Khoi Vinh is going to swing by Postlight tonight at 6:30PM
Khoi Vinh is going to swing by Postlight tonight at 6:30PM
Postlight is going to do a Q&A tonight with Khoi Vinh. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe, Design Chair at Wildcard, and co-founder of Kidpost (Kidpost comes HIGHLY RECOMMENDED if you have small children and parents on the Internet). He’s an essential voice in interaction design, and a hard-working designer.
The best place to see Khoi at work is probably subtraction.com, a blog he’s been running—and updating—since the year 2000. To prepare for his visit we’ve been poking around the archive and taking notes. Here are a few interesting paragraphs—
First, a very sweet and modest “first post,” from the year 2000:
This journal will be a sort of grab bag, culled from whatever’s going through my head at the time. Of course, I’ll try and keep it all as coherent, interesting and entertaining as my hack skills will allow.
Khoi is excellent at sharing what he’s discovered—often to the industry’s benefit. On designing TheOnion.com (2005):
One of the primary reasons for the complexity of these columns is the orderly accommodation of advertising units. The Onion is, after all, an ad-driven site, especially in the wake of its obsolesced, subscription-only archives model. The problem was that we had a mandate to provide for so much new advertising inventory that, without some logical approach to laying them out on a page, the result would have been considerably more jumbled than what we see in the final redesign.
He’s also a leader in the design community who frequently uses his platform to talk about ethics. “On unsolicited redesigns” (2011):
I will say this, though: unsolicited redesigns are terrific and fun and useful, and I hope designers never stop doing them. But as they do so, I also hope they remember it helps no one — least of all the author of the redesign — to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside. If you have good ideas and the talent to execute them and argue for them, the world will still sit up and pay attention even if you take care in your language and show respect to those who don’t see things quite the way you do.
And he’s an honest person—he’s shared successes with his audience, but also failures. On shutting down a startup, Mixel (2012):
At the heart of all of this, at least for me, was a core of shame. I left a great job, had big ambitions, spent over a year building something I truly believed in, launched it, and realized that it was falling short of expectations. I had a crisis of confidence; for weeks and weeks I beat myself up with a prolonged self-inquiry into my own fitness to do anything entrepreneurial, social, mobile, even anything digital. I felt an acute case of “impostor syndrome,” that feeling that I was just barely fooling the people around me of my competency, if in fact I was fooling anyone at all.
Reading through Subtraction you can see how Khoi’s success is not simply about “talent” but more specifically the result of experimentation and obsession, day after week after month after year. He loves big problems. And now he’s working at Adobe, a company that has defined digital design for three decades. So it should be interesting!
Bonus: A beautiful and deeply influential presentation from 2007 (with Mark Boulton) called “Grids are Good.”
See you tonight! Come, grab a beer out of the fridge, and ask your neighbor what they’re up to.