Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 88

Very Detailed Maps from the Midterm Elections

Yesterday The New York Times published these maps from the midterm elections and billed them as “the most detailed you’ll see.” I can’t verify that, but I do know that they’re very probably the most beautiful election maps from this cycle we’re likely to see. I hope they also goose the competition and that next…

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When Typography Is Suspenseful

This is one of many videos from Airbrush Action Magazine capturing self-taught airbrush artist Glen Weisgerber, who has been painting custom lettering and graphics for trucks, cars, guitars and motorbikes since the 1970s. It shows Weisgerber demonstrating his “round hand lettering” technique—essentially a kind of calligraphy that emphasizes open, flowing letterforms—by hand-painting words on an…

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Ghostbusters Redux

This was posted three months ago, but it’s still marvelous, and maybe one of my favorite things I’ve seen on the Internet ever: a group of middle school students produced this shot-for-shot remake of the trailer for “Ghostbusters.” Here is a version where you can compare it side by side with the original trailer. This…

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Animography

Animography is a type foundry specializing in the combination of motion and typography. They sell a variety of animated typefaces that are geared towards motion designers and video editors. Naturally, each one comes with a nifty promo video showing the typeface in action, like this one for Webster: Here’s one for Anodine. This one for…

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How the 1960s Batman TV Show Escaped Legal Limbo

I realize that the Venn diagram of Subtraction.com readers and fans of the Adam West-starring 1966-68 television show “Batman” probably entails a pretty small overlap, but I thought this Wired article about how that show was finally untangled from the legal mess of conflicting rights holders might be of some interest anyway. The show sat…

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Wired on Project LayUp

Over at Wired, writer Margaret Rhodes recently caught wind of Project LayUp, the iPad app that I’m collaborating on with Adobe, and wrote a short piece on its genesis. It includes some comments from Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance and now VP or Mobile at Adobe, including this one: There is so little, if any,…

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Blocs

Here is a video preview of Blocs, a new Web design app coming soon from U.K. designer and developer Norm Sheeran. It takes a componentized approach to constructing pages, allowing users to tack on new objects quickly and intuitively from menus of preexisting elements. I decided to post about Blocs not so much because it…

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Bowling Script

I’m not sure I completely understand what “Mute” is, but it appears to be a kind of promotion for the typeface Bowling Script by Alejandro Paul of Argentina’s Sudtipos type foundry. “Mute” describes itself as “a visual essay conceived from the design of a phone case whose function is not to protect it but silence…

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Serial’s True Detectives

Today is Thursday, which means another episode of my favorite new weekly show: “Serial,” a podcast spinoff from public radio institution “This American Life.” The premise of “Serial,” now on its sixth episode, is the examination of a single, true story for twelve episodes, with each installment shedding more and more light on its events…

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Mobile Is Eating the World

This slide deck from Andreesen Horowitz analyst Benedict Evans is an essential overview of how mobile technology is changing our definition of technology itself, how it’s coming to supplant the things that we previously took for granted as established elements of the technological landscape. There is no point in drawing a distinction between the future…

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