Here’s a list of books I have in a pile next to my bed, which I’m either reading, have read, or am planning to read:

Non-technical:

1. ‘Hackers and Painters‘ by Paul Graham.
2. ‘Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers‘ by Geoffrey A. Moore. (I wanted to know what a disruptive product is… yes, this was an impulse buy on Amazon.)
3. ‘Subject to Change‘ by Adaptive Path (* partial review).

Technical:

1. ‘Flash CS3 for Designers‘ by Tom Green and David Stiller. I won/inherited this book at a Flash Brighton event over half a year ago.
2. ‘CSS Mastery‘ by Andy Budd et al.
3. ‘Bulletproof Web Design‘ by Dan Cederholm.
4. ‘About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design‘ by Alan Cooper.
5. ‘Designing Interactions‘ by Bill Moggridge. It’s extremely inspiring to learn about the history of the Graphical User Interface at Xerox PARC (among everything else in this book).

These lists should give you an insight into what’s on my mind right now.

Overall, I’m focusing on learning about web standards, which I have finally accepted are quite important. So, a new ambition is to write clear, standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. I’m getting there. Learning to write CSS/XHTML that is also standards compliant helps me to understand how it works, which is the underlying motivation. That is what it is about for me: expanding the parameters of what I am able to do with CSS/XHTML.

Reading books about CSS, to my genuine surprise, has taught me a lot – I was skeptical that they’d teach me more than pure tinkering could. I’ve always known what good website design looked like, but I never had sufficient respect for the underlying code – even if I told myself I did. It’s a good feeling to actually understand what the code is doing, or to begin to understand.

In addition to learning CSS/XHTML, I’m playing tentatively with Processing, mainly to sate my curiosity. After tiptoeing around the programming pool for years, I’m now dipping a toe in… and running off screaming. But then coming back to it, with euphoria, grit, and determination! And why not?

It’s hard for me to avoid or ignore programming, as I work for a software company. I design interfaces for mobile software. One of my coworkers suggested I start learning Objective-C, which I just might. I liked this quotation from Paul Graham, which made the idea much more appealing to me:

“It’s odd that people think of programming as precise and methodical. Computers are precise and methodical. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh.”

I’ve just started reading Adaptive Path’s book, Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World. Here are some thoughts it’s provoked so far.

People / consumers / users / fool-proof
Ugh, the problem with words! This sentence stood out:

“Once you stop thinking of your customers as consumers and begin approaching them as people, you’ll find a whole new world of opportunities to meet their needs and desires.”

As I interpret the sentence above, the word “consumer” risks rendering an anaemic, flat, or mono-faceted view of a person, who should be considered as not just a consumer, but – well – a whole person. So if products should be considered in a wider context, so should people.

Still, you could argue that this is all silly pedantry – holding little to no value for designing a product or a service – and that the word “consumer” doesn’t imply a limit, per se, but usefully demarcates a single activity.

Inconclusive, and possibly over-analysed.

That said, words matter.

Don Norman wrote that we shouldn’t use the phrase “fool-proof” when talking about making a product simple. Why would you want to insult your users by calling them fools? He also wrote that if the product is difficult to use, you can only blame the product.

Empathy with users (user is my preferred term) is necessary for creating a good product experience.

Brand strategy versus experience design
Peter Merholz draws attention to an article on experience design by the UK’s Design Council, which confuses brand strategy with experience design. According to the Design Council, “experience design concentrates on moments of engagement between people and brands, and the memories these moments create”.

Merholz wrote a succinct and clear response to Ardill’s article. Merholz’s view is that brands work “inside-out”: brand is how the company projects how it wants to be perceived. Experience design works the other way, or “outside-in”: an “appreciation of customers’ motivations, behaviours, and context leads to the development of a product, service, or system that can satisfy them”.

In Merholz’s definition, brand strategy and experience design are totally different things.

I really like the clear definition of brand strategy and experience design as Adaptive Path explains it. The confusion is there because experience design is still formative, and there is no universal, solid framework established, and perhaps there shouldn’t ever be a universal, solid framework. After all, everything is subject to change.

*

It’s a very thought-provoking read so far. I’ll write up other ideas and thoughts I deem worthy of sharing…

Here are three books that I read in the last year and found to be inspiring and valuable additions to my bookshelf.

Adrian Shaughnessy: How to be a graphic designer: without losing your soul
I would say, straight off, that if you’re a graphic designer, you must read this book. Own a copy. Illustrator Siggi Eggertsson said that its awesome design made him suspicious of the quality of the content, but the content is at least as good as its design. It works as a handbook, a resource for inspiration, and gives solid and practical advice. It covers how to set up your own design studio (with helpful diagrams), and how to handle job interviews. Here is a very good interview with Shaughnessy that focuses on his book.

As for the book title, I think it is apt: ‘losing your soul’ (I think it means becoming disillusioned with your craft, which is easy enough to do) is a danger in everything, and in a profession that is primarily preoccupied with surfaces, it’s especially precarious. This book did a great job at inspiring me, and hopefully other designers will find it useful, too.

[Amazon UK: How to Be a Graphic Designer, Without Losing Your Soul]

Robin Kinross: Unjustified texts: perspectives on typography
This happened to be one of the books I picked off the shelf while I was researching for my dissertation, and was a fantastic find. Self-published, and with no less authority (perhaps more?), Kinross’ ‘Unjustified texts’ gathers together 25 years’ worth of writing on the themes of editorial typography, the emergence of graphic design in Britain, and the work of modernist designers.

This is an unusual and smart collection of writings that I’d recommend to designers who are interested in history and culture. The essays also deal with the recognition and definition of graphic design as a profession, and the writings are no less relevant to the current day and even the future.

[Amazon UK: Unjustified Texts: Perspectives on Typography] [Hyphen Press]

Christopher Burke: Paul Renner: the art of typography
Originally Burke’s PhD thesis, Burke converted his ideas into a highly readable and beautifully-designed book. It is the only biography on Paul Renner, the designer of the typeface Futura. Although not as widely used as Helvetica, geometric sans-serif Futura has been prominently (over)used in advertising and across visual culture since its creation in 1927. Burke argues that Futura was a product of the classic German third way: an answer to the conflict of Roman (western) type, and German gothic blackletter. This was highly contentious in Germany in the early twentieth-century. The political and social forces behind the creation of Futura are compelling, and Burke does a fantastic job at revealing them. Here is a longer review of this book at Typebooks.

[Amazon UK: Paul Renner: The Art of Typography]

I have just finished reading the story of boo.com, ‘Boo Hoo: $135 million, 18 months… a dot.com story from concept to catastrophe’, by Ernst Malmsten et al.

From any perspective, it’s quite a read, and I would recommend it to anyone based on its thrill factor (”reading [this] has the fascination of watching a high-speed car crash in slow motion”) and lucid, readable prose style.

Boo.com seemed to be a web 2.0 site before the world was ready for it. Tristan Louis argues this in a blog post (about two screens down the page, titled ‘Was boo.com the first web 2.0 company?’). If Boo.com had launched the same way in 2008 as it had in 2000, it would have stood a better chance — widespread broadband alone would have helped significantly with the website’s problems — but it’s hard to make excuses for the excessive spending of investors’ money. Frugality is quite topical right now: reading the story of boo.com side by side with the recent discussions about dollar-stretching in startups is quite a contrast.

It’s easy to see how boo lured interest from media and investors: the story is both romantic and convincing. Founders Kajsa Leander and Ernst Malmsten were friends from childhood, millionaires from their previous internet book e-tailing success bokus.com; and one founder was a former fashion model, the other, a poetry critic. Patrik Hedelin was the third founder, whose role was played largely out of the media spotlight.

One thing that really interests me is the level of thought that was given to the site philosophy and emphasis on “more than a brand — boo is a lifestyle”. The branding was carefully applied across the site, with visitors depositing items into their “boobag”, mixing with other shoppers at the “boo party” (encompassing a forum and chatroom), and reading their fashion and style magazine, Boom. The design of the site itself was ahead of its time: it used the rounded corners which feature as part of the standard branding of web 2.0, a rounded logo typeface, and bright colours.

Miss Boo, the character introducing visitors to the site, was anything but a one-dimensional cartoon: her personality, looks, history, and ‘voice’ were given careful consideration and thought. Unbelievable to me, they booked Eugene Soulemain, the world’s top hairstylist whose clients include Hollywood A-list actresses, Prada, and Louis Vuitton, to advise them on Miss Boo’s hair.

The depth of thought they gave Miss Boo is amazing to me, and perhaps symptomatic of the rather too-visionary nature of its founders (come on: booking the world’s top hairstylist for consultation on a website character? Is it a joke?). Focus on their business model, and being accessible to all users, would have been a better idea. Immediately after the site’s launch, there was a bug preventing Mac users from purchasing items. Unfortunately for boo, a lot of journalists used Macs, experienced this bug, and negative reviews flooded in.

It is intoxicating to learn how seriously boo took its brand, and how much money they managed to raise, and subsequently burn through, to build it. I felt a bit drained by the end of this book, and feel that as a model, the failure of boo at least leaves behind a lot of lessons.

View an archived copy of boo.com here

Another interesting read about boo

Boo on Wikipedia