Comic Books, Grids and Designing the News The...

Comic Books, Grids and Designing the News

The Color Machine produced this interview with Khoi Vinh, former design director for the New York Times. In it, Vinh talks about design grids, reducing complexity and how comic books helped him formulate a design theory of his own.

Unrelated but Interesting: Vinh and Scott Ostler just launched Mixel. It’s a social iPad collage making tool for the iPad.

Via Vinh’s blog Subtraction:

Our goal with Mixel is to turn the act of art-making into something incredibly easy, fun and even addictive. Just as importantly, we also want art-making to be deeply social. Mixel is a social network of its own — you sign in with Facebook, and you can find and follow anyone on the network to see all the great work they’re producing. You can also comment, like and share the art, just as you would on any other social network.

But we chose collage for a very important reason: it makes art easy. Photos, the component pieces of every collage, are among the most social and viral content on the Web, and allowing people to combine them into new, highly specific expressions of who they are and what they’re interested in is powerful. Collage also has a wonderfully accessible quality; few people are comfortable with a brush or a drawing implement, but almost everyone is comfortable cutting up images and recombining them in new, expressive, surprising or hilarious ways. We all used to do this as kids.

Mixel is available in the iTunes store. A video of it in action is at mixel.cc.