6 books that will not change your life

Books don’t change us. So if you’re one of those people secretly hoping that all this time lavishly spent reading did not go in vain, well, acceptance is the first step. As Hemingway once expressed it: never confuse action with movement. Books may entertain, inform or even inspire us to do something but sadly, they themselves are rather on the action side.

On the positive side, this tiny drawback might be the only thing preventing excessive exposure to brainwashed hordes of sociopaths. Obviously, this is precisely what would happen if all those avid students of “The Art of War” (supposedly all time bestseller on Amazon self-help books list) started actually living according to the “Lure them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion” maxim. As for now we only have to put up with it during elections.

The following books will neither change you, nor your beliefs (unfortunately, hardly nothing can change the latter), but I’ve found them interesting or useful enough to recommend each to someone at least once. Not to mention that I’d rather keep my self-delusions nourished and nurtured; writing about what I’ve read provides a good excuse for reading on.

Twyla Tharp: The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life & The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together

Being creative for some time takes a lot of work and passion. Staying creative for years takes an awful lot of discipline and really hard work; there’s little romantic about it. As for collaboration, I’ve always thought that was what Beckett had been thinking of when he famously said: ‘Fail, fail again, fail better’.
Don’t let the titles mislead you; neither of these books is a traditional self-help book. Still, the Habits are one of the wisest and most pragmatic books on the subject I’ve ever read. I cannot recommend them enough.

James Gleick: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Books that are thorough rarely are gripping (unless you’re a nerd). In either case: it’s an excellent read.

Sándor Márai

I love Sándor Márai. With all my heart. His most popular ‘Embers’ is a masterpiece that kept me mesmerized to the very last page and that does not happen often (over-read, blasé and proud of it). His Diaries are the only book I’ve bought recently in paper (!) and decided not to give away after reading. So on and so forth.

Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language and Antonio Damasio: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

To my best guess pairing psycholinguistics with neuroscience is like coupling css and product design just because in some general sense they both do with design. Regrettably, these volumes are too nerdy and geeky to put them separately and they don’t exactly fit smoothly into ‘easy summer reading’ category. Just as a sum up of both: “The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will contain With ease, and you beside.”

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Instapapers (would have fallen under tl;dr tag unless they hadn’t been actually worth reading):

The Local-Global Flip, or, “The Lanier Effect” Somebody should have invented ‘too good for web’ tag. This interview would utterly fit.

How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More. I truly abhor so-called ‘gamification‘, nonetheless this is how a relevant approach to this trend looks like or how posts would have been written if blogging as a genre had not signified “substance watered down to a week of posts”.

Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action, best read with: Designing for Social Norms (or How Not to Create Angry Mobs).

The Possibilian: What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain. Rather unfortunate title for quite interesting article on our perception of time.

Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance On unfotunate titles again, still worth a few minutes.

If you’ve read up to this point, it may indicate that you’re seriously procrastinating. So last but not least: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield is a rather short (and consequently procrastinate friendly) book that will help you get out of your own way and just do it. With just a few more pages:)

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Ogilvy’s principles of management

1. Remember that Abraham Lincoln spoke of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He left out the pursuit of profit.
2. Remember the old Scottish motto: “Be happy while you’re living, for you are a long time dead.”
3. If you have to reduce your company’s payroll, don’t fire your people until you have cut your compensation and the compensation of your big-shots.
4. Define your corporate culture and your principles of management in writing. Don’t delegate this to a committee. Search all the parks in all your cities. You’ll find no statues of committees.
5. Stop cutting the quality of your products in search of bigger margins. The consumer always notices — and punishes you.
6. Never spend money on advertising which does not sell.
7. Bear in mind that the consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Do not insult her intelligence.
[via: Patricia Sellers]

For the Love of Culture

“For 75 percent of the eighteen million books in our libraries, the rule of the plaintiffs would have been a digital death sentence. For these works–presumptively under copyright but no longer in print–to require permission first is to guarantee invisibility. These works are, practically speaking, orphans. It is effectively impossible–at least at the wholesale level–to secure permission for any use that triggers copyright law.”
Lawrence Lessig’s, as always insightful essay on Google, copyright and our future.

Milton Glaser: Ten things I have learned

1 You can only work for people that you like.
2 If you have a choice never have a job.
3 Some people are toxic avoid them.
4 Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
5 Less is not necessarily more.
6 Style is not to be trusted.
7 How you live changes your brain.
8 Doubt is better than certainty.
9 On aging.
10 Tell the truth.
full post here & a short documentary.

Design Imperialism

“A key point of failure in today’s global design landscape lies precisely in the jargon — we need to invent new ways of writing, talking and thinking about concepts of “humanitarian design”; we need new language that doesn’t homogenize entire cultures, new vocabulary that better reflects the intricate lace of the world’s biocultural and psychosocial diversity as a drawing board for design.” Maria Popova on The Language of Design Imperialism. Insightful.

Of Frog Wines and Frowning Watches: Semantic Priming, Perceptual Fluency and Brand Evaluation

“Visual features that have no meaningful association with the product itself can actually make consumers like the product, provided that these features are something that the consumer can easily identify with.This means that critters on wine labels, however odd that may be, can be a good sales strategy. It allows a marketer to target a certain consumer by using images on labels that represent an important aspect of that customer’s life. Moreover, there are potentially many ways to make that label as unique as possible because a logo would be chosen based on who the target customers are and not on what that product is.” Building a Better Brand: How feelings shape product evaluation.

The Sins of St. Paul

“I did not know Paul Rand. I did not work for him or study under him. My understanding of his importance, then, has been gained in the same way as students and practitioners in years to come will gain theirs: through books like Modernist Design. (…) So it’s with some trepidation that I wonder if I might lodge a few complaints about Mr. Rand as a model for graphic design practice. But here goes.” M. Bierut on Paul Rand.

“Any design student could do a better job”

“I never knew a designer that got hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a logo. Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace. This is a process that can take a year or more. Getting a large, diverse group of people to agree on a single new methodology for all of their corporate communications means the designer has to be a strategist, psychiatrist, diplomat, showman, and even a Svengali.
The complicated process is worth money. That’s what clients pay for. The process, usually a series of endless presentations and refinements, persuasions and proofs, results, hopefully, in an accepted identity design” What they don’t teach you about identity design by Paula Scher.

Steven Heller on Olympic Pictograms

Briefly and to the point (& video): Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages.

Quiet logos

“Lindstrom suggests that too much messaging on a product’s packaging can actually prevent a sale. Logos and words can engage the rational mind, causing people to actually think harder about making a purchase. It’s a counter-intuitive notion, but then think about the effectiveness of the quiet logos on a bottle of POM Wonderful pomegranate juice, or a Method product, or the entire Apple product line up.” The Myth of the Rational Buyer: How Too Much Thinking Can Hurt Your Brand

Meetings, the Google way

Not exactly on the main subject of this blog, but hey, branding actually IS about meetings. Meetings, the Google way:
1. Set a firm agenda. 2. Assign a note-taker. 3. Carve out micro-meetings. 4. Hold office hours.
5. Discourage politics, use data. 6. Stick to the clock. [via: supervolatile]

Idiologie / branding & everything else

Summer reading