holocaust Memorial Day last week. It’s part of the Memory Makers project, which pairs survivors of genocide with artists; the latter create works of art based on the life stories of the former. This particular work of art was a collaboration between Holocaust survivor Bettine Le Beau and collage artist…

How Office Cubicles Came to Be

This article at The Economist on the evolution of the office cubicle is fascinating if depressing. It details how the original concept for modular office space was perverted almost immediately—the original intention was to position walls at 120º in order to avoid the monotony so familiar to cubicle dwellers today, but cost efficiency led to…

Tim Cook on the State of the iPad

Last October I wrote about how I believe that the iPad is at a crossroads, facing a number of significant challenges on a number of fronts. In an analysts’ conference call yesterday, Tim Cook commented on Apple’s most recent quarterly results (summary: great) and had a few interesting comments about the state of the iPad.…