hyalineskies

A Behavior co-founder leaves his company behind for The New York Times. Why?

On December 31, 2004, the web design community stumbled upon a few red stripes across the page of Subtraction.com. When the redesign launched on January 2, 2005, using only black, white, a hint of orange, and the ubiquitous Helvetica typeface, the site shouldn’t have received much attention.

What set Subtraction apart from the others attempting to do minimalism was its heavy emphasis on grid design, a format largely unheard of on the Web at a time when the buzz was beginning over Web 2.0. This designer, a man at the Behavior design consultancy in Manhattan, had taken a fundamental tenet of print design and translated it to new media in a strikingly comfortable format.

Nearly one year later, on December 31, 2005, the man who revolutionized the current state of Web design found himself leaving Behavior to become Design Director at The New York Times, easily the most respected media company in the United States.

That man is Khoi Vinh, and, after a month of e-mail-and-IM-tag as Vinh worked to adapt to the world of online journalism, I was able to have ninety minutes of his time to ask him about the future of new media.

Eston Well, I guess I’ll start with the basics. You were originally a print designer, right?
Khoi Yes, that’s right. Well, I graduated from art school with a degree in communication design, which encompassed both graphic design and illustration, but I mostly did illustration and painting. When I left school I got work as a print designer.

Eston Where was your first design-related job?
Khoi A small advertising agency that had mostly commercial real estate clients in the Washington, D.C. area. I used to live in downtown D.C. and reverse commute every day to that job, mostly because I had so little demonstrable design training. It was a good first opportunity, but it wasn’t particularly close to what I really wanted to do… It was a case of “paying dues.”

Eston So did you want to do new media, or did you just stumble into it?
Khoi I’m not sure if “stumbled into it” is the right characterization, because in the early days, I had a hard time adjusting to it. I really kind of fought the idea that the Internet was going to change everything. A good friend of mine was much more gung-ho about it and I was rather skeptical.

Eston I find it funny that you fought the idea. It seems that that’s the case with a lot of journalists versus new media now. That’s what I’ve seen, personally, from a lot of the people I’ve been working with.
Khoi Yeah, it takes time. Internet professionals think that anyone who’s not on board with the Internet now is a dinosaur, but adoption always spreads itself out over decades, not years.

Eston The issue with adoption seems to me to be a “Get with it, you are only hurting the new media” type of thing. Personally, I think print in its current state is dying. Do you guys see this at the Times, or does new media just seem to be a new outlet for the media? Do you think print’s dead?
Khoi I don’t think print’s dead, no, definitely not. But I think print is going through a painful evolution. Every new medium brings about a change in an older medium; there’s a period when the older medium tries fitfully to adapt, but eventually it re-adjusts its inherent strengths and finds a new purpose. That’s what happened with radio when television came along. At one time radio was full of dramas and diverse programming; eventually it became a music-based medium… and now it’s becoming a medium where the disc jockeys don’t talk and the talk show hosts yell… Which is a digression, I know. Feel free to cut that.

Eston No need to. I think one thing that journalists specifically seem to see in new media is a lack of reputability.
Khoi Yes, I would agree with that. Some old-school journalists tend to think of new media as a kind of pretender.

Eston I think they see print as being an institution that this new-fangled Internet stuff can’t really match, and blogging… well, anyone can have a blog. There’s no editing or control over who has one. No one’s right. There’s no one to trust. The old schoolers really seem to have a lot of disrespect for new media, and I think it’s holding it back a lot.
Khoi Well, first I would raise some argument about the aversion to blogs. At the Times, what I’ve seen is a pretty impressive enthusiasm for blogs. A lot of journalists really want to get started blogging under the Times imprimatur, and we’re starting to roll out more and more Times-branded blogs.

Eston Just a nerdy question for my own knowledge: are you guys running them on a custom CMS, or something off-the-shelf?
Khoi A little bit of everything, really. I think you’ll find at most large institutions that the IT infrastructure is a semi-organic ecosystem of home-brewed software, expensive off-the-shelf products and, increasingly, shareware and/or open source solutions. The news industry is no different.

Eston Here’s one I think a lot of people really are dying to know: where do you stand on all of the Ajax/Web 2.0/social-whatever trendiness? From what I’ve seen, both you and Behavior have really stayed out of the hype, and I’d take it that it’s on purpose.
Khoi I have nothing against it, really. I don’t find it objectionable in the least, though I think it’s just a developmental phase that won’t be remembered in and of itself unless some really stellar designs are produced. I don’t know if I would say that I’ve made a conscientious effort to avoid Web 2.0. To be honest, we didn’t come across the opportunity at Behavior, but if we had, we would have taken it on gladly.

Eston Well, according to a few sites, Subtraction seems pretty stellar.
Khoi Ha! Thanks; but I don’t consider Subtraction to be a true Web 2.0 product. I’m very proud of it, but meme-wise, it’s a little behind.

Eston Subtraction’s beautiful; I hadn’t ever paid any attention to grid-based Web design before I saw your site, and now everything I develop uses a grid of some sort, so feel proud that at least one person’s really been changed by it.
Khoi That’s very flattering, thanks. Okay, all modesty aside, if you consider my somewhat dogmatic grid advocacy to be a contribution to the practice of Web design, then I would say in that respect Subtraction is up-to-date. Hopefully we’ll see a lot more grid use in Web 2.1.

Eston Speaking of the notorious grid design of yours on Subtraction, do you think we’ll see it in use on NYT’s site in the future as we did on The Onion?
Khoi Well, there’s a funny story there… Or awkward at least. I’m not sure I can say too much now, but you’ll see some changes soon, some of which will be mine, and some won’t.

Eston Withholding the awkward story?
Khoi Yes, unfortunately.

Eston Okay, kind of shifting gears here. You’ve talked about the Times a lot, especially during the Onion redesign.
Khoi Right, well that was after.

Eston I’d take it you had been talking with the Times guys around this time, but you seem to draw a lot of influence from the Times.
Khoi Yeah, I definitely did, even long before I even had the remotest chance of getting this position there.

Eston Now, though, you’re on top of those guys. Now what?
Khoi Now what? Now I start aping Yahoo. Just kidding. (I laugh.) To answer your question, I’m not sure what being at the Times will mean for my design influences exactly, because it was a big influence on me for so long. It’s early still, but I do feel comfortable at the Times already and I feel like I have a lot to learn about the way they do design. On the other hand, my real idol in design is Massimo Vignelli, so maybe the next thing to look forward to is working with him one day. One day.

Eston I think there are a lot of obvious aesthetic parallels in the way you’ve done things and the way the Times does.
Khoi Yeah, I think so too. When I was designing the current version of Subtraction.com, I spent a lot of time examining NYTimes.com as well as the newspaper itself.

Eston What’s your main complaint about new media today?
Khoi “Complaint” is probably too strong a word; I guess that it’s closer to a feeling of anxiousness. We’re still at so early a stage in the development of online experiences, and I’m really excited to see what comes next. In particular, I really want to get to that next stage of online design where we’re not focused exclusively on designing beautiful platforms, but spending equal amounts of time producing beautiful expressions within them.

Eston So you’re looking at quality within the content you’re producing as well. I don’t think you’ll have too much trouble with that where you are. On a completely different note, I think we missed a lot about when you were at Behavior, as we kind of slid off track into Subtraction-land. Why’d you jump ship to the Times? You went from a designer / blogger to the design director of one of the world’s most reputable names in journalism.
Khoi I’d been working as a design consultant - basically helping clients with their design challenges, then moving on to a new client gig, over and over - pretty much since I got out of design school. I still really do like that kind of design work; you get to go and meet new people and learn about new businesses all the time. But one minor frustration I had about that was that, after building a design solution for a client, I never got to continue to evolve it, to play with the design platform we’d deliver. I didn’t mind that so much, but when the Times opportunity came along, it looked like the one design platform that was worth giving up the design consultancy life for. There’s such an amazingly rich design history and tradition here, but more important, the Times produces the best content anywhere. It’s thrilling and humbling to be helping to deliver the news like this.

Eston And with that, the creative workflow there is much different than it is in online journalism. Have you adapted well to the Times‘ work environment?
Khoi It’s been a real challenge. There’s so much stuff going on here at the Times, and the organizational structure, naturally, is many orders of magnitude more complex than what we had at Behavior. There’s a markedly greater demand on my attention at all hours of the workday; I may be going home earlier than I did at Behavior, but it’s much more exhausting, at least for now, while I’m in the ramp up stage. But, I do like it a lot - part of the challenge every day is to keep up with all the sharp people who work here. I’ve been in big organizations before, but never with so many smart people. It makes the challenge particularly satisfying.

Eston And one last question: Where do you see NYT Digital in five years?
Khoi I’m sure anything I say will be one hundred percent wrong, so I have to pass on this question!