Category Archives: Books

Reading About Design Is No Fun

Swiss Graphic DesignI’m in the middle of reading “Swiss Graphic Design: The Origin and History of an International Style” by Richard Hollis, a thorough and lavishly illustrated overview of the extremely influential designers and philosophies that shaped much of the craft in the last century. It’s a fantastic tour through the evolution of visual communication in the Modernist style, comprehensive enough in its account to qualify as required reading for any graphic designer, I’d be willing to say. I recommend it.

The problem is, it’s not a particularly gripping read. To be sure, it’s well written and professional, but it’s not engrossing in its narrative; the mind tends to wander a bit when your eyes run back and forth across its dense paragraphs of factual prose; the words don’t do a particularly great job of grabbing your attention and holding onto it with the authority and immersiveness of storytelling. This is perhaps owing to the fact that it’s a history book and a book about design — two non-fiction genres that aren᾿t exactly known for yielding page-turners. Still, I don’t see a good reason why the book couldn’t have been as gorgeously and expertly assembled as it is and, at the same time, also proven to be a blast to read.

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Score One for Books (With Pictures)

Wimbledon GreenThis weekend at The Strand, a downtown Manhattan bookstore that claims to sell “18 miles of new, used, rare and out of print books,” I picked up a copy of “Wimbledon Green, The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World” a graphic novel by the popular alternative comics artist Seth. Though I have a soft spot for comic books, I often regard the romanticized, tactile quality of printed matter to be a bit overrated — when I can, I prefer to have things digitally. Not so in the case of “Wimbledon Green,” which is nothing if not physically beautiful.

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Score One for Books (With Pictures)

Wimbledon GreenThis weekend at The Strand, a downtown Manhattan bookstore that claims to sell “18 miles of new, used, rare and out of print books,” I picked up a copy of “Wimbledon Green, The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World” a graphic novel by the popular alternative comics artist Seth. Though I have a soft spot for comic books, I often regard the romanticized, tactile quality of printed matter to be a bit overrated — when I can, I prefer to have things digitally. Not so in the case of “Wimbledon Green,” which is nothing if not physically beautiful.

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C’mon Feel the Signalz

37signalsMy first exposure to the “Getting Real” approach to Web application development came just about a year ago, in a session at the 2005 South by Southwest Interactive Festival given by the method’s putative leader, Jason Fried of 37signals. It was called “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams,” and it was an hour-long primer on what then seemed like a completely counter-intuitive approach to creating hosted applications for businesses: do away with superfluous preparation and documentation, whittle your team of trusted collaborators down to no more than a very small handful, rush to build and rush to iterate — in short, just do it.

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C’mon Feel the Signalz

37signalsMy first exposure to the “Getting Real” approach to Web application development came just about a year ago, in a session at the 2005 South by Southwest Interactive Festival given by the method’s putative leader, Jason Fried of 37signals. It was called “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams,” and it was an hour-long primer on what then seemed like a completely counter-intuitive approach to creating hosted applications for businesses: do away with superfluous preparation and documentation, whittle your team of trusted collaborators down to no more than a very small handful, rush to build and rush to iterate — in short, just do it.

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Eighty Years on Eight DVDs

The Complete New YorkerYou’d be hard-pressed to find an offline publication that’s had a more fitful and ambivalent attitude towards digital media than The New Yorker. I’m not talking about antipathy or outright scorn for online publishing; plenty of magazines openly eschew the Internet and, whether one agrees or not with that tact, at least those publications are resolute and unambiguous in their positions.

The New Yorker, on the other hand, seems intent on embracing the digital availability of its work, but in its actions, has demonstrated such an obvious hesitancy as to be maddening. Reportedly, internal debate over whether the magazine should have even a nominally substantive Web site was so heated, the site didn’t launch until early 2001, long after most of its peers had ventured online and well into the fallow period that followed the dot-com bust. Even then, its offering was generally stilted and paltry, with content from each issue available only during the week of its newsstand date; with some alterations, the same general dearth of online enthusiasm remains to this day.

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The City in Seventy-Seven

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is BurningIf ever there was a perfect summer book for me, it’s Jonathan Mahler’s “Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx Is Burning,” which I finished last week. It’s a completely absorbing tale of New York in 1977, when the city was besieged by fiscal crisis, arson, serial murders, blackouts and divisive politics, a time when New York seemed literally on the brink of a final, catastrophic end. Through meticulous research and a masterful feat of narrative contrivance, Mahler posits that year’s Yankees ballclub — itself stricken with internal strife between the erratic paranoia of manager Billy Martin and the outsized ego of new addition Reggie Jackson — as a metaphor for the city’s troubles, and uses the team’s progression over the course of the year to tell profound, fascinating stories about baseball and an iteration of New York that, in its very character, is almost unrecognizable from its twenty-first century self. New York, politics and baseball — what’s not to like?

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Fictitious Weblog Name

DickensIn a roundabout, flirty kind of way, what I was asking in yesterday’s post was, “What is a weblog?” The question itself is so open-ended and suggests no definitive answers that even those who pose it seem to do so a bit wearily, which explains why I didn’t come out and state it that way. It deserves to be asked though, and I think a reasonable if still evasive way of answering it might be, “What is a book?” The most literal answer might be: it’s a technological vehicle for the delivery of ideas. But the form itself suggests few inherent purposes, uses or opportunities beyond the very basic one of communication, so why should a blog? Both a book and a blog can take just about any form that can be contained within their own rudimentary technical limits.

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The Reading (and Waiting) List

Bel CantoIt’s not often that I read fiction anymore, unfortunately. I blame this on a schedule that imposes unhealthy restrictions on leisure reading in general and also the ‘always on’ nature of my home internet connection, which beckons me to read more and more blogs when I should be spending the evening on the couch with a good book. From time to time I’ll make a concerted effort to read something in ink and paper format, but more often than not, I’m drawn to non-fiction.

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Picture Books

Last night I took about 180 snapshots with my new Nikon D70, trying to get a handle on the way the thing works. It was a blast; I was up until 2:00a tinkering, experimenting and poring through books. The books themselves have been a revelation, too. On Naz’s advice, I went looking for an older photography reference that would help me get up to speed on the basics, rather than something brand new off the shelf at a mega-sized bookseller.

He said there were some brilliant layouts to be found among the forgotten photo texts out there, and he was right. I’m enamored with one that my girlfriend took out for me from her school library: the first edition of Barbara London’s “A Short Course in Photography.” It’s a masterful example of traditional design in the modernist school, featuring a page grid executed with a gritty, low-level genius. Though I have a bias towards all things digital, there is a warmth to this book — the black ink on these pages is blotchy and malformed, and the typography and diagrams all lack the inhuman precision and passionless perfection in their edges that can be had effortlessly with today’s design and production techniques. Sometimes it’s nice to see that.

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