From the monthly archives:

April 2009

The Advertising Concept Book

The Advertising Concept Book

What makes a good ad? What makes an award-winning creative idea? These days its easy to get distracted by fancy art direction and technological novelties, but when you strip all that away, does the idea still stand up? This is the essence of Pete Barry’s The Advertising Concept Book (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) in which you won’t [...]

Read the full article →

UPPERCASE Magazine

uppercase magazine

I am cheating here because UPPERCASE is a magazine and not a book, but rules are made to be broken. How could a web site that bills tags itself with “books for the creative mind” turn down a review of the first issue of a magazine that bills itself as a “magazine for the creative [...]

Read the full article →

Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web

Blueprints cover

(Guest review by Steve ‘Doc’ Baty) For people who approached information architecture via Rosenfeld & Morville’s “Polar Bear” book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, there was a gap left between an understanding of what was meant by information architecture versus how to actually do information architecture. The knowledge about IA failed to provide [...]

Read the full article →

How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer

Thumbnail image for How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer

(Guest review by Shannon Smith) If you are a fan of FreelanceSwitch the freelancing blog started by Collis and Cyan Ta’eed, their spin-off How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer is written in the same, blog-like style. The book, which is available as a PDF or lulu.com paperback, is an easy read, written in a clear [...]

Read the full article →

Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything.

Cars

The car sums up the contradictions of industrialised age more than any other design object. Simultaneously a symbol of desire, design and engineering brilliance and of over-consumption of resources and destruction of the environment. The subtitle to Stephen Bayley’s Cars (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) comes from Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. “Cars mean more to [...]

Read the full article →