Aphorisms 100 Things I Know About Design is a collection of aphorism-like reflections, which include pure awesomeness like: Design is easy. It’s good design that’s hard. Or: Sometimes design is about creating opportunity. Or: A good design is often a bad design, refined. Mixed-in are such nonsense like: The purpose of any design is to…
Tag: book
Weekly Learning: Thought Leadership, Teaching Design, and the Strategic Designer
Thought Leadership Internal Design Teams and Thought Leadership explores the challenges in-house design teams face, especially when it comes to thought leadership and “lost potential.” Specifically: …internal design roles are structurally misaligned with public thought leadership. And the career growth options don’t favour the craft side of things: Thought leadership and mastery are correlated. An…
Weekly Learning: Design, Measurement, Hype, and Captaincy
Framing Design in Business A new model of the design process provides an interesting perspective to look at design in business. Firstly, design happens on three levels: strategic, tactical, and operational: Then it gets interesting when those three levels intersect with each other: The six areas derived from the intersections ask different questions regarding design’s…
Weekly Learning: The Future Issue
Synthetic Realities Deepfake and blockchain are twins. But unlike blockchain, deepfake is not something new. Synthetic realities have been existed for a very, very long time. Andy Polaine’s iconic post, Design in the age of synthetic realities tells fascinating stories of how “AI-generated and mixed realities are blurring the boundaries of “truth” and challenging how…
You Know the Next Item on My Bucket List
The Previous Item I had always wanted to write a book that helps everyone understand design. It was on my bucket list for a very long time. When I was an editor in a publishing house, I wondered why there are no such books (which is not true, of course). By the time I was…
Bookview: How Design Makes the World by Scott Berkun
Amazon | Goodreads The Best First Reading to Understand Design for Everyone What is good design? It’s a simple question that demands not-so-simple answers. To answer it in the most basic way, you have to clarify at least two more basic questions: What is “good”? And what is “design”? Only when you get down to the…
2x2x2: Six Books You Deserve As a Designer
Do designers still read books? Despite the proliferation of short-form web content, books are still a thing. The former is very good at keeping us well informed, while the latter still best at delivering elaborated, accumulated, and well-organized collection of knowledge. Here are six books that helped and are still helping me. I hope they…
Bookview: An Intelligent Career
Our average “career books” are usually emotionally inspiring, pragmatically instructive, but, unfortunately, profoundly lacking in helping us reflect and elaborate deeply in a holistic, self-defining way. Many of them give us what we want, but not what we need. No book can tell us what “I” need, because the true career- or life-defining ideas and…
Bookview: Elements of Mathematics
Elements of Mathematics fills a gap somewhere in between. It’s dense, for sure. It demands your full attention. While the insights scattered on those 393 pages are invaluable.
Bookview: The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly
KK has valuable insights buried in his tiring and never-ending personifying of technology.
Bookview: Experience Required by Robert Hoekman Jr
Experience Required: How to become a UX leader regardless of your role by Robert Hoekman Jr The Bottom Line Your first book towards a designer career and constant reminder of any career, because, seriously, you don’t get such sobering insights and decent advice very often in life or career. Official Summary For all the resources…
Bookview: Design for Hackers
Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy The Bottom Line A mixed bag of anecdotes, best practices, principles and insights related to design. You can start reading it from any page. Official Summary Discover the techniques behind beautiful design – by deconstructing designs to understand them. The term ‘hacker’ has been redefined to consist of anyone who has an…
My Interactive Storytelling Book
So finally my Simplified Chinese translation of Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling 2nd Edition will soon be published by Posts & Telecom Press, one of the big-four information industry oriented publishing houses in China. I wouldn’t call the cover design aesthetically satisfying, but I’m not going to kill the cover designer either. I tried to…
The Myth of Telling Stories About Innovators
Just finished reading The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson. The author is surely a very good storyteller, and when stories are told brilliantly well, they become more than stories. The primary premise, it seems, is that no single person instantiates a series of happenings…
Book – Thoughts on Interaction Design, 2nd Edition by Jon Kolko
Although I started my translating “career” 12 years ago (I had been translating and writing C/C++ articles and was once well-known for that in the relevant community), and although I had been a well-respected editor who had helped/assisted many translators on translating, I never did “serious” translation work until the year 2011. And the result…
Book – Intersection: How Enterprise Design Bridges the Gap between Business, Technology, and People
Intersection 1st Edition NOTICE: This post is NOT about the content or idea of the book, but about what it remind me of. Sorry for the post title — it’s just a teaser and origin of thoughts. Came across this book lately. Haven’t read too far. The scope seems broad (it is) and the goal…
