 | Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business by Alex Frankel
Buy new: $10.40 / Used from: $4.25 How naming big products works... worth the week-long bedtime read.
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 | Art Directors Annual 85 (v. 85) by The Art Directors Club
Buy used from: $37.90 Graphic design porn... and it's only so-so in comparison to previous years AD club annuals.
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 | Mapping Boston
Buy new: $24.39 / Used from: $10.25 |
 | Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath
Buy new: $17.16 / Used from: $9.89 Fun read on how to manage and create sticky (aka easily remember-able and fun) ideas and stories.
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 | Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott
Buy new: $19.98 / Used from: $0.03 |
 | Visual Communication: From Theory to Practice by Jonathan Baldwin
Buy new: $29.16 / Used from: $13.21 Communication theory applied to visual and information design. Several excellent chapters on the basics of info/comm theory. Comm theory is not a usual component of a designer's education - and it absolutely has to be.
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 | Design Secrets: Furniture: 50 Real-life Projects Uncovered by Laurel Saville
Buy used from: $10.98 I'm in the midst of fabricating a healthstation and health installation. This is a fab book of how-tos... of designing furniture from sketch to prototyping to manufacturing.
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 | The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't by Robert I. Sutton
Buy new: $14.94 / Used from: $5.96 Nothing new in this rant about workplace bumholes.
Grow a pair, skip this book, and take them head-on.
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 | How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman
Buy new: $12.88 / Used from: $0.58 |
 | Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning by Thomas H. Davenport
Buy new: $19.77 / Used from: $10.94 Fab read on running your biz on analytics... how do you run your life thru better analytics?!
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 | Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication by Neil Gershenfeld
Buy new: $13.63 / Used from: $0.77 Personal fabrication is coming... and the first few chapters are spot on! Worth the 3-night read if you're hot on fab, industrial design, open source, and empowerment.
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 | Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder
Buy new: $10.85 / Used from: $1.99 Think you're productive? I'm maybe 10% efficient... maybe.
Paul Farmer takes drive to a new level. More importantly, he's taking local action on health in Haiti. Rock on Paul.
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 | A Designer's Research Manual: Succeed in Design by Knowing Your Clients and What They Really Need (Design Field Guides) by Jennifer Visocky O'Grady
Buy new: $29.20 / Used from: $15.99 Good primer for the design process. I wanted to see the process... see the evolving artifacts from each process from real projects... to see the real design paths (right and wrong) and how products ended up in the final state.
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 | Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston
Buy new: $17.15 / Used from: $1.52 Fantastic interviews with founders/start-up jedis.
I've read a handful. The webTV and TIVO interviews are spot on. While webTV has a lot to be desired, their startup ride was fantastic!
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 | Visual Grammar (Design Briefs) by Christian Leborg
Buy new: $14.93 / Used from: $8.38 Beautiful intro to visual design grammar. A lovely looking book... decent explanations.
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 | Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas by Seth Godin
Buy new: $17.13 / Used from: $2.98 Get off your duff and read/listen to this logical, passionate, hard-hitting, GET-OFF-YOUR-RUMP and do something brilliant rant.
For the startup in many of us, get on the Small is the New Big bandwagon.
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 | Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design by Robert Hoekman Jr.
Buy new: $26.39 / Used from: $17.86 Great book for folks wanting sober and realistic advice when creating services on da web. More prototyping, less worrying, more doing, less "let's take a year and figure this out."
Good read for designers, programmers, and managers.
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 | LogoLounge 2: 2,000 International Identities by Leading Designers by Bill Gardner
Buy new: $19.00 / Used from: $5.49 Decent icon porn. Not hugely inspiring but it may pop an idea or two in your head.
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 | The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life
Buy new: $21.12 / Used from: $9.99 Rebel against the establishment...and often against anything with a pulse.
Fun accounts of rebellion, installation art, performance art, and Art Politic.
If you're a Yes Men fan, take a peek.
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 | Wayshowing: A Guide to Environmental Signage Principles and Practices by Per Mollerup
Buy new: $38.93 / Used from: $22.18 Fun book about environmental and installation design and graphics. Author is particularly fond of Swiss design... and the best practice examples bend toward this aesthetic. A tad more diversity pretty please.
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 | Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande
Buy new: $16.32 / Used from: $4.95 Rockin accounts of Performance in Health. One chapter revolves around Open Source Health - YUM.
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 | Design Art: Functional Objects from Donald Judd to Rachel Whiteread by Barbara Bloemink
Buy used from: $45.00 |
 | Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent by Joel Spolsky
Buy new: $11.55 / Used from: $2.57 Mashup Good to Great + 37signals Getting Real + Joel Spolsky's practical, no BS HR practice = super resource for hiring great people for your company.
Need to bypass corporate HR and actually hire great talent? Joel spot on with his ideas on finding, hiring, and cultivating great talent.
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 | On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt
Buy new: $11.20 / Used from: $1.92 Yawn. Pseudo-practical and logical advice about Truth. Nothing remarkable.
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 | Design-inspired Innovation by James M. Utterback
Buy new: $27.90 / Used from: $34.03 |
 | The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin
Buy new: $9.32 / Used from: $2.83 Know when to quit? When to stick? A solid 1-hr review of when to get the hell out of Dodge, know the signs for exiting or the staying in for the long haul.
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 | Nonviolence: 25 Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea (Modern Library Chronicles) by Mark Kurlansky
Buy new: $13.00 / Used from: $2.88 A fantastic must-read historical primer on non-violence. Read it in just a few nights (it's ~190 pages) and regain your inner activist.
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 | Signage and Wayfinding Design: A Complete Guide to Creating Environmental Graphic Design Systems by Chris Calori
Buy new: $46.13 / Used from: $43.68 |
 | The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Buy new: $17.82 / Used from: $5.76 Mmmm mmm... yummie baseline for atheism. [more later, 1/2 way thru]
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 | Tools of the Imagination: Drawing Tools and Technologies from the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Buy new: $22.76 / Used from: $16.80 The book is nearly unreadable because of the terrible contrast and glossy pages and text. As a designer, the author failed on the book design.
Beautiful images and examples. Decent story.
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 | Design Management: Managing Design Strategy, Process and Implementation (Required Reading Range) by Kathryn Best
Buy new: $32.85 / Used from: $28.49 No surprises or fabulous advice. If you're familiar with basic project management, skip. If you're a designer jumping into the project leader role, dive in.
I skipped the last few chapters.
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 | The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Buy new: $18.48 / Used from: $8.98 We really don't have a clue how to forecast events... none.
Once you get thru 1/2 the book, you've heard the story. I then skipped the last few chapters.
So-so overall. Fun start, funky thinking/theory.
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 | Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World by Keith Yamashita
Buy new: $10.52 / Used from: $0.42 Excellent exercises to 1) realize you're stuck, 2) know why you're stuck and 3) get yourself out of the rut.
Do the writing exercises, read, think, and execute....
This book rocks.
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 | Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) by Christopher Hitchens
Buy new: $13.71 / Used from: $3.39 Listened to the audio book (~3.5 hrs).
As an aspiring citizen designer, T.Paine paved the road for all of us....
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 | Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres
Buy new: $16.50 / Used from: $1.47 Blink + Freakanomics + Statistics.
Datamining + regression testing + beautiful evidence = the new design trend in making smarter decisions.
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 | The T-Shirt: A Collection of 500 Designs by Lou Lv
Buy new: $23.10 / Used from: $18.10 Yawn. Double yawn. Tshirt collection book that's mediocre at best. Pictures aren't super, designs are so-so... the whole presentation isn't rockin.
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 | Schott's Miscellany 2008: An Almanac by Ben Schott
Buy new: $8.60 / Used from: $0.01 So many eye-popping statistics, stories, and tidbits... it's a must read for designers, engineers, scientists, and folks who want to know the goods on Planet Earth in 2008.
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 | Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies) by Bill Buxton
Buy new: $27.93 / Used from: $21.96 So far, solid design in practice... just starting.
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 | The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
Buy new: $18.48 / Used from: $3.83 A must read... top 2 books of the year.
Scary, depressing, and fabulous all wrapped into a riveting read.
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 | The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
Buy new: $9.75 / Used from: $3.49 Ever seen Snow's map in Tufte's books? Get the inside scoop on how to conduct fundamental science... and how urban areas have evolved over the past 200 years.
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