Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck


Jon Acuff - 2015
    Now he offers his most important book yet, a guide to making big career changes—by choice or necessity—and escaping the horrible feeling of being trapped in the wrong job.Acuff finds it amazing that people spend more than eighteen years studying and preparing for college, but little or no time honing their careers between graduation and retirement. He offers an empowering tool he calls the Career Savings Account, which will change the way readers think about their skills, relationships, character, and work ethic. He also shows that if you’re on the wrong track, you already have what you need to change it—even if your family and mortgage mean you can’t simply pick up and move for a new opportunity.Throughout the book, Acuff features inspiring and funny true stories—not merely his own, but those of friends who restarted their careers after a layoff, an extended maternity leave, or simply the realization that they were suffering fifty weeks a year just to pay the bills and enjoy two weeks of vacation. Everyone can benefit from Do Over, from new graduates to fiftysomethings and beyond.

Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series


Tyler Knott Gregson - 2014
    The miracle in the mundane.One day, while browsing an antique store in Helena, Montana, photographer Tyler Knott Gregson stumbled upon a vintage Remington typewriter for sale. Standing up and using a page from a broken book he was buying for $2, he typed a poem without thinking, without planning, and without the ability to revise anything.He fell in love.Three years and almost one thousand poems later, Tyler is now known as the creator of the Typewriter Series: a striking collection of poems typed onto found scraps of paper or created via blackout method. Chasers of the Light features some of his most insightful and beautifully worded pieces of work—poems that illuminate grand gestures and small glimpses, poems that celebrate the beauty of a life spent chasing the light.

Unstill Life: A Daughter's Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction


Gabrielle Selz - 2014
    What followed was a whirlwind childhood spent among art and artists in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Gabrielle grew up in a home full of the most celebrated artists of the day: Rothko, de Kooning, Tinguely, Giacometti, and Christo, among others.Poignant and candid, Unstill Life is a daughter’s memoir of the art world and a larger-than-life father known to the world as Mr. Modern Art. Selz offers a unique window into the glamour and destruction of the times: the gallery openings, wild parties and affairs that defined one of the most celebrated periods in American art history. Like the art he loved, Selz’s father was vibrant and freewheeling, but his enthusiasm for both women and art took its toll on family life. When her father left MoMA and his family to direct his own museum in California, marrying four more times, Selz’s mother, the writer Thalia Selz, moved with her children into the utopian artist community Westbeth. Her parents continued a tumultuous affair that would last forty years.Weaving her family narrative into the larger story of twentieth-century art and culture, Selz paints an unforgettable portrait of a charismatic man, the generation of modern artists he championed and the daughter whose life he shaped.

The Freelance Manifesto: A Field Guide for the Modern Motion Designer


Joey Korenman - 2017
    It’s what we’re good at. However, designing the career we want, with the freedom, flexibility, and pay we crave, that’s more difficult. All of the above is within your grasp if you’re willing to take the plunge into freelancing. School of Motion founder Joey Korenman worked in every kind of Motion Design role before discovering that freelancing offered him not only more autonomy but also higher pay, less stress, and more creativity. Since then, he’s taught hundreds of School of Motion students his playbook for becoming a six-figure freelancer. Now he shares his experience and advice on breaking out of the nine-to-five mold in this comprehensive and tactical handbook. The Freelance Manifesto offers a field guide for Motion Design professionals looking to make the leap to freelance in two clear and concise parts. The first examines the goals, benefits, myths, and realities of the freelance lifestyle, while the second provides future freelancers with a five-step guide to launching and maintaining a solo business, including making contact, selling yourself, closing the deal, being indispensable, and becoming a lucrative enterprise. If you’re feeling stifled by long hours, low-paying gigs, and an unfulfilling career, make the choice to redesign yourself as a freelancer—and, with the help of this book and some hard work, reclaim your time, independence, and inspiration for yourself.

A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design


Frank Wilczek - 2015
    Wilczek’s groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. In fact, every major advance in his career came from this intuition: to assume that the universe embodies beautiful forms, forms whose hallmarks are symmetry—harmony, balance, proportion—and economy. There are other meanings of “beauty,” but this is the deep logic of the universe—and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring.Wilczek is hardly alone among great scientists in charting his course using beauty as his compass. As he reveals in A Beautiful Question, this has been the heart of scientific pursuit from Pythagoras, the ancient Greek who was the first to argue that “all things are number,” to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of twentiethcentury physics. Though the ancients weren’t right about everything, their ardent belief in the music of the spheres has proved true down to the quantum level. Indeed, Wilczek explores just how intertwined our ideas about beauty and art are with our scientific understanding of the cosmos.Wilczek brings us right to the edge of knowledge today, where the core insights of even the craziest quantum ideas apply principles we all understand. The equations for atoms and light are almost literally the same equations that govern musical instruments and sound; the subatomic particles that are responsible for most of our mass are determined by simple geometric symmetries. The universe itself, suggests Wilczek, seems to want to embody beautiful and elegant forms. Perhaps this force is the pure elegance of numbers, perhaps the work of a higher being, or somewhere between. Either way, we don’t depart from the infinite and infinitesimal after all; we’re profoundly connected to them, and we connect them. When we find that our sense of beauty is realized in the physical world, we are discovering something about the world, but also something about ourselves.Gorgeously illustrated, A Beautiful Question is a mind-shifting book that braids the age-old quest for beauty and the age-old quest for truth into a thrilling synthesis. It is a dazzling and important work from one of our best thinkers, whose humor and infectious sense of wonder animate every page. Yes: The world is a work of art, and its deepest truths are ones we already feel, as if they were somehow written in our souls.

The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide


Leah Buley - 2013
    Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you're a seasoned practitioner trying to drag your organization forward, this book gives you tools and insight for doing more with less.

Undressed Art: Why We Draw


Peter Steinhart - 2004
    In The Undressed Art, writer-naturalist Peter Steinhart investigates the rituals, struggles, and joys of drawing. Reflecting on what is known about the brain’s role in the drawing process, Steinhart explores the visual learning curve: how children begin to draw, how most of them stop, and what brings adults back to this deeply human art form later in life.  He considers why the face and figure are such commanding subjects and describes the delicate collaboration of the artist and model. Here is a powerful reminder that no revolution in art or technology can undermine our vital need to draw.

Thoughts on Design


Paul Rand - 1947
    Writing at the height of his career, Rand articulated in his slender volume the pioneering vision that all design should seamlessly integrate form and function. This facsimile edition preserves Rand's original 1947 essay with the adjustments he made to its text and imagery for a revised printing in 1970, and adds only an informative and inspiring new foreword by design luminary Michael Bierut. As relevant today as it was when first published, this classic treatise is an indispensable addition to the library of every designer.

Holly Smith's Money Saving Book: Simple savings hacks for a happy life


Holly Smith - 2020
    She founded the Facebook group Extreme Couponing and Bargains UK (the second largest Facebook group in the world) and is on TikTok, Youtube and Instagram helping as many people as possible to save money too.This book contains all her best hacks and tips to save money and make money - simple, life-changing ideas for everyone.Holly has included her favourite hacks from the Extreme Couponing and Bargains UK community too, who inspired her to write this book. And has asked all her money-saving expert friends to contribute tips too.All the costly moments of everyday life are included, from supermarket shops to kids parties - even special occasions like weddings and Christmas.Discover lots of fun ways to get saving, find the bargains and make your money go further.

Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Entire Branding Team


Alina Wheeler - 2003
    From researching the competition to translating the vision of the CEO, to designing and implementing an integrated brand identity programme, the meticulous development process of designing a brand identity is presented through a highly visible step-by-step approach in five phases.

The Handmade Marketplace: How to Sell Your Crafts Locally, Globally, and On-Line


Kari Chapin - 2010
    Learn to determine your cost of goods, set prices, identify the competition, and understand the ins and outs of wholesale and retail sales. Explore the various sales venues available, including independent craft fairs, Web sites such as Etsy, and traditional stores, and learn to maximize your visibility and sales in each one. Want to start your own website? Chapin shows you how to style and prop your crafts for photography and explains how the most popular Web marketplaces operate. You’ll find everything you need to turn your talent into profits.

A History of the World in 100 Objects


Neil MacGregor - 2010
    Encompassing a grand sweep of human history, A History of the World in 100 Objects begins with one of the earliest surviving objects made by human hands, a chopping tool from the Olduvai gorge in Africa, and ends with objects which characterise the world we live in today. Seen through MacGregor's eyes, history is a kaleidoscope - shifting, interconnected, constantly surprising, and shaping our world today in ways that most of us have never imagined. A stone pillar tells us about a great Indian emperor preaching tolerance to his people; Spanish pieces of eight tell us about the beginning of a global currency; and an early Victorian tea-set speaks to us about the impact of empire. An intellectual and visual feast, this is one of the most engrossing and unusual history books published in years. 'Brilliant, engagingly written, deeply researched' Mary Beard, Guardian 'A triumph: hugely popular, and rightly lauded as one of the most effective and intellectually ambitious initiatives in the making of 'public history' for many decades' Sunday Telegraph 'Highly intelligent, delightfully written and utterly absorbing ' Timothy Clifford, Spectator 'This is a story book, vivid and witty, shining with insights, connections, shocks and delights' Gillian Reynolds Daily Telegraph

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future


Joichi Ito - 2016
    The world is more complex and volatile today than at any other time in our history. The tools of our modern existence are getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, transforming every aspect of society, from business to culture and from the public sphere to our most private moments. The people who succeed will be the ones who learn to think differently. In Whiplash, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe distill that logic into nine organizing principles for navigating and surviving this tumultuous period: Emergence over AuthorityPull over PushCompasses over MapsRisk over SafetyDisobedience over CompliancePractice over TheoryDiversity over AbilityResilience over StrengthSystems over Objects Filled with incredible case studies and cutting-edge research and philosophies from the MIT Media Lab and beyond, Whiplash will help you adapt and succeed in this unpredictable world.

Art Sex Music


Cosey Fanni Tutti - 2017
    . . shortly before he was arrested for indecent exposure, and whose work continues to be held at the vanguard of contemporary art.And it is the story of her work as a pornographic model and striptease artiste which challenged assumptions about morality, erotica and art.Art Sex Music is the wise, shocking and elegant autobiography of Cosey Fanni Tutti.

Spy Rock Memories


Larry Livermore - 2013
    As he learned valuable lessons in self-sufficiency, taking responsibility, and how to avoid (for the most part but not always) getting punched in the face by irate hippies, Larry also found his place and made his home in the far-flung, disjointed and eccentric community he encountered in the anarchic realm that begins where Highway 101’s tattered tarmac dissolves into the dust of Spy Rock Road.