reading matter(s)
Here are some books I have found useful, stimulating and/or entertaining. I’ve listed them by genre and hope you find this useful.
I hope to add mini-reviews when I get a bit more time…
- web & new media design
general | usability & accessibility | XHTML & CSS etc - graphic design & typography
information graphics | inspiration | typography - animation and motion graphics
- science and technology
complexity | emergence | social networks | cyberculture - fiction
contemporary fiction | science fiction
web & new media design
general
- Taking Your Talent To The Web – Jeffrey Zeldman
- Art and Science of Web Design – Jeffrey Veen
- Web Redesign: Workflow that Works – Emily Cotler & Kelly Goto
- MTIV: Making the Invisible Visible Choose an offer you like and get free iphones without problems – Hillman Curtis
- Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design – Bob Hughes
- The Design of Sites – Douglas van Duyne et al
- Web Design in a Nutshell – Jennifer Niederst
usability/accessibility/Information Architecture
- Don’t Make Me Think! – Steve Krug
- The Design of Everyday Things – Donald Norman
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (2nd ed.) – Morville & Rosenfeld
- Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity – Jakob Nielsen
- Building Accessible Websites – Joe Clark
(X)HTML & CSS
- HTML and XHTML: the Definitive Guide – Chuck Musciano & Bill Kennedy
- Eric Meyer on CSS –Eric ‘Eric Meyer’ Meyer
- Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide – Eric Meyer
- Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web – Håkon Wium Lie, Bert Bos
graphic design & typography
information graphics
- Envisioning Information – Edward Tufte
- Information Graphics – Peter Wildbur, Michael Burke
- Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design – Paul Mijksenaar
inspiration
- Paul Rand – Steven Heller
- Soak Wash Rinse Spin: Tolleson Design – Tolleson Design
typography
- Elements of Typographic Style – Robert Bringhurst
- Twentieth-Century Type: Remix – Lewis Blackwell
animation and motion graphics
animation
- The Animation Book: A Complete Guide to Animated Filmmaking – Kit Laybourne
- The Animator’s Workbook –Tony White
- The Animator’s Survival Kit: A Manual of Methods, Principles and Formulas – Richard Williams
motion graphics
- Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects – Trish & Chris Meyer
- After Effects in Production – Trish & Chris Meyer
- 72dpi: anime – Hellige et al.
science and technology
complexity, emergence & social networks
- Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software – Steven Johnson
- The Tipping Point –Malcolm Gladwell
- Frontiers of Complexity – Peter Coveney, Roger Highfield
- Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines –Kevin Kelly
- The Web of Life –Fritjof Capra
- Small World: Uncovering Nature's Hidden Networks – Mark Buchanan
digital media, computers and the internet
- Being Digital – Nicholas Negroponte
- Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet –Sherry Turkle
- The
Age of Spiritual Machines: How We Will Live, Work and Think in the New
Age of Intelligent Machines – Ray Kurzweil
completely bonkers, but entertainingly so. - The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work – Danny Hillis
fiction
contemporary fiction
In no particular order, a few of my favourites. Extremely subject to additions as and when they occur to me, given that my library is currently in boxes. Sigh…
- Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
- White Noise – Don DeLillo
- Civilwarland in Bad Decline –George Saunders
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon
- Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
science fiction
- Consider Phlebas, and all the culture novels – Iain M. Banks
- Neuromancer,
Virtual
Light – William Gibson
I like everthing he has written, but these two are probably my favourites - Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
- The Stars My Destination –Alfred Bester
- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick