An Interview with Khoi Vinh

Adobe’s Principal Designer shares his thoughts on AI, XD, and the many futures of design.

When Adobe’s Principal Designer Khoi Vinh visited Seattle recently, David Blatner tracked him down and asked him about what Adobe is working on for the future, and what designers should be learning today.

Adobe Principal Designer Khoi Vinh

David Blatner: I’m sitting here with Khoi Vinh, who is Adobe’s principal designer. So, I have to ask you: What does principal designer mean?

Khoi Vinh: I like to say it just means I’m a designer who’s your pal.

[laughter]

I’m lucky to have a really unusual job where I spend half of my time in the community, at conferences, working with customers, trying to hear what’s going on in the design community and design industry.

Then the other half of my time, I try to bring that back into Adobe and weave it into our roadmap and, through our strategy, influence the way we think about building products for those customers—designers like myself.

David: In the old days, we would call that a liaison. You’re a liaison to the design community.

Khoi: I think that’s still a fair way to say it, yes.

David: It’s great because you have this deep background in design, and also technology, so you can speak to both groups, within and outside.

Khoi: That’s exactly right. We’ve got a small team we call the design practices team. Folks like Val Head, who is an expert in the intersection of user experience design and animation; and Kyle Webster, who’s a famous digital painting and illustration guy.

These are folks who are well-versed in

thinking about products, thinking about how workflow works at design studios or design companies. They’re also great out in the community, talking with folks, really being great listeners, and helping shine a light on what’s coming up for their prospective crafts.

David: So how did you get into this awesome job?

Khoi: I’ve been a designer for a long time, for a few decades, starting in print design—reading your books to learn how to do layout, branding, and corporate collateral—and then making the transition to, first web design, and then later mobile design and product design in general.

I’ve worked at agencies. I started a studio. I worked at The New York Times for a long time. I had a startup that I sold. I’ve just bounced all over. I’ve seen a lot of different corners of the design world.

I never really thought that I would work at Adobe, primarily because Adobe is out West, and I’ve lived in New York City for a long, long time. But when Adobe bought Behance several years ago, I got a call from the Behance co-founder and CEO, Scott Belsky, who’s a friend of mine.

Long story short, eventually I started working at Adobe, because I saw that Scott and his colleagues were working on a whole new vision for how Adobe addresses the creative markets in general, and how Adobe builds products for designers, particularly.

That’s what excited me, because I really, truly love being a designer and love the whole community and love where design is going, and all its potential. To get to work for customers like myself is just a huge privilege. I wouldn’t get to do this anywhere else.

David: The other thing that was going on right around that same time—around the Behance acquisition—was the blossoming of mobile technology. It seemed you got involved with that very early and had a vision… in fact, one of the first times I heard about you was around what became Adobe Comp. I’ve already spaced out on the code name. What did we call it for so long?

Khoi: [laughs] Now I’ve spaced out the code name, too. It’s been a while now! … Oh, Layup! Project Layup.

David: Yes, thank you! You demoed Layup, if I remember, at MAX a few years back, and we all got very excited—the idea of doing page layout on a tablet. It must have been a fascinating experience taking that vision and then trying to turn it into something real.

Khoi: Layup was a real passion project for me. That’s the reason I came to work at Adobe, because Adobe was making this big investment in the mobile ecosystem.

We’ve worked hard to tackle the problem of precision—of expressivity on multi-touch surfaces, on tablets and on phones, and what it means to be able to take a supercomputer with you in your bag or in your pocket.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Layup became Adobe Comp CC, which is a gesture-based approach to laying out a page—similar to InDesign or Illustrator.

It really inspired a very passionate following. But there’s still so much emphasis, “heat,” if you will, in the desktop space for designers. They are very attached to laptops, and desktops, and the ability to get to the file system and all of this stuff. But we think that’s not going to be the case forever.

We’ve reoriented the priorities a bit to work on Adobe XD—which is the project that I work on right now, it’s our new UX/UI design tool—that this is really where designers are putting in most of their time and most of their thinking.

David: Do you feel that the lessons learned from Adobe Comp have gone to inform XD creation?

Khoi: Absolutely. A lot of the lessons we learned about what it takes to start a project, like being able to get up and running really quickly, being able to remove friction. Those ideas are informing Adobe XD sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly.

Certainly, they’ll surface again when we bring more powerful editing features to our XD companion apps on iOS and Android. Right now, we have these great apps that let you run the prototypes that you build out of your designs from the desktops on iOS and Android. We’ve been thinking about what it’s going to mean to be able to edit it on those devices as well.

David: We have just gotten two very big pieces of news, that XD is now free for anybody, which is a big turnaround for Adobe.

Khoi: I think it’s unprecedented.

David: And also the news of this giant grant for third-party developers, to bring them into the XD ecosystem. It kind of harkens back to the earlier days of InDesign and other technologies—even Photoshop—where when you get the developers involved, you build an ecosystem.

Khoi: That’s exactly right. We call it the Adobe Fund for Design. We’ve earmarked up to $10 million that can be either invested or issued as grants to people who are working on interesting tools for designers.

We hope it will inspire people to build on top of Adobe XD, to build plug-ins and integrations. If you’re working on any kind of interesting approach to design workflow or solving interesting problems for designers, we want to work with you.

The way the fund is structured, it allows us to work with teams of all sizes—small teams, big teams, as well as individuals. If you’re hacking on a passion project, maybe you and a friend, and maybe you haven’t even incorporated it yet, or you’re just about to. We want to be able to work with folks like that as well, to give everybody the chance to contribute to the ecosystem.

David: It’s interesting, because I think of XD as, “oh, that’s just that prototyping tool for doing UI/UX stuff.” But the way you’re talking about it makes me think there’s a deeper or longer term plan that’s really about design itself. It feels like XD is turning into a platform for, perhaps, all kinds of design opportunities.

Khoi: That’s exactly right. We really like that concept of a platform for design. Right now, the focus is on what some people would call screen design apps, websites, and digital interactivity that’s primarily visual. We are definitely planning for XD to sustain design for many, many years.

As design evolves, and then takes on things like voice, VR, or AR, or mixed reality, as it takes on more from the world of machine learning or AI, and as designers have to account for that stuff, we anticipate that XD is going to be that platform that people can build on top of in order to make those new technologies malleable for designers.

David: That said, I still believe in the future of print. At CreativePro Week, we surveyed our attendees, and something like 50 percent of the attendees said their primary focus is still print. I know you don’t speak for Adobe management, but we still need better print tools as well.

Khoi: Yes. I can’t talk about what we have in the pipeline. We certainly haven’t forgotten the use cases that evolve around print, and we want to continue investing in all of our tools to improve that.

For tools like XD, we’ve been very deliberate in making sure that XD has really viable links back to the core Creative Cloud apps, the flagship apps everybody knows so well: Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. For example, you can build stuff in Illustrator and Photoshop, and then use Creative Cloud Libraries to share it with XD.

We think that’s not just an important obligation, but it’s a core strength of XD. It means that you get to benefit from all of the work that you’ve invested in these other apps.

David: I love the idea that the core strength comes from its part in a larger community of tools. And not just the tools, but the community of designers and developers you work with.

Khoi: Absolutely. If you go back to the early ’90s, when the apps that we have all made our livings on, really first surfaced and started to get traction. They were so powerful, but they were built around this single-user model, and the output was fairly static.

Now we’re in this entirely different realm where the user model for apps really needs to be oriented around teams—multiplayer, right? It’s got to be something where other designers can collaborate with you, but also stakeholders, clients, developers. It’s very much team-oriented.

At the same time, the output can no longer be only static. It also needs to move. It needs to demonstrate behavior. It’s really very different from where creative tooling first began a few decades ago.

That change—the complexity of that difference—is what drives all of our products today, both the flagship products and the new products that we’re building.

Whether something moves, or whether something actually has form and dimensionality—like it does with the things that you can build in our other new tool, Adobe Dimension—this is all part of helping designers grok or master all these new forms. Learn how to get started with Adobe Dimension in Issue #103

David: I love how earlier you used the word “multiplayer.” I’ve had this long-standing philosophy that if you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right. And in some ways, these tools, these apps, have been my video games.

And I’m not necessarily talking about gamifying the tools, but I do think that the more fun you have with them, the more efficient and productive you can be as well.

Khoi: I think it’s a hundred percent true. I don’t say this just to flatter you, but part of the fun of reading your book [about QuarkXPress, in the 1990s] was learning all the cool things that could be done that I wouldn’t know otherwise. For some people—maybe nerdier people than most—but for some people, learning how to build a rule into a paragraph style… I was, like, “This is so fun to be able to do that.”

It’s definitely the kind of thing we think about when we’re building XD. How can we remove friction, and then also make it more enjoyable to use, and make the time that you’re spending at your job less laborious and more creatively satisfying?

David: Another area in which Adobe is spending a lot of effort is Adobe Sensei, the artificial intelligence technology. This idea that AI and machine learning can help designers… a lot of designers are very nervous about this.

Khoi: There’s a tremendous amount of potential to help designers be more productive in their day-to-day work—remove even more friction, even more tedium, and help them achieve an even better level of work. That’s what we’re focused on with AI.

It’s not a replacement for designers. It’s a way to give designers additional superpowers.

David: That’s kind of what all these tools are about: they’re enabling me, giving me powers I wouldn’t normally have. I can’t draw a straight line with a pen, but I can do it with my superpower tools called InDesign or Illustrator.

The idea that the tools could give me even more power to do cooler stuff that I’m maybe not even imagining, I think is quite wonderful.

Khoi: The way we think about it is, since the advent of digital technology into the design world, the pattern has been that no matter what the computer can do, humans actually make it better, make it more relevant… make it more human.

We’re just ramping up to another level of what computers can do, but we feel 1,000 percent confident that whatever a computer can do, humans can improve on it and make it more relevant to people.

David: So perhaps a lot of first drafts could be done by computer, and then the fine tuning, the tweaking, is going to have to be personal, because there’s an analog aspect to design that resonates—a resonance that only humans seem to be able to do.

Khoi: There’s also a lot of repetitive manual tasks in all kinds of design and in all kinds of creative work that computers can do more efficiently and just free up the designer, the digital artist, whomever, to focus on what a computer can’t do, which is come up with uniquely human solutions.

David: What do you think designers should be learning today in order to succeed in the coming years?

Khoi: If you’re thinking about the future of publications, XD is a very logical next step, because we’ve focused so much on the first day using XD. If you bring any kind of experience in InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop, that first day or even the first hour of XD has been optimized to make life very easy for you. The tools will behave in a way that you expect them to.

There aren’t a lot of tools to master, even though they’re very powerful. You can get up and running very quickly and move from creating a static layout if it’s a website, or an app, or something, to something that moves and responds to your input and behaves in a certain way very quickly, which a few years ago was actually quite tedious to do.

This is a very natural, very easy on-ramp to thinking about interaction design, thinking about the world of interactivity.

David: XD means “experience design,” right? And the idea that you’re designing experiences is different than when you’re laying out a page in some ways, but in other ways it’s the same. You’re still designing what the experience is going to be like for your audience.

Khoi: That’s exactly right. That sameness is something that is core to XD. We’ve really tried to help people transfer their existing skills, existing knowledge into this new world. Similarly, I mentioned Adobe Dimension earlier, and the idea behind Adobe Dimension is: we take something that’s very complex and actually not easily learned by a 2D designer…

David: By mere mortals. [laughs]

Khoi: Yes! And we make it very comprehensible for somebody who’s familiar with InDesign or Illustrator. There’s that skills transference again there. Then we hope, as you get more and more comfortable in the world of 3D objects, that you’ll start to acclimate to 3D environments, 3D experiences. And that’s where a lot of design is going with AR, VR, and beyond, taking computing out into the world everywhere.

David: Apart from XD and Dimension and Comp, what tool does Adobe make that you think designers just really should be playing with more?

Khoi: There’s an app that’s available on iOS and Android called Capture, which is brilliant for people who have ever dabbled in patterns in Photoshop or Illustrator or in Brushes. Capture, essentially, lets you take inspirations from the real world and then turn them into assets that are almost immediately usable in Photoshop and Illustrator. It’s something that never fails to delight people once they start playing with it.