AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Business Week…

Since 2006, Khoi Vinh has been the design director of NYTimes.com, where he and his staff of information architects and designers are responsible for the look and feel of the Times’s website. On his blog, Subtraction.com, he addresses key questions about web standards and the marriage of design and technology. Last fall, Vinh and editor Liz Danzico launched Abriefmessage.com, where contributors critique design topics within an imposed length of 200 words or less.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1971, Vinh immigrated to the United States in 1973 and was raised in Gaithersburg, Maryland. After his family moved to the Los Angeles area in 1989, Vinh enrolled at L.A.’s Otis College of Art and Design, where his interests shifted from illustration to graphic design. After graduating, he turned his attention to new media and moved to New York to pursue web design. In 2001 he co-founded Behavior, a boutique interaction firm that designed websites for clients as diverse as JPMorgan Chase and The Onion. In recent years, he has been an advocate of integrating “traditional design” and internet design, and yet he fully understands the limitations of this still primitive form. Nonetheless, he is attempting to build a new genre of designer. Here, he explains the challenges to a former New York Times employee, art director, author, and critic, Steven Heller.…more…