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The Tuesday Morning Book Club | New Tutorials | Contest Winner

CATEGORIES: Living In Layers | RC | March 11, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, Mike Simons of New York emailed a comment about recommendations for books on design/type/theory. He’s a teacher at an upstate NY school and wanted to have material from which to inspire and jump from for his students.

As a teacher AND obsessive Barnes and Noble addict, I figured I’d go to my bookcase and see what I’ve bought. I stacked them up in a neat pile so I can go straight down the list.

While this is going to represent a -small- collection of books (I didn’t take more out because I’d feel compelled to browse and I’d never get any work done), I also thought this would be a good idea to get all of you involved. Everyone loves book recommendations – so if you’d like to, feel free to leave a comment on the post telling us about what books you think are good.

I’ll go ahead and list the books in the picture, introduce a new tutorial, and announce our contest winner – after the jump.

Chris Alvanas on Masking & Selecting
Chris Alvanas has tutorial online on creating masks and selections. Be sure to check it out!

Renamer 4 Mac
CreativeTech Tips brings us a good post on a cool application that renames files for the Mac – Renamer4Mac. Click here to check out more of the application. I for one have had this problem affect me because of the sheer amount of files that I use.

Contest Winner
Congratulations to Doug Zeliff for winning our “Submit a Review” contest. Make sure you send us your mailing information at the Contact Page.

Book Recommendations

Ok. So this is the order from bottom to top:

Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines (Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines) by the Graphics Artists Guild
Web Site Graphics: Color: The Best Work From The Web by by Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman
Master Lighting Guide for Portrait Photographers – Christopher Grey
Logo Design That Works – Silver
Logo Lounge – Fishel and Gardner (Any Logo Lounge rocks)
Logo, Font, & Lettering Bible – Cabarga
The Big Book of Logos – David E. Carter
The Zen of CSS Design – Shea/Holzschlag ( I love this book)
The New Graphic Design School – Alan Swann
Designing Web Usability – Jakob Nielsen
The Adobe Type Library Reference Book
Digital Photography Expert – Ligh and Lighting – Michael Freeman
Digital Photography Workshops – Portraits – Duncan Evans
Graphically Speaking – Buchanan (One of my top favorite books!!)
Digital Food Photography – Lou Manna
Web Design: Flash Sites – Taschen
Web Design: Studios – Taschen

That’s it for today everyone. See you on Wednesday!

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Visitor Comments »

For more web design related books I would definitely add to this list:

Designing The Obvious
Don’t Make Me Think
The Design of Websites
Communicating Web Design

And for some quick inspiration check out any of the Web Index books. They are just snap shots from thousands of different sites. Good stuff.

Pick them up on Amazon and save yourself about 30 to 50% of each.

Comment by Brett | March 11, 2008 @ 11:21 am

RC,
Awesome! I just sent my info. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Blessings,
Doug

Comment by Doug Zeliff | March 11, 2008 @ 11:30 am

RC:

Here are a few volumes I’d like to add to your list:

The first book I’d recommend to anyone considering the design business is: The Creative Business Guide to Running A Graphic Design Business – Cameron S. Foote.

Then I’d add:
Idea Index, Layout Index, Color Index & Design Basic Index, all by Krause
Before & After Page Design – McWade
Design Elements (A Graphic Style Manual)- Timothy Samara
Universal Principals of Design – Lidwell/Holden/Butler
What is Exhibition Design – Lorenc/Skolnick/Berger
Commercial Photoshop – Bert Monroy

Comment by Veronica Phillips | March 12, 2008 @ 12:39 am

Veronica: I second your choice, Before and After Page Design by McWade. I would add is that their web-based magazine is basically just more chapters of that book. Each issue is a basically a beautifully designed project from start to finish, period. Brochure, business card, website….you name it, they are all a wonderful source of inspiration when starting a new project and you are drawing a blank. (www.bamagazine.com)

Another book is Crumble, Crackle and Burn by Von Glitschka. In addition to the book it provides, on a DVD, 120 textures to add to your image. The book has beautiful examples from all types of artists on how they used his textures. But once again I have to recommend the website. I wish he would publish his tutorials! He demonstrates design/illustration projects from beginning to end. My favorites (which nobody ever talks about) are the projects that failed or the projects that were “killed” by art directors and where to go from there. http://www.illustrationclass.com/

Comment by d Klecan | March 17, 2008 @ 1:09 am

One more…..any book published by AVA, http://www.avabooks.ch/ You can purchased them from Amazon. They publish digital photography, graphic arts design, books etc. It is just a nice change of pace to read and view work from a European POV.

Comment by D Klecan | March 17, 2008 @ 1:13 am

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