One typography book to rule them all

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
–J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954, chapter 2

The only book you need for typography.

Recently I moved from New York to Hong Kong after spending more than a decade working in Gotham City. During this process, I had to ‘minify‘ a one-bedroom apartment filled with wall-to-wall books to a personal set goal of ten. It turned out to be a very challenging process – and it took me a long time to get it done. Ultimately I had everything down to 30 boxes – which was much higher than my goal, but still an extreme reduction no less.

If you are a book nerd like me, you would understand my dilemma of throwing books away. Yes I know – I haven’t touched most of them in years, and they were pretty much collecting dust — but they are also treasures to me. I remember when and why I bought each of my books, and I recall the lessons I learned from reading it. I had donated them all to charity so that they won’t go to waste, but saying goodbye was difficult.

The process did result in something positive in the end: helping me identify the gems of each genre – in other words – the one book to rule them all!

As a designer, I own a lot of design books. And since design books are visual and are not really about just the words, Kindle + electronic books simply don't do their justice – maybe in the future that will change – for now you simply can't get the same experience from their electronic equivalent, and it is for this reason that most of them don't get issued in electronic format.

So if you ask a designer to get rid of his books, it's a heartbreaking task. In the end, I kept only one book on typography: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. On Amazon, I recommend seven books on typography. But if there is only one book which you want, this would be the one.

Ironically this was also the only book on the reading list for my graphic design education at Yale – I suppose that's what a good education buys you: the wisdom + access to the gems in each category, saving you the time to read all of the books only to come to the same conclusion?

Here are the rest of the books on typography which I recommend, if you are interested:

• The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
• Language Culture Type: International Type Design in the Age of Unicode by John D. Berry
• Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter by Johanna Drucker
• Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface by Lars Müller
• Books, Boxes & Portfolios: Binding, Construct and Design, Step-By-Step by Franz Zeier
• The Complete Manual of Typography by James Felici
• Stop Stealing Sheep &Find Out How Type Works (2nd Edition) by E.M. Ginger

The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir, a book by James A. Reeves

This is a story about being a man in America. – James A. Reeves

As I stand behind the philosophy of diversity, often I forgot that it is just as important to reflecting on who I am as the assumed dominant voice of the world – to be a man. In his book titled The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir by writer / photographer / designer extraordinaire James A. Reeves (Twitter / Flickr) gave a frank and honest account of the things he saw and experienced during his journey as he drove cross-country across America. Through witty commentary and often funny + ironic photographs observed through the author's lens, the book is a joy to read and provides great insight about men as well as cultures + customs in America.

Recommended.

SML Bookstore: SML Recommend Books

I did a test drive on the Amazon Associates program and created a bookstore using my existing Listmania lists:

Redirected smlrecommendbooks.com to this bookstore as a result :)

Graphic Design

See-ming Lee says: "In order to master the art and science of any field, have a solid foundation of the basic principles, learn the history of its development and always have a critical mind of everything that you create. With these tools in hand, you can solve any challenges that come in your way."



Information Design

See-ming Lee says: "Before there was a field called information architecture, IA is the first step in the graphic design process. Content gathering and organization is arguably the most powerful steps in gaining a thorough understanding of what we wish to create and conceptualize. Information needs to be designed in the form that most eloquently describe its function. This collection of books represents best-of-breed examples. From maps to airplane safety instructions, they knock down linguistic and cultural barriers and enable viewers the most immediate path to their content and structure."



Typography

See-ming Lee says: "My graphic design education at Yale has planted the seed for my love for typography and artists' books."



Flash + ActionScript

See-ming Lee says: "A collection of books on ActionScript that I have read and can easily recommend to any ActionScript developers."



Network Theory

See-ming Lee says: "After reading Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams, my exploration of decentralized networks went down a very viral path. Here are a collection of books that I have picked up over the course of a few years. The application of network theory is enormous, and can be used as a tool and device to understand cities, computer networks social networks, human-human interactions (speech), human-computer interactions (HCI), computer-computer interactions (protocol), diseases, computer viruses, nature. This field of study has brought me tremendous amounts of ideas for the next big thing in marketing strategy."



Life Hacks

See-ming Lee says: "As a highly stressed ADD'ed individual working in the information systems / design industry, these books helped me tremendously in balancing my work + my life."



Business Administration
SML Recommend Books: Business Administration

3D: modeling, rendering, mathematics models
SML Recommend Books: 3D

SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

SML LibraryThing = See-ming Lee + LibraryThing

You are what you read.

SML LibraryThing = See-ming Lee + LibraryThing



Related SML Universe
+ SML Books
+ SML Network
+ SML RecommendBooks

SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Amazon Kindle = iPod of E-book Reader

Amazon.com unveiled its electronic-book reader Kindle to compete directly with Sony® Reader. Unlike Sony's electronic book reader, Kindle allows users to shop and download books from Amazon.com wirelessly via cellular network EV-DO. Books are priced at $9.99 or less. The reader itself will sell for $399.

One of the key issue users of the Sony Reader has is the lack of content, and Amazon.com definitely has content. You can not only download books, but also magazines and newspaper, which is a god-send. It also has a built-in dictionary and allows you to perform searches across your entire library. Sounds like a pretty smart business plan to me.

Design wise it's not as sweet as the Sony Reader, but I look forward to trying it out to see how its performance compares to Sony's, as the number one reason I did not buy the Sony Reader is because of its sluggish refresh rate.

WSJ Video: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tells WSJ's Jeffrey Trachtenberg the new Kindle is "designed for people who really love reading."

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Related News
+ CNET News.com: Amazon's Kindle vs. Sony's Reader

Related SML Universe
+ SML Wiki: Amazon

SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Open Content Alliance = Books + Universal Web Search / Slashdot

The Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history, has created a new project: the Open Content Alliance. Its purpose is to open the nation's library collections to universal web search.

A number of major library systems, including the Boston Public Library and Smithsonian, have refused to sign up with competing ventures by Microsoft and Google because they do not provide for universal access to digitized books. These commercial ventures prohibit books being accessed by competing search engines. So far, 80 libraries and research institutions have signed on with Open Content Alliance.

They must pay for the scanning of their books while Google and Microsoft offset that cost for their participating institutions

Source: Internet Archive Challenges Google / 2007-10-22 / Slashdot

Related News

• Libraries Decline Offers to Place Books on Google and Microsoft Search / 2007-10-23 / Search Engine Roundtable: A New York Times article discusses the Open Content Alliance, an initiative to put books online for everyone's consumption regardless of affiliation. ...
• Freeing books and other digital things / 2007-10-22 / ZDNet Blogs

Full detail of OCA on OpenLibrary.org

SML Copyright Notice

©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

More sex is safer sex / Steven Landsburg

Source: Possible Side Effects / 2007-07-08 / New York Times

Steven E. Landsburg (Google), a professor at the University of Rochester recently published a book called More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics, where he applied economics theory in everyday life. The book is largely based on his column called Everyday Economics on Slate Magazine.

I haven't read the book yet, but it looks quite interesting based on the book review on New York Times, where he suggests that the AIDS epidemic is "the price of our permissive attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms of extreme sexual conservatism."

You can also read the first chapter of the book on New York Times' Web site.

SML Google = See-ming Lee 李思明 + Google

SML Math = See-ming Lee 李思明 + Mathematics

• SML (Google: SML) = See-ming Lee = Design + Technology + Marketing Strategy = 李思明 = 設計 + 科技 + 營銷策略
• Google (Google: Google) = Google + Google Maps + Google Video + Google News + Google Groups + Google Labs + Google Adwords + Google Desktop Download + Google Image Search + Google.org + ...

SML Google = See-ming Lee 李思明 + Google

• Google: "See-ming Lee" = Results 1 - 10 of about 36,100 for "See-ming Lee". (0.05 seconds)
• Google Blog Search: "See-ming Lee" = Results 1 - 10 of about 34 for "See-ming Lee". (0.18 seconds)
• Google Books: "See-ming Lee" = Books 1 - 2 of 2 on "See-ming Lee". (0.10 seconds)
• Google Images: "See-ming Lee" = Results 1 - 20 of about 333 for "See-ming Lee". (0.05 seconds)
• Google Images: "See-ming Lee" site:farm1.static.flickr.com = Results 1 - 20 of about 632 for site:farm1.static.flickr.com "See-ming Lee". (0.15 seconds)
• Google Images: "See-ming Lee" site:farm2.static.flickr.com = Results 1 - 20 of about 76 for site:farm2.static.flickr.com "See-ming Lee". (0.05 seconds)
• Google Images: "See-ming Lee" site:www.yaleherald.com = Results 1 - 14 of 14 for site:www.yaleherald.com "See-ming Lee". (0.05 seconds)
• Google Groups: "See-ming Lee" = Results 1 - 10 of 103 for "See-ming Lee"
• Google Maps: "See-ming Lee" = Results 1 - 10 of about 26 for "See-ming Lee"
• Google Video: "See-ming Lee" = Results for "See-ming Lee" 1 - 3 of about 3 (0.014 s) - RSS

SML Copyright Notice

Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee (SML Google / SML LinkedIn / SML Pro Blog) / SML Search. All rights reserved.

Tag Mirror = Your Books in the Eyes of others

I have been using LibraryThing for a while now and I am quite happy with it.

Source: LibraryThing

Originally it was mostly a data-entry chore, but I bought one of their $15(USD) CueCat bar-code scanner and started scanning in my books (work in progress). The downside of having all these books on the site, I noted, is that while there is no longer a nightmare for data-entry, tagging become a bit of an issue, as I still have to type them in one by one (another work in progress).

Today, I discovered a very innovative feature called tag mirror which I have never noticed before. As according to the site, it "is a new twist to tagging. Rather than showing a member's tags, this shows what other members think of a member's books."

Here's a screenshot of it:

Source: Screen capture of See-ming Lee's tag mirror on LibraryThing / 2007-08-26T09:04-05:00

Until I have time to properly tag all my books, it definitely helps me analyze what my true interests are better than my own tags :)

See my profile + my library + my tag cloud + my tag mirror + my author cloud on LibraryThing.

Also see LibraryThing's blog post about their innovation.

SML SEO = See-ming Lee + Search Engine Optimization

Source: Amazon

After reading Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams, my exploration of decentralized networks went down a very viral path. I discovered that the application of network theory is enormous and has huge implications and applications on every seemingly unrelated topic that I have come across.

It can be used as a tool and device to understand cities, computer networks social networks, human-human interactions (speech), human-computer interactions (HCI), computer-computer interactions (protocol), diseases, computer viruses, nature. If you think about it, all these things boil down to a single category: communication.

My recent interest in networks has in turn got me into search engine optimization — because search engine is essentially a highly networked database with stored properties between data collections. Here are the steps I have taken to research this topic:

1. Study network theories (mostly through books and wikipedia)


2. Dive into every social-networking sites and analyze their business strategies


3. Domain-shopping and create targeted content as a way to validate the theories studied

It appears that my SEM (aka Wikipedia: Search Engine Marketing aka SML: Search Engine Masturbation) has paid off — I discovered today that I have accidentally fell into a gold mine:

1. Googling design, technology and marketing returns about 209,000,000 results.
   SML currently secure results #1, #2 and #3.


2. Googling design, technology and strategy returns about 159,000,000 results.
   SML currently secure results #3, #7 and #9.


3. Googling design, technology and marketing strategy returns about 109,000,000 results.
   SML currently secures results #1, and #2.

Notes:

1. Your personalized results may vary.
2. Sign out from Google to view neutral results.

Here are a collection of books that I recommend if you are interested in this topic:

Source: Amazon	Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi "Understand the properties of networks, and you will understand the principles governing life." — See-ming Lee
Source: Amazon	Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems) by Mitchel Resnick
Source: Amazon	The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation by Gary William Flake
Source: Amazon	A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
Source: Amazon	Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks by Mark Buchanan

If you like these books, you might also be interested in other books that I recommend.

GUIdebook = Graphical User Interface Repository

GUIdebook is "a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces, as well as various materials related to them.”

1. Screenshots. This site has an amazing repository of screenshots of all the main applications from pretty much all the OS that's ever been introduced, all saved in 24-bit PNGs (aka lossless) quality.

2. Interface Elements. Additionally, you can compare icons of application components, drives and devices, documents and folders, as well as mouse pointers across different OS environments.

3. Sound. Fairly interesting, and is often missing in other GUI repositories is the collection of sounds in WAV (lossless) format, which is a very effective means of user feedback in interface designs.

4. Applications. The site also include application splash screens, and an applications section that detail every aspect of iTunes and Photoshop during their entire history.

5. Additional resources. It even has repositories for ads, videos, articles, books and tutorials of everything known to human history about GUIs.

More information about specific GUI families can be found on the site's site map.

2007 = 50 Years of Helvetica

Helvetica lovers rejoice!

1. 50 Years of Helvetica is currently being shown at MoMA. You'll get plenty of time to hike up to midtown before the show ends on March 31, 2008.


2. Helvetica, the film.


3. Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface, the book.


4. Linotype is having a Helvetica NOW Design Contest, the poster design contest.
   
   The winners will be selected by popular vote. The voting will be carried out online at www.Linotype.com/helveticaNOW starting in mid-October 2007. The winners will be announced in the January 2008 issue of the LinoLetter.
   
   Prizes
   Linotype will offer prizes to the first three winners. Together the prizes will be worth more than €15,000.
   
   Deadline
   Submissions will be accepted from July 4–October 4, 2007. Entries will be made public once voting begins and not before that date.
   
   Details

From the MoMA website:

2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Max Miedinger and Edouard Hoffmann's design Helvetica, the most ubiquitous of all typefaces. Widely considered the official typeface of the twentieth century, Helvetica communicates with simple, well-proportioned letterforms that convey an aesthetic clarity that is at once universal, neutral, and undeniably modern. In honor of the first typeface acquired for MoMA's collection, the installation presents posters, signage, and other graphic material demonstrating the variety of uses and enduring beauty of this design classic. As a special feature in the exhibition, an excerpt of Gary Hustwit's documentary Helvetica reveals the typeface as we experience it in an everyday context.

If you are a typographer, you owe yourself to visting these events and shopping for these goods.

If you think that Helvetica is just the same as Arial, stop judging typefaces on screen and observe the beauty of type and scrutinize the difference when they are offset-printed.

Also, please stop thinking that Arial is created by Microsoft and thus bad. Arial is designed by Monotype and is provided as an alternative that is a sans-serif that has the same metric values as Helvetica without the hefty licensing premiums for Helvetica.

Another point in mind: Microsoft has commissioned a lot of excellent typefaces, by many renowned type designers--Matthew Carter, for example. Check out Microsoft Typography.