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Books & People

Updated: 12/03/2008

The Books & People corner of the Community section offers lists of books on user interface and graphic design, well-known UI people, as well as a growing selection of book reviews. On this page we also present books and UI and graphic design experts.

 

Recent Book Reviews

Colin Ware: Visual Thinking: for Design (12/03/2008)

Cover of Visual Thinking: For Design

Colin Ware conceived his new book, Visual Thinking: For Design, as "an introduction to what the burgeoning science of perception can tell us about visual design" and thus to help "make us better designers." He wrote his book because of the current "revolution in our understanding of human perception that goes under the name active vision," which "allows us to think about graphic design issues from a new and powerful perspective." According to Ware, "we can now begin to develop a science of graphic design based on a scientific understanding of visual attention and pattern perception." Ware's book "is intended for anyone who does design in a visual medium and it should be of special interest to anyone who does graphic design for the Internet or who designs information graphics of one sort or the other."

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Bill Buxton: Sketching User Experiences – Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (10/08/2008)

Cover of Sketching User Experiences

When our reviewer attended the INTERACT 2005 conference in Rome, Bill Buxton was one of the invited speakers. In his talk, Buxton promoted the use of sketching as a tool for the early stages of design and for exploring as many design ideas as possible. At the CHI 2008 conference, our reviewer encountered Buxton again who this time, among others, gave the closing plenary address. Shortly before the talk, he saw people carrying Buxton's latest book, Sketching User Experiences. The book had apparently appeared at the Morgan Kaufmann booth on that very day – but the booth had already closed. So, he bought the book after he had returned home. What do you think is it about? You guessed it – it's about the topic of Buxton's INTERACT 2005 plenary presentation, namely sketching. Of course, that is only part of the story...

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Jeff Johnson: GUI Bloopers 2.0 (08/11/2008)

Cover of GUI Bloopers 2.0

Seven years after the original publication of his famous GUI Bloopers book, Jeff Johnson published the second edition, GUI Bloopers 2.0, announcing on the cover that it has been "totally updated and revised." Of course, "updated and revised" points to the fact that the essentials of the book have remained unchanged – and that is a good thing, because GUI Bloopers was already a useful book in its first edition. However, a number of reasons led Johnson to eventually publish a new edition of his book.

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Book ReviewS In Preparation

Currently, we have no further book reviews in preparation.

 

New and Recommended Books

Ben Fry: Visualizing Data (06/12/2008)

Cover of Visualizing DataVisualizing Data is Ben Fry's book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. Unlike nearly all books in this field, it is a hands-on guide intended for people who want to learn how to actually build a data visualization.
(From Ben Fry's Website, adapted)

Ben Fry (2008). Visualizing Data. O'Reilly. ISBN-10: 0596514557, ISBN-13: 978-0596514556 (Paperback)

See the book in the book list...Overview of all featured books

 

Featured UI & Design People

Gillian Crampton Smith (11/28/2008)

Photo of Gillian Crampton Smith Gillian Crampton Smith is trained as a philosopher and art historian, but decided to follow her long-standing interest in typography. She designed books and magazines, and spent four years on the London Sunday Times before going freelance. In 1981 an issue of a typographic magazine inspired her to buy a computer and write a program to do magazine layouts on-screen – a very early example of desktop publishing. This experience convinced her of the potential contribution of designers to the design of the human-computer interface. In 1984 she set up the computer studio at St Martin's School of Art in London and started a graduate program for practicing graphic designers to learn about the potential of computers for their work.

In 1990 she moved to the Royal College of Art in London, Britain's only college dedicated to graduate programs in art and design, where she founded the Computer Related Design department. This spanned the disciplines of graphic and industrial design, film and animation, architecture, electronic and software engineering, and psychology. Its research studio, started in 1994, collaborated with many high-tech companies and developed the role of the art and design disciplines in shaping how people interact with electronic tools, products, and media. She spent several summers working in Silicon Valley at Interval and Apple.

In 2000 she was invited to be the first Director of Interaction-Ivrea, an institute for advanced teaching and research founded by Telecom Italia and Olivetti. This became a world-class center for interaction design teaching and research. In 2005, when Interaction-Ivrea moved to Milan, she moved to Venice in order to take a much delayed sabbatical and start work, with Philip Tabor, on a book on interaction design.
(From biography, adapted)

Bio: www.iuav.it/Facolta/facolt--di1/English-ve/faculty/teaching-f/GillianCra/index.htm
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Colin Ware (11/28/2008)

Photo of Colin Ware Colin Ware is Director the the Data Visualization Research Lab at the University of New Hampshire, where he specializes in advanced data visualization and he has a special interest in applications of visualization to Ocean Mapping. He combines interests in both basic and applied research has advanced degrees in both computer science and in the psychology of perception.

Ware likes to build useful visualization systems. A founding member of the Ocean Mapping Group at the University of New Brunswick, (and lately the Ocean Mapping Center at UNH) he has been designing 3D interactive visualization systems for ocean mapping for about 13 years. Ware has also contributed to software system visualization. He directed the development of NestedVision3D, a system for visualizing very large networks of information.

Ware has published numerous articles in scientific and technical journals and at conferences. He is author of Information Visualization: Perception for Design. Ware's latest book is Visual Thinking for Design, an up to date account of the psychology of how we think using graphic displays as tools.
(From cover of Visual Thinking: For Design and homepage, adapted)

Bio: ccom.unh.edu/vislab/CWBio.html
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Bill Buxton (08/05/2008)

Photo of Bill Buxton Trained as a musician, Bill Buxton began using computers over thirty years ago in his art. This early experience, both in the studio and on stage, helped develop a deep appreciation of both the positive and negative aspects of technology and its impact. This increasingly drew him into both design and research, with a very strong emphasis on interaction and the human aspects of technology.

He first came to prominence for his work at the University of Toronto on digital musical instruments and the novel interfaces that he employed. This work in the late 70s gained the attention of Xerox PARC, where Buxton participated in pioneering research in collaborative work, interaction techniques and ubiquitous computing (1987-1994). He then went on to become Chief Scientist of SGI and Alias|Wavefront (1994/95-2002), where he had the opportunity to work with some of the top filmmakers and industrial designers in the world. In December 2005, was appointed principal researcher at Microsoft Corp., where he splits his time between research, and helping make design a fundamental pillar of the corporate culture. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting firm, Buxton Design. Buxton's latest book is Sketching User Experiences.
(From cover of Sketching User Experiences and homepage, adapted)

Bio: www.billbuxton.com (Microsoft Research)
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