In response to the question, “is an interface designer a salesman?,” Khoi answers affirmatively, saying, “interface is marketing, and unavoidably so.” He goes on with a very intelligent and thought-provoking piece that includes the following:
If you think about marketing as a way of communicating the benefits of a designed product to users, then it’s clear to me at least that good interfaces do that. To make an interface ‘user friendly’ is to communicate the value of features or content to a user, and to do so in as expedient and succinct a fashion as possible. At a low level, expressing functionality as a tab, or providing a summarized view of complex information, or positioning like features in close proximity to one another — or any number of nuanced decisions that designers make — is very much about marketing that functionality to users.
I think sometimes designers get a little too full of themselves, thinking of their work as “art,” and forgetting that, in almost all cases, we’re doing jobs for commercial clients whose end game is to make money. Ultimately, all designers are salesmen, no matter how many levels of abstraction away from the actual transaction we sit.
As a sidenote, Khoi’s writing really shines in this piece. Visit site »
Wow. This is awesome. Liz Danzico and Steven Heller have put together a MFA program with a faculty that includes the likes of Christopher Fahey, David Womack, Jason Santa Maria, Karen McGrane, Khoi Vinh, Paul Ford, Matt Owens, Rachel Abrams, Jeffrey Zeldman, and more. The program will launch in the Fall of 2009. Only one question: where were you guys in 1994?! Visit site »
Kohi opines that design doesn’t scale well to larger teams, and suggests that if a design team is larger than “a dozen or two,” things start to get dicey. I’m sure there are exceptions to this, but in general, I think he’s right. Design is best practiced by small teams. Visit site »
Khoi is a believer in the logic that great design is an important asset to any company, and wonders why Yahoo — a company he feels had a great design sense — ultimately has failed. A great discussion follows as to whether or not Yahoo is actually a great design company.
My take? Yahoo has some real shining examples of great design (see Y! Mail and Flickr for the most obvious examples), but that great design sense never managed to make it’s way to Yahoo’s core product: their homepage and search engine. So, even though Yahoo is capable of great design, it may be that poor design was actually a flaw that ultimately hurt them. Visit site »
Great interview with Khoi focusing on his gig as the Design Director at nytimes.com. Really interesting insight — I have a little designer crush on Khoi and read just about anything about or by him, but I’ve really not heard much about his day job before. Good stuff. Visit site »
An absolutely hilariously illustrated blog post by Khoi Vinh. Visit site »
As I said over in the comments on Khoi’s writeup, I really hopes this great new site helps to push the idea that even though web design is largely about designing systems, rather than pages, those systems can still be flexible enough to allow for elegant, content-aware and content-appropriate design — rather than the over-templated spitting-out of content we still on almost every web site in the world today.
Oh — and the site is off to a great start from a content perspective, too, with Steven Heller discussing the notion that print is a dying medium. The 200-words-or-less format is even carried through in the reader comments. Love the concept. Visit site »
It’s rare that I will openly say this: I agree with every single word of this article. Great one, Khoi. Visit site »
Khoi’s post about has favorite Mac software you’ve never heard of has generated a ton of comments with other suggestions. Can’t wait to go through this list! Visit site »
Khoi interviews Olav, the guy who has packaged up a lot of the work we did at LJWorld.com (along with some more work!) into a handy CS framework called Blueprints. It’s a great little interview.
For the record, I was surprised and a bit taken aback when I first saw that someone else had packaged up a lot of our work and released it publicly, but in the end I’m very pleased about it. There some great stuff in there, and Olav has added to it, and done a great job of documenting it and supporting it. And, he definitely gives credit to everyone involved — he was never trying to rip us off. He just wanted to provide something useful, and I’m glad he has! Visit site »
Blueprint is a CSS framework based very heavily on the work Nathan, Christian and I did at the Journal-World (and also taking some cues from Wilson Miner and Khoi Vinh). I’m happy to see it out there and someone else supporting it (since we never could have), but I do sort of wish I’d at least gotten a heads up that someone was planning to package and release it. I suppose Olav didn’t need to ask for permission, but it would have been the polite thing to do. We never really intended our work to see the light of day, but I’m not really bothered that is has. And, Olav does give credit where credit is due.
Anyway, it does look good. It’s got a few minor improvements on what we had built and is packaged very neatly. Give it a look, if you’re interested in this sort of thing. Visit site »
Khoi has a wonderful (and glowing) analysis of The Times of London’s online design, which makes strict use of an established columnar grid. It’s a great insight into how a grid can be used from page to page to tie them together visually and structurally.
I myself am probably not quite as excited by The (other) Times’ design as Khoi is. I do think it’s a lot better than most newspaper websites, and I do love the thought that went into the grid — but overall, it still feels a bit more cluttered and unclean for my taste. I would like to see a bit more whitespace and a bit more stylistic subtly. But, I’m being picky. The Times of London is definitely one of the better online news websites, design-wise — so check it out, along with Khoi’s great deconstruction of it. Visit site »
“[Art direction] is where, as designers working on the web, drop the ball.” says Khoi. “We fail to follow up on the many hours of labour that we put into the online magazines, the news sites and even the blogs that we create. Rather, we defer the act of laying out the content to publishing systems and databases. We may painstakingly tailor design to match a workfl ow, but we rarely venture into the murkier arena of responding to the specific content.” Amen, brother. Great article. Visit site »
Khoi has a post up about he and Mark’s terrific SXSW presentation about grid-based design. Slides, screenshots of his Yahoo! redesign,and more included. If you weren’t at SXSW, this is a must-see. Visit site »
Khoi and Mark’s Yahoo redux for their “Grids are Good” power session, which was the best 25 minutes of SXSW thus far. Visit site »
A great article by Garrett Dimon on the realities of doing web design in the real world, using Khoi’s New York Times team as the case study. I am often irritated by people in our industry who seem to be oblivious to the business side of things, getting bent out of shape over imperfections that occur due to timelines and budgets. I wonder: do these people have real jobs with real bosses and real deadlines, or do they just tinker with their blogs all day? Visit site »
Khoi overviews the NY Times election night coverage, which is freaking excellent. Well done, Khoi and team. Visit site »
Khoi shoots three quick questions a the Z and he gives wonderfully insightful responses, as per usual. Interesting topic, too — especially in light of recent discussion here and elsewhere about quality design versus the “hacks,” as I’m calling them. I’m willing to concede that part of the problem is that many of us quality designers don’t do a very good job selling ourselves and our services. Visit site »