December 28, 2009
Aesthetics, Books
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Graphic Design: The New Basics Ellen Lupton & Jennifer Cole Phillips
As it says this is the New Basics.
Firstly, it really is the basics, but those basics are the starting points for all designers; point, line, colour etc.
The Basics – I have read about, practiced all these topics before (in various art and design courses) but I’ve never had them all together in a design text book, which is good for reference before. I found reviewing them again useful, and they were well presented with nice and varied examples which helps provide inspiration.
The New – The New bit refers to some additions which have been made to the ‘usual’ basics which includes looking at; transparency, animation and computer generated images. This was nice to see as they are the new basics.
What I liked the most was that it was teaching the underlying concepts not the software (except a bit of Processing in places), it is the basics and some of the exercises seemed to be implied rather than stated, it’s not just a reading book, if you want to become a designer you have to read, look at the examples and then go off and design your own, I didn’t think that was stated explicitly enoug8h.
December 18, 2009
Random
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In the following two articles business people and entrepreneurs discuss the books which influenced them; and they’re not all business books!
Reading for business inspiration
Reading for business inspiration (part 2)
December 6, 2009
Random
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Well Batch A of the dandelion wine did clear nicely and I bottled it up the other day.
Of course that meant giving it a try too, I hadn’t measured the specific gravity when I first made it so I have had to guess based on the ingredients at its inital gravity, but it appears if all had gone to plan I should have ended up with a wine of about 14%, I think it’s actually ended up at about 11% and a little bit (okay that’s being nice) sweet, perfectly drinkable but perhaps just a small gloass as a dessert wine.
December 1, 2009
Strategy
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As part of my effort to keep on learning and supplement my reading on the personal MBA, and figure out how I can be more entrepreneurial I have been going to Enterprise Tuesdays, which is a series of lectures and talks every Tuesday evening at the University of Cambridge.
It’s the end of the first term now and I’ve been looking back over notes I’ve made and there seems, to me, to be some similarities in what everyone has said.
- An idea is worthless until you do something about it.
- Stress test your idea with a few people (who will tell you the truth!) is it really a good idea? Is the timing right, is the idea ready, is the market place ready?
- Put everything in to it, you must be passionate about it.
- Be passionate about it, if you’re not then no one else will be.
Obviously there was a lot more to the lectures than that, but to me these seem to be the common themes across the lectures so far.
I’m still having difficulty with the post lecture networking, the place is full of MBAs, CEOs and all sorts of other acronyms and I feel like a fraud for being there, which I think fits in with what Josh calls Imposter Syndrome