Thinking With Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students
by Ellen Lupton.
This is a really great book for folks wanting to get into typography. It not only teaches the basic principles (what’s an x-height? what’s a descender?), it also gives a good bit of the history and theory. I really dug it, and for $14, I’m thinking about adding it to my library.
Links:
“To reclaim…control over one’s food, to take it back from industry and science, is no small thing: indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts.”—Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food
This was an fantastic book that deserves a better map. Oh well.
Earlier today my friend Tim asked, “What is your most naïve question?”
Mine was, “Why do we live like this?” Which, of course, is also a way of asking, “How should we live?”
I loved this book because Michael Pollan answers my question in terms of food: “Why do we eat like this?” and “How should we eat?”
The answer to the latter: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. In an age where food has become nothing but a commodity, something packaged and sold, it’s time to treat it like a gift. “Shake the hand of the one who feeds you,” as Pollan says.
Speaking of great writing about food, I’d like to wish Maureen McHugh a happy birthday! Check out her blog and contributions to Eat Our Brains for some exquisite culinary lit.
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain is okay. As a huge Oliver Sacks fan and a musician, I thought I was going to like it more than I did. But really, it’s a pretty scattered book. There’s not much of an overarching theme or thread — just 350 pages of Oliver Sacks writing about music and the brain. Which is very cool and all, but it doesn’t make for an engaging long narrative. It might be a good bathroom book: you just pick up a chapter here and there, rather than reading it straight through.
Here’s a big roundup of links related to the book:
I don’t talk about web design all that much on this blog—probably because it’s what I do at work all day—but for anybody wanting to dip into the subject, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is a simple, straightforward, and classic guide to web usability. I read it when I started my job. (Almost six months ago!) I found these illustrated notes in my desk today, so I thought I’d share…
There was a good article about this book in the LA Times:
Hyde’s 1983 book “The Gift,” subtitled “Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World,” argues that inspiration comes to its creator the same way a gift does. Because of this, both the artist and the resulting work itself become uneasy in a market economy. This gift is most comfortable, instead, when it is kept moving — offered or traded — instead of being hoarded or commodified….Over the years, “The Gift” has developed a cult following among writers and artists who rarely lend their names to anything as potentially sentimental as a book on “creativity” — David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and Geoff Dyer among them. To Jonathan Lethem, it’s “a life-changer”; video artist Bill Viola calls it “the best book I have read on what it means to to be an artist in today’s economic world.”
Mr. Hyde himself gives a good summary:
The main assumption of the book is that certain spheres of life, which we care about, are not well organized by the marketplace. That includes artistic practice, which is what the book is mostly about, but also pure science, spiritual life, healing and teaching….This book is about the alternative economy of artistic practice. For most artists, the actual working life of art does not fit well into a market economy, and this book explains why and builds out on the alternative, which is to imagine the commerce of art to be well described by gift exchange.
In other words, “Don’t quit your day job, dude.”
I’m not really sure what to say about this book. It just kind of re-affirmed a lot of what I’ve been thinking about making art: that it’s important for me to have a day job, so I can separate work from play, and that the more generous you are with your audience (through blogging, teaching, sharing, etc.) the better off you’ll be as an artist—spiritually and financially. Good companion reading would be Cory Doctorow’s article, “Giving It Away.”
Has anybody else read it? Thoughts?
