Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design is a delightful page-turner even on the iPhone. His response to design thoughtful and the connection with jazz improvisation is insightful. The reference on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue alone is intriguing. Definitely worth a few rereads. Here’s an excellent excerpt on framework and the work of Miles Davis:

A framework for improvisation allows us to get into the process of making things more easily. Perhaps the most famous example of an imposed framework was created by jazz musician Miles Davis during the recording of his album, Kind of Blue. Davis, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Jimmy Cobb, Paul Chambers, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley packed into a CBS recording studio in New York in March of 1959 without any songs pre-written. Jazz musicians routinely tolerated this sort of ambiguity, because they made their living by winging it. But it’s unlikely that any of them predicted that jazz would be reinvented that day.

The predominant style of jazz at the time, called Bebop, was frenetic and lively, but had a tendency to overstuff songs with notes. The abundance sometimes hindered the musicians’ melodic expression by occupying all the space in the song. Bebop has been described as musical gymnastics, because the style’s flourishes and showmanship forced musicians to negotiate complex structures. In spite of the artistry necessary to maneuver in the Bebop style, it can become too large a load to carry. It’s hard to swing if there’s no room to move. Davis wanted to let the air back into the songs, to give the musicians more space to play. They were asked to improvise with simple scales and modes rather than Bebop’s chord progressions.

The recording session began with Davis handing each of the seven men a small slip of paper where he had written down a description of their part. None of them had seen any of the songs before coming to the studio, but with the guidance of the slips of paper, they recorded the whole day, and booked a second day a few weeks later. After two sessions, the album was finished.

Kind of Blue is unequivocally a masterpiece, a cornerstone to jazz music created in just a few short hours by altering the structure of the performance. The musicians accepted the contributions of one another, and ventured out into a new frontier, using their intuitions as their guides. Davis amassed a stellar group of musicians, and with a loose framework of limitations to focus them but plenty of space for exploration, he knew they would wander with skill and play beyond themselves.

Davis’ example is a bit misleading though, if only for its efficiency. Improvisation is a messy ordeal, wasteful in its output, and it should be accepted as such. The key is to generate many ideas, lay them out, and try to recognize their potential. Don’t be concerned if you improvise and don’t use most of the ideas. There’s always a significant amount of waste when mining for gold. (Unless you’re Miles Davis, apparently.)

A required reading for my graduate course on Brand Identity Design, Marty Neumeier’s The Brand Gap sets the record straight. A brand is not a logo, a corporate identity nor a product. A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is. The book is such a pleasure to read thanks to Neumeier’s concise writing, clear illustrations as well as large Helvetica.

Butterick’s Practical Typography is insightful as well as opinionated. You’ll learn the difference between straight and curly quotes as well as to stay away from bad fonts (in his opinion). Obviously if you use his fonts (Equity and Concourse), you can’t go wrong. The book is a great read and I love the way Butterick uses the web as a publishing platform. The book is set in the beautiful Equity and Concourse. Unfortunately the site is not made for mobile. Reading the book on the iPhone is a bit of a pain because the text is tiny and you have to move the body text around a bit to fit nicely on the small screen. Taking the responsive design approach would have solved these issues.

I have read a handful of books on JavaScript, and yet John Pollock’s JavaScript: A Beginner’s Guide, by far, is the easiest to learn. While most authors have done a great job of explaining the core concepts like variables, functions, operators, conditional statements and loops, they don’t show you how these fundamentals are being used in the web page. Pollock, on the other hand, provides step-by-step tutorials on how to create an HTML page with each concept he taught. What makes this book stands out is the connection between theory and real usage. With other books, you’ll get the programming theories, but you’ll understand how to applied them with this book.

When it comes to recommend a good book on JavaScript for beginners, people tends to point out Eloquent JavaScript, JavaScript Enlightenment, Professional JavaScript for Web Developers and JavaScript: The Good Part. Having read three out of four, The Good Part is on my reading list, I highly recommend A Beginner’s Guide as a starting point.

Not sure how I managed to miss Erik Spiekermann & E.M. Ginger’s Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works. It’s a classic with exceptional materials and entertaining analogies. Just finished reading in a few hours and it’s instantly one of my favorite books on type. Preordered the third edition for rereads.

Michael Harkin’s Understanding Type is a short and sweet overview that provides the basic knowledge of typographic matter. With Harkin’s approachable language backed up by excellent examples, anyone who is new to type will learn the core foundation including history, terminology and technology. Recommended read for design students.

As a priest and a music lover, Jamie Howison takes on the challenge of examining the spirituality of John Coltrane’s music. He connects jazz and theology through extensive studies, researches, interviews as well as his own interpretation of Coltrane’s compositions including tracks from A Love Supreme, Ascension and My Favorite Things. Though Howison is not a musically trained, his detailed analysis makes God’s Mind in That Music an intriguing read.

Cunningham’s small, concise book makes a great checklist for making accessible web site. If you follow the guidelines presented in this book, your site would accommodate users with blindness, hearing impairment, physical disabilities and cognitive disorders. You can delve further into this subject, but this is a good start.

Tim Wright’s Learning JavaScript is very approachable. Wright doesn’t teach you everything about JavaScript, but just what you need to know to understand the language. If other thick, complicated books overwhelmed you, give this one a try.

Robin Landa’s Graphic Design Solution (5th edition) is surprisingly comprehensive. From a brief history of graphic design to typography to the design process to grid systems, Landa has done a thorough job of introduction these important design subjects.

In my early days, I learned design from a variety of resources. It’s nice to have a preview of everything in one source. This is a great read for beginners to learn the basic of design. To dig further, you’ll need to find books that are focused on a particular topic. Typography, for instance, needs a book or several books of its own.

I must confess that I didn’t realize the cost ($153.95) of this book until I checked it on Amazon. I just picked it up at George Mason library.