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.

Michael Evamy’s Logotype demonstrates the art of transforming words into visuals. Through an extensive collection of over 1,300 examples, this is an invaluable resource for designers who are interested in crafting memorable, recognizable typographic identity. Added to my bookshelf.

Stephen Coles’s The Anatomy of Type takes less time to read, but much more to digest. From the terminals to the tails, Coles breaks down the nuances of 100 typefaces with beautiful, comprehensible illustrations. He draws particular attention to the details that make a typeface unique. With a short history of each type and suggestion for what the type is good for, this is a must-have for web and print designers.

Once you’ve mastered The Anatomy of Type, you can pick up Lara McCormick’s Playing With Type to explore various typographic techniques. The book provides 50 experimental guidelines to jumpstart your creativity. The hands-on approaches aren’t limited to just playing with type on the computer. For example, the first experiment, “Ransom Note,” encourages you to cut out types from printed materials and assemble them together as a collage. With simple instructions and well-executed examples, Playing With Type is fun to read and inspiring to apply.

Tim Brown, a former colleague and a great friend of mine, had written a little book called Combining Typefaces. Even though the text is quite short, Tim managed to squeeze in invaluable resources for readers to explore further. The e-book format turns out to be quite useful for that task.

One of the advices I take away from the book is to experiment with different types. Nothing wrong with sticking to just one family, “But it also robs us of the opportunity to truly understand why a combination works or doesn’t, and can lead to a false sense of completion.” Tim said, “The task of combining typefaces doesn’t begin or end with any single piece of advice—it is necessarily more complex, and dependent upon a project’s design goals.” I’ll definitely keep that mind when designing my next project.

For the second project of my Advanced Web Design class, I need to build a mobile web application. Although I have done responsive design for two years now, I have never built a web application; therefore, I picked up Kris Hadlock’s jQuery Mobile: Develop and Design to see if this is the right framework for me. To my amazement, I have learned the power of jQuery Mobile through Hadlock’s excellent, easy-to-follow writing style. jQuery Mobile is very well thought-out and it does all the heavy lifting. You could build a decent mobile web application if you get all the right hooks and Hadlock’s book is a great reference for those.