

Books I've read in 2012 - sgarbi
http://www.ruggero.info/books-ive-read-in-2012/329/

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pbateman
Not wanting to be negative or anything but I'm a bit puzzled why this post is
here. There's only six books, the descriptions are sourced from Amazon and
there's no comment as to whether the books are good or not.

At the very least some reviews would be helpful.

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sgarbi
I love recommendation engines as much I love people making recommendations on
good reads based on what they think it would be interesting.

I posted this link here just for the sake of discussing the books and maybe
learning about new ones.

BTW which book would you like to know more about?

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pbateman
Ideally your thoughts/experiences with all of them but my first two
preferences would be _Thinking With Type_ and _Understanding Color_.

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sgarbi
Thinking with type gives you an in-depth view into what are the roots of
modern typesetting. At first I was pretty amazed in finding out that Italy
(which also happens to be the country where I am from) gave a strong
contribution to type design during Renaissance. However my purpose of reading
wasn't about history. It was about going less random when having to choose a
font from a set for a presentation or a website. At least having in mind what
are the basic rules to follow when mixing type and setting paragraphs. This is
what the second and third part of the book deal with and I would say that the
book helped me to get acquainted with that altought much of the experience
comes with practice and further reading.

For what concerns the book about color the main reasons for reading it were
that I wanted to know what color fit well together and even though I am at 75%
of the book I would say that I am still not 100% satisfied with the book
because it lacks a bit of exercises for the reader. So far I particularly
appreciate the highlights at the end of each chapter and the part of the book
dedicated to light

Since Illustrator is a great playground for color and type I thought to give
it a try. As it appears a bit complicated at first sight I decided to If you
already have some web design technical background this book flows very fast
and I would recommend it together with vector tuts for getting your hands on
illustrator in a fast way.

I have been eating a lot of information since I got online. I have 1000+ RSS
feeds, 1000+ facebook pages and 500+ followed people on twitter, 1000+
subscription to newsletter which crowd my inbox. But what is really important
to me? The Information Diet gives a framework for healthy information
consumption by comparing information consumption to food consumption. The gist
is that you should consume more information from the source and less from re-
posting content factories which chase the synonyms just to get better SEO
ranking. What I particularly didn't like about the book is that the author has
been writing too much about American politics as an example. As a non-american
I would have preferred more international topics. But I must admit that
politics is a good example to get concept like self reinforcement of your own
truth across.

In Gamification by Design I got some best practices for design patterns that
make websites more stimulating for the user to participate. The best concept I
got were: walk the user throught all the steps from beginner to master, useful
stuff to do this are leaderboards and badges. The book however is a bit of
advertisement for ruby on rails and badgeville.

Last but not least Enterprise Games: Using Game Mechanics to Build a Better
Business has a lot of concepts which are probably already known to a web
designer but not to a manager in a manufacturing enterprise but is still a
good way to get started with gamification for people who don't have an
extensive experience with online tools.

Hope you will find my comments useful. I'm now thinking of editing the
post....

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wtvanhest
Since you are a designer, what do you think the top design books for non-
designers are? I'm primarily concerned with understanding the basics and
language to better communicate with others rather than be the primary
designer.

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thebigkick
Universal Principles of Design [http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Principles-
Design-William-Li...](http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Principles-Design-
William-Lidwell/dp/1592530079)

~~~
namank
I would recommend against this.

This is a book that gives you a collection of techniques. Without the
knowledge of _why_ you should be using these techniques, you'll end up with
weird designs that feel wrong intuitively but are correct technique-wise.

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ttty
It would be nice to read a review of the books...

~~~
sgarbi
here you are :) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4966546>

