Designer Robin Williams has crafted a series of text books showing non-graphics design folks the …
Review of 'The non-designers design book' on 'GoodReads'
3 stars
This was a very quick read that basically confirmed that common sense applies to visual design: organize your information, line stuff up, repeat some elements and make others different. It's nice to have a framework for this "common sense" stuff, though, and it has helped me think more clearly about why something works or doesn't work.
I really like that it looks super dated. All her finished designs look kind of goofy but I think it actually reinforces the focus on underlying principles - you can tell that if the font faces and art styles were swapped around things would look just fine in a modern setting.
Read this on a whim based on a Metafilter comment. It's basically a book about how to learn stuff good. Pretty interesting - to me, the two biggest points are that plateaus in learning are fine and that preconceptions can be very harmful. I think much of this book is common sense but it is nice to see it all in one place. It also kind of makes me want to learn Aikido. It was a quick read, and enjoyable enough. Overall I'm glad I read it, and the concepts he has distilled will probably stick with me into the future.
What a fun book. Steven Vogel has a great voice - it's like having your fun, very smart uncle sit you down and open your mind to a bunch of science that applies to plants. Everything is built up from common intuition about shapes and our everyday experience, so it's quite accessible. He also has the actual equations floating around in the footnotes for the more quantitatively minded. I learned a bunch of fun facts, but more importantly it opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about things in nature.
All four books in this series had quite different feels and it's certainly possible to enjoy the books as standalones. If I were to only read one, it would be Wild Seed.
Wild Seed: Wow! A real interesting power struggle between two supernatural humans who have a complicated and at times abusive relationship. A lot of bad things happen to good people, and Octavia Butler has a real good way of making you feel truly awful when someone you care about is coerced into doing something.
Mind of My Mind: I spent most of this book wishing that the cool characters from Wild Seed would have bigger roles. But the main character in this book was, I thought, somewhat flat - and her conflicts never seemed particularly threatening or interesting. I guess there was a lot of ink from the perspective of someone who wanted to control people and not …
All four books in this series had quite different feels and it's certainly possible to enjoy the books as standalones. If I were to only read one, it would be Wild Seed.
Wild Seed: Wow! A real interesting power struggle between two supernatural humans who have a complicated and at times abusive relationship. A lot of bad things happen to good people, and Octavia Butler has a real good way of making you feel truly awful when someone you care about is coerced into doing something.
Mind of My Mind: I spent most of this book wishing that the cool characters from Wild Seed would have bigger roles. But the main character in this book was, I thought, somewhat flat - and her conflicts never seemed particularly threatening or interesting. I guess there was a lot of ink from the perspective of someone who wanted to control people and not a lot from other perspectives so the book just felt somewhat one-dimensional. Quick read, though, and sets up the Pattern for Patternmaster.
Clay's Ark: here we get a pretty interesting escape story. You got your standard post-water California setting, and some people who got captured by wackos on the highway, and you have a backstory for these wackos which explains their group motivations pretty well. However I felt like the individual motivations were occasionally a bit lacking. Sometimes people would do things and it just didn't jive with how they had been characterized to that point. It felt pretty detached from the previous books - I guess it's the first one that launches into sci-fi territory, and also there's no mention of the Pattern or related phenomena beyond the passing mention of how Clay's Ark worked.
Patternmaster: This was a good end to the series, I think. It brought the Clayarks and Patternists together, examines what each have lost from their original humanity, and is a fun romp with plenty of intrigue, action, and truly heinous villains brought to justice. The three other books occur in the distant past of this one, and so the world has a feeling of deep history to it that it wouldn't have had as a standalone book.
Opus is Kon's metafictional tale of Chikara Nagai, a creator under pressure to finish his …
Review of "Satoshi Kon's Opus" on 'GoodReads'
3 stars
This is a book about blurring the line between a creator and his creations. But, maybe because it is unfinished, it feels much more like a proof of concept than a truly fleshed out idea. The characters don't get to develop personalities since the limited time is largely spent on plot and beautiful visual exposition of the merging worlds. Fortunately, what personalities they do have are not bad, just forgettable.
One more point about its unfinished state is that it was pretty cool to see the partially sketched out last chapter.
Overall, I think that this was a pretty and fun romp through some relatively unpolished thoughts in the author's brain. I think that Satoshi Kon deals with many similar themes better in his later work, but certainly don't feel like I've wasted my time reading this.
