For a book that teaches you to stay creative, the horrendous illustration and typography on the cover of Curt Cloninger’s Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process do the opposite. But don’t let the design of the book throws you off. Cloninger has enough useful materials, including guides to creative process, bypass your inertia, draw inspiration from art and design history, and unblock your imagination. One of the activities he recommends that I also encourage is to maintain a personal design playground in order to keep your motivation moving.

Like the world would really need another book on Miles Davis, Richard Cook, editor of Jazz Review, cleverly stirred his It’s About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record away from being another hagiography. Begin with Birth of the Cool and end with posthumous Doo Bop, Cook’s ingenious assessment of Miles’s music and life is based on his albums. What makes this book rewarding is Cook’s meticulous evaluation of the recordings. It takes me longer to read because I have to pause and listen to the albums (only the ones that I own) to appreciate the level of details and the liveliness in his writing. Without being too technical, Cook’s vivid language will help readers understand the aesthetic qualities and beauties of Miles’s works of art.

I read many American music critics—including Sasha Frere-Jones, Kelefa Sanneh, Jeff Chang, Jon Caramanica, Jon Pareles, Oliver Wang and Stanley Crouch—to get a feel for my own writing, and Greg Tate is the man that I admire most. His writing is sharp, provocative, and he always speaks his mind. Below is an except from his “Hardcore of Darkness: Bad Brains” to illustrate my point:

Hardcore? [Bad Brains] take it very seriously. You say you want hardcore? I say the Brains’ll give to you hardcore straight up the ass, buddy. I am talking about like lobotomy by jackhammer, like a whirlpool bath in a cement mixer, like orthodontic surgery by Black & Decker, like making love to a buzzsaw, baby. Meaning that coming from a black perspective, jazz ain’t it, funk it ain’t hardly, and they’ll probably never open for Dick Dames or Primps. Even though three white acts they did open for, Butch Tarantulas, Hang All Four, and the Cash, is all knee-deeper into black street ridims than the Brain ever been and ain’t that a bitch?

The essay came from his Flyboy in the Buttermilk, a book I have not one but two copies of. I thought I lost one so bought another one, but then found the other one.

Beside Tate’s book, Oliver Wang’s Classic Material: The Hip-hop Album Guide is a collection of hip-hop reviews that I come back from time to time for inspiration. One of my favorite pieces from the book is on Jay-Z contributed by Elizabeth Mendez Berry who is a brilliant critic I come to respect after reading up on her works, particularly with “Love Hurts.” In comparing Jay-Z with Che Guevara, she concludes her essay with:

Guevara abandoned a cushy career in medicine to pursue his lifelong goal, the creation of his an egalitarian society uncorrupted by decadence or deprivation, whereas Jay corrupted his community by selling street medication. Later, Che left the relative comfort of celebrity in communist Cuba to stir up revolution throughout Latin America, while Jay ditched dope-dealing for the relative comfort of Big Pimpin’ rap. Che died trying to change the world. Jay lives large in the world order. But even if you can knock Jay-Z’s logic, you can’t knock the hustle.

Damn, she sure knocked the hell out of Jay-Z’s logic, and I just love the way she ended the essay with the title of his track “Can’t Knock the Hustle” (his flow is virtuoso).

Great designers don’t steal. We take inspirations wisely. With Thuy Nga’s Vi Yeu album cover, one could argue that it was inspired by Vanity Fair. Whoever photographed the cover just failed to move beyond what he or she has been influenced by. Let’s be real. Whatever design you come up with, people have done it. Just point out a project and the design observers like Steven Heller and Mirko Ilic will show you where they have seen something similar. In fact, that is exactly what they have done in The Anatomy of Design. With forty-nine projects selected, they unveil an array of sources where the designers might have picked up. The purpose of the book is not to point out where the designers have copied their work from, but to show how designers could still come up with their original work drawing from their inspirations. At the end, what makes your final piece distinctive is your own design sensibility, not the ones that influenced you.

In design, nourishing your creativity is part of the game. Like flowers, once your creativity runs dry, your design will die. The question then how do you stay on top of the game and how to maintaining your creativities? In his new book, Analog In, Digital Out, Brendan Dawes gives us a personal tour into his daily creative-seeking journey. From riding the train to work everyday to listening to Thelonious Monk while working to observing how people travel whilst waiting for his flight departure, Brendan shares how these day-to-day experiences could feed his mind beyond what the web, books, and magazines within the field could offered. While the concept of searching for inspirations outside your circle isn’t new to me, what makes this book worth reading is how he actually puts these discoveries to work and continue to be inspired.

Can depressing songs really fuck you up? Tom Reynolds was screwed by nihilistic shit so bad that he has to pen a book entitled I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard. Instead of analyzing how the suicidal tunes make you want to blast yourself, Reynolds makes them sound depressingly hilarious with his wit, incisive, heartless and sometimes silly criticisms.

With the list including Ray Peterson’s “Tell Laura I Love Her,” The Carpenter’s “Good-bye to Love,” Phil Collin’s “In the Air Tonight,” Celine Dion’s “All By Myself,” and Bonnie Taylor’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Reynolds discusses the lyrics (mostly his own interpretation of the stories), examines the vocal deliveries (how horrible Mariah Carey sounds when she takes the chorus of “Without You” to the next octave), and scrutinizes instrumental sounds that make you want to pull your hair out. Even though Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” made the cut, I ain’t mad at him. The song meant to be miserable, and she was “telling a story nobody wants to hear.” Who wants to listen to a song about lynching with “bulging eyes,” “twisted mouth,” and “burning fresh?” But I must confess that I dig the part where she mournfully croons, “Here is fruit for the crows to pluck / For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck / For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop / Here is a strange and bitter crop.” I guess I am pretty fucked up myself for enjoying such a horrendous image.

Besides a few truly depressing songs like “Strange Fruit,” Reynold’s list includes sorry-ass songs like Kenny Rogers’ “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” Apparently, the song is about a “cold heartless bitch Ruby” who goes out of town to fuck other men while her husband who is a crippled Viet Nam vet rolls around in his wheelchair. Reynolds points out that listening to the song makes “you feel guilty about even having legs.” You may say that he’s a soulless dickhead, but that what makes his writing appeal to me. At least there’s another asshole who is unapologetic about what he thinks.

Typography is both fun and challenging for designers. Selecting the appropriate typeface to communicate the message is not as easy as it seems. I see bad use of types everywhere from bathroom posters to Vietnamese album covers. Most often, designers just slap on new and fancy fonts just to make their works look cool. If you are one of those designers (you know who you are), Imin Pao and Joshua Berger’s 30 Essential Typefaces for a Lifetime is an invaluable investment. The book featured fifteen san serifs (including Avenir, Futura, and Myriad) and fifteen serifs (including Bembo, Minion, and Times New Roman) that you might want to use for your projects. With a brief history, purposes’ suggestion, and well-chosen, real-world examples of each typeface, the book should not leave the designers’ desk. I know it won’t leave mine. And just to show a quick inspiration from the book, I played around with my banner’s assignment for Vassar’s October Break. The experimentation is nothing fancy but gets me to think about communicating with types.

As blogging gains its popularity (even people with Yahoo mail can blog), fun and worth-reading contents are hard to find. No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog aims at providing you tips on how to make your entries more enticing than your mundane life. From “Fifteen Minutes to Fame” to “Think Like A Writer,” Margaret Mason who is the owner of MightyGirl.com (used to be one of my frequent stops) presents her ideas in a short, concise, witty with the blog-formatted approach to help people write down their own experiences. Although my main interest for Visualgui.com is “unprofessional criticism” on music, design, or whatever interests me, I could use some of Margaret Mason’s advices to juice up my posts. So flip through the book, find something provokes your head, and set your blog on fire.

“Why is abbreviation is such a long word?” Why do we use redundant words such as honest truth? And if we rearrange the letters in funeral, we get real fun, which the opposite meaning. These are some of the absurdities in the English language that graphic designer and typographer Teresa Monachino points out in her Words Fail Me—a book inspired by her Italian mother who had trouble understanding the idiosyncrasy of English. With clean and simple design, witty wordplay, and clever use of typography, Monachino illustrates how those words fail her.

Read Midnight Lightning not because I am interested in Jimi Hendrix’s life, but because I dig Greg Tate’s writing. He sure is one fine critic I have mad respect for. Tate describes Hendrix as “[T]he electric guitar’s Einstein if not its Edison.” And he isn’t ashamed to admit that he felt in love with Hendrix the “dreamfucker” as he analyzes Hendrix’s lyrics, “I make love to you in your sleep and yet you feel no pain because I’m a million miles away and at the same time right here in your picture frame.” Speaking of Hendrix’s sex life, Tates invited Michaela Angela Davis, a fashion and beauty editor for a major African American women’s magazine, to compliment on Hendrix’s pimp juice and for “how liquid and languid he was, and how drippy that made him always seem. Like he was surrounded by a lot of water and could still set shit on fire—literally! He was also drippy without seeming soft or gay and that was because he was not afraid to embrace his inner pimp… I’ve never wished I could have fucked him, but I have wanted to fuck that feeling he was having when he played… watching Hendrix fuck those amps was some of the best sex I’ve ever seen.” Tate also featured a portion of the book to a number of people who were close to Hendrix to speak about him. While these chapters are informative, they could not carry the engaging level Tate could.