Khoi Vinh Quotes

Before Gutenberg, there was this really very strong oral storytelling culture where being able to relay stories from person to person was sufficient. And then, with the introduction of printing and mass communication, suddenly somebody had a lot of authority invested in the idea of a single canonical expression of a document or a piece of communication.

I think if you took away all the designers and automated the process tomorrow, the end result would be really, really dissatisfying and disturbing to a lot of people. So, I think there's a lot of value that print designers have.

I think there's always something about design that is going to be very difficult for more than a small fraction of people to really get.

I know that what keeps me interested in my job and in the medium in general that what makes every few months more interesting, or newly interesting every few weeks, is the idea that everything is changing, that the ideas that you think are sacrosanct and unimpeachable suddenly are up for grabs again.

I think there's a really selfish part of me that wishes I had the tools that I had today in the context of a designer practicing in the middle part of the 20th century when creating a single expression of an idea was the norm.

Even though the means of production are more available than ever, I think the true expertise is as rare as ever.

I think the way design was practiced for most of the 20th century was very declarative. A designer came up with a solution for a project and put it in place and shipped the solution and it landed in a reader or a customer's hands as a brochure. They would see it as a poster, or as a piece of signage. And that was sort of it. That was the end of it. I think Internet technology has really upended that whole equation because in some ways a designer's work is never really done online.

You have to have a balance and understand that as much as you would like to have absolute control over everything, it's just not realistic.

Designers from start to finish now in digital media have to think in a much more sort of thoughtful serious and humble way about how design audiences will receive their products.

I think the key difference between the web and print medium is, on the web or any digital medium, you're dealing with this added element of behavior.

You have this really powerful technological infrastructure that can do really tremendous things. At the same time, it's never going to be as flexible as we'd like it to be. Just by nature of web technology.

I have a few memories of being young here in the United States, but almost no recollections of being young in Vietnam.

Things have a behavior online, whereas in print, there is a single canonical expression for them, but online everything responds to different criteria or has inherent states to it based on that criteria. So, you have to design that in a different way. It's a completely different dynamic even though it may look similar.

I think as technology and expertise makes possible these sort of amazing levels of fidelity to the real world, a lot of people sort of get sort of - what's the word I'm looking for - seduced into that. And after a time, they get tired of it and they become a little bit more interested, I think at a certain level of subtraction and a new level of sophistication.

I guess if there was a desert island scenario and I only could take one font with me, I guess it would be Helvetica, though it has it's limitations, I think it's incredibly versatile and gets the job done and I also think it's one of the typefaces that will really survive the test of time beyond the next several decades if not into the next century.

I think we are in this era right now where every element in a webpage is rendered to within an inch of its life. I think if it's a button, it looks like a physical button, you know, if it's a mailbox that's meant to signal a messaging functionality then the whole mailbox right down to the rivets on the hypothetical metallic housing is rendered.

I think a lot more people are able to take on a design challenge than ever before. And this was true 20 years ago when the desktop publishing revolution came about that allowed people with Macintosh's at home to produce professional-looking newsletters or publications for the first time. So, there's a long march toward more democratization for design.

I think now we're seeing the pendulum switch back to this idea where conversations are more important, if not more important than documents.

The way I look at my job, I spend a lot of time trying to create the conditions for good design to happen and I don't get an opportunity to do a lot of hands on work.