needs more demons?

Brand Thinking offers 22 short interviews with an astounding array of heavy hitters in branding, identity design, and related disciplines. It’s a fascinating and invigorating read. Millman coaxes the likes of Tom Peters and Karim Rashid into moments of almost shocking candor; Dori Tunstall and Alex Bogusky unflinchingly address issues of social and environmental [...]

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As the name might suggest, Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works takes a breezy, irreverent approach to introducing typography to the lay reader. It does a good job of explaining the vocabulary of the field. It demonstrates how elements of of a typeface contribute to legibility in various contexts. And it introduces [...]

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In this lavish, generously illustrated book, Sean Adams offers several prominent branding and identity consultants an opportunity to discuss their work and their approach to identity design. A few consistent themes emerge, most about managing client relationships, with “listen to your client,” and “make sure you’ve identified and are reaching the real decision makers,” perhaps [...]

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I was intrigued by van Gaalen’s forthcoming Indie Brands: 30 Independent Brands That Inspire and Tell a Story, recently mentioned with other interesting sounding books on Brand New. I looked for other books by van Gaalen and turned up this, which, sadly, is less interesting than it sounded. It presents, as advertised, 51 rules of [...]

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The arrest of James “Whitey” Bulger this past June left me feeling like I was missing too much context: it clearly closed a significant chapter for my new home, and I had only a vague (and mostly incorrect, it turns out) awareness of his role in Boston history. And I’d seen people reading Black Mass [...]

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Bossypants is a weird mix: one part autobiography, one part collection of comic essays, with a little bit of serious social relevance, and dash of business book for good measure. Not only does Fey offer some decent advice for managing a creative team, her guidelines for improvisation are mostly applicable to a big-deal sales call. [...]

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Dave Clark’s The Knucklebook was listed in the bibliography of the Tim Wakefield bio Knuckler and I knew immediately that I had to read it.
It’s a marvelous little book, providing a brief, but insightful look at baseball’s oddest pitch from a variety of perspectives: how to throw it, how to hit it, how to [...]

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I love the knuckleball.
I don’t know how any nerd could not love the knuckleball, or, as I prefer to call it, the “chaos pitch.” It’s thrown — at the velocity of a cheetah, mind you — with almost no rotation. Its path to, and hopefully over, the plate is determined, as much as anything else, [...]

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A couple of Derek Sivers stories:
My first CD Baby order was #17697, for 8 discs, in 2000. When I got the now-famous colorful shipment notice I thought I’d actually been the first brand new customer to order as many as 8 albums. I thought the email had been crafted for me, in particular. I [...]

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I can’t remember where I saw Googling Security reviewed*, but the review made a strong impression. It exposed at least a couple of the provocative tidbits in the book, like that even if you personally refuse to use Google’s Gmail service on privacy grounds, as soon as a friend sends you a message with Gmail, [...]

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