In Hillman Curtis on Creating Short Films for the Web, New York-based Web/motion designer Hillman Curtis reveals his DIY (Do It Yourself) digital video production. With nine short projects—produced exclusively for the web—ranging from designers’ documentary, portrait and music video, to short movie, Curtis shares his experimental approaches to filmmaking: how a movie or a song inspires his vision; how he comes up with a concept; how he learns from his mistakes.

Curtis is not only an exceptional designer, but also a fine writer. Even though he touches briefly on technical notes (equipment acquiring, lighting, directing, editing, and interviewing) here and there, the heart and soul of Creating Short Films is behind the thinking process. This is where his ingenious writing comes in. He knows how to float his words on the page, and his style is captivating. Take the following paragraph for example:

Like most of Mogwai’s songs, “Sine Wave” starts low and mellow, and then builds to a dissonant crescendo. It consists of a warm, basic chord progression on a keyboard, coupled with a static, harsh percussion track. In fact, the song sounds just like James Victore’s work looks: stark, dissonant, and above all, beautiful. Victore’s work, like the Mogwai song, consists of just a few strokes that, taken collectively, build on one another to covey powerful, often jarring messages. Like Fellini’s film, the song gave my imagination a jumpstart, setting me back on track.

The language is beautiful and Curtis’s honesty is delivered. Not too many designers (especially those who are highly respected) would write about a project that has failed miserably. In the making of Superdrag’s “The Staggering Genius” music video, Curtis not only explains why his concept didn’t work, but also admits his failures (something most designers have a hard time dealing with).

For those who seek to go into filmmaking, Creating Short Films is an invaluable text to initiate your experimentation, to learn the process, and to build up your confidence. Even if you have never shoot a film before, this book will motivate and encourage you to pick up the camera. With his openness to a personal level, Curtis has crafted an enjoyable book to be read from cover to cover.

From the intricate syncopation to the elaborate rhythms to the meticulous phrasings (instruments, scats and vocals), jazz is one of the most complex forms of music. Like a sophisticated lady, jazz takes time, tremendous patience and careful attentions to get acquainted with. Of course, the experience is rewarding once we tapped into her body and soul (I am referring to the musical pleasure).

If jazz is the sophisticated lady, Tom Piazza’s Understanding Jazz: Ways to Listen is a useful dating guide. He shows how the art is formed, explains how instruments integrate to create exotic sounds, and demonstrates the aesthetics of storytelling through syncopation, rhythm, improvisation, time and space. With an accompaniment CD consisted of seven classic jazz pieces including King Oliver’s “Weather Bird Rag,” Count Basie and Lester Young’s “Boogie Woogie” and Mile Davis Quintet’s “Footprint,” Piazza uses them as references throughout the book to help readers understand what he means when he talks about music. For example: “… listen to the series of descending figures [Sonny Rollins] plays in “Moritat” at 2:23, or listen at 3:02, when he alludes to the melody, or to the little grunt he emits at 3:42, or the yelp of assent right around 5:53, during his exchanges with drummer Max Roach.” In addition, the extensive of “Further Listening” recommendations at the end of each chapter will be helpful to those who wish to embark their journeys deeper into the world of jazz.

Understanding Jazz is recommended for the beginners. Once we understand the music, we can learn about the important figures, such as Pops, Duke, Bird, Dizz, Prez, Bean, Prince of Darkness, Lady Day, whose works made significant contribution to the world of jazz. The history is as intriguing and exciting as the music herself.

Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz is clear, concise, and comprehensive. From the prehistory of jazz to the swing era to the rise of big band to the pathbreaking of bebop style, Gioia’s analytic force captures images of jazz figures on the pages. Jelly Roll Morton places his pistol on the piano; Louis Armstrong drops the music sheet during a recording session; Charlie Parker drinks his life away; Miles Davis makes history with the recording of Kind of Blue. This book is a required reading for my jazz history class, and I can see why my instructor, Brian Mann, selected it, and it is highly recommended for those who are interested in learning the remarkable stories behind an American original music.

James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is an intriguing story of a talented ragtime pianist and an outsider (an ex-colored who does not belong to either black or white) looking into the world of both races, and not sure which one to be identified with. After witnessing a tragical incident, he decided to live his life as a white man because of the “shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals.” Even though this book is also a required text for my jazz course, it has nothing to do with jazz (more of a race issue). Still, the novel is short and compelling.

Dan Cederholm knows exactly what Web designers need, and he writes for them. I praised his previous book, Web Standard Solutions, as not only a markup and style handbook, but also an accessibility guide. With his latest publication, Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS, he takes accessibility a step further by designing with flexibility or in his own words, “being prepared for whatever is thrown at your design.”

Forward-thinking design is the approach the book takes on. As Web designers, we need to share the control of our sites with the users. For example, allow users to resize their text if they desired. By using percentages, ems or keywords instead of pixels enable Internet Explorer users to increase or decrease the default text sizes. In the first chapter, Cederholm suggests setting keywords for the body text, and then use percentages for the headings when styling the type size in CSS to accommodate IE browsers. Although the method is bulletproofed, a bit of hacking is required. To set the text sizes to display consistently across browsers with hack free, I suggest using percentage for the body and ems for the headings.

Other than the “Flexible Text” approach, I find his tips and tricks throughout the book to be useful and adaptable. The “Scalable Navigation” technique is not only accessible and easy to modify, but also saves bandwidths because of the lightweight markups. The “Expandable Rows” and “Indestructible Boxes” methods give the site invisible, extra spaces to prevent unpredictable scenarios. The strategies for “No Images? No CSS? No Problem” is seemed to be simple, but no less valuable. I am sure many designers wouldn’t be thinking of styling background colors to ensure readability incase users turn off images to speed up the loading process. How could we when we have like million other things to worry about? So this chapter serves as a great reminder for that sort-of-minor-but-important stuff, and be sure to check out the bulletproof tools (Favlets, Web Developer Extension, Web Accessibility Toolbar, and Validator) listed as well.

Once again, Cederholm’s solid writing combined with his easy-to-follow instructions complemented by clear visual presentations make Bulletproof Web Design an essential guide for designers who wish to create Web sites that would always look good under any circumstances. Even though he delves into the “Fluid Layouts” approach, I still feel the book needed a chapter on zoomable layout, which is one of the most flexible and accessible methods I have come to appreciate, to be completed.

Why universal usability is as essential as the visual layout on the Web? Why keeping the site clean and simple is important? Why should we replace graphic with text navigation when possible? How to create forms that are painless to fill out by both visual and nonvisual users? Web designers who are unsure what the answers are to any of these questions should take a look at Sarah Horton’s Access by Design: a Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers.

By eliminating the technical practices, Horton allows her book to focus on the design principles; therefore, anyone (with or without technical skills) who wishes to learn Web accessibility is welcome. With simple language complemented by clear visual illustrations, she walks readers through everything they need to know (including text, images, color, forms, links, lists, audio, and video) when creating universal usability for the Web. She points out what to do and what to avoid when designing for maximum accessibility, and shows both good and bad examples to back up her cases. For instance, nonvisual users may have a hard time distinguishing between parent and child items in compound lists; therefore, she suggests to either use ordered lists or break the compound list into sections with appropriate headings.

Although Horton favors flexible over fixed layouts, she does a thorough job of explaining the pros and cons of both designs. While the fixed design does not expand when users increase the text size, the flexible design causes readability issue with long lines of text. From my own experience, using em measurements is the best solution to accommodate readability. The default is presented in a fixed layout, but the text and the layout will expand or condense when users adjust the text size, and that is “where designers and users share control of its design.”

Access by Design offers nothing new on Web accessibility, but Horton’s clear and concise approach makes the book an important reading for Web designers and developers, especially the newcomers. Read it, learn it, and keep it by our side when working on Web sites.

Had an easy weekend. Spent time alone and got through both Ashley Kahn’s A Love Supreme : The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album and Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. Enjoyed both books. Kahn’s writing, especially on the sessions of recording the pieces, gives readers deeper appreciations on two of the most influential jazz albums. These two CDs are back on heavy rotations. Kind of Blue is for relaxing, and A Love Supreme is for spiritual uplifting.

With gorgeous designs, insightful essays, and comprehensive explanations, Ellen Lupton’s Thinking With Type is not only an essential but also a pleasurable reading on typography. The book is an excellent accompaniment to a course on type design because Lupton’s balances the theory and practice, at the same time, she manages to keep the texts short, straightforward, and accessible.

Divided into three main categories, Thinking With Type walks readers from the fundamental concepts of “Letter” (including size, classification, and families) to the arrangements of “Text” (such as kerning, tracking, and spacing) to the visual layouts using “Grid” (exploring single and multiple columns, modular, and data tables). The structures, illustrations, and exercises are well crafted to help readers enhance their use of type. While most typographic books cover mainly on print design, Thinking With Type deals with both print and web. Many beautiful screenshots of web sites are showcased throughout the book as well as a short coverage of “Web Accessibility” and “Web Hierarchy.”

Thinking With Type is a book that could be read from cover to cover because of the slim in size and simplified in language. Even the “Appendix” is filled with useful information, especially the free advices: “think more, design less,” “spend more, buy less,” and especially for screen designers, “make it bigger.” So buy it, study it, enjoy it, and most importantly, apply it. Still not convinced? Visit ThinkingWithType.com for excerpts.

The joyful part of web design is when the final Cascading-Style-Sheets-driven layout looks exactly like the Photoshop mockup; however, the joy ends as soon as the site goes into Browser Cam, and that’s when the hair-pulling part comes in. The beautiful site is no longer beautiful in Netscape 4.0. The main content is dropped below, instead of beside, the navigation in Internet Explorer 5.5. Why are there a few pixels off in IE 6.0?

After freaking out over the screenshots provided by Browser Cam, the next thing to do is revisit the CSS file and search the web for ways to fix the bugs. Getting frustrated because there isn’t a central place to find all the hacks. Fortunately, Joseph W. Lowery recognizes it, and puts together an accessible reference for designing cross-browser compatible websites called CSS Hacks & Filters: Making Cascading Style Sheets Work.

Because of the concise explanations, clear visual demonstrations, and well-organized contents, CSS Hacks & Filters is the book to have on hand when testing and debugging web pages and CSS files. From filtering CSS for older or hiding it from newer browsers to integrating layouts to building menus to troubleshooting, this is a one shop for all CSS-workarounds resource. Every hack or filter we need is well documented and usually accompanied by a web address if it was pulled from a particular site.

The strength of the book is Lowery’s easy-to-follow writing style. The language is simple and the instructions are comprehensible. For instance, the step-by-step breakdowns of the commented backslash hack for Mac IE is easy to understand, and the simple method to wrap texts around a cursive image is easy to pull off. Lowery is also a Dreamweaver expert; therefore, Dreamweaver users get a special treat at the last two chapters.

I am a designer, not a hacker, and hacking CSS is not my style. I prefer clean and lean style sheets, but in order to design a beautiful table-less layout website to work consistently on various browsers, hacking CSS is inevitable. Until CSS works the way it is supposed to, CSS Hacks & Filters not only saves the designers as well as developers tremendous time, headache, and effort, but also helps crafting their websites to reach wider audiences.

If I have to learn CSS from scratch, I would start with Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos’s Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web. CSS is easy to learn, but to understand how to use it correctly is a bit challenging. In order to take full advantage of CSS, designers need to know how each element was built, and what purpose it serves. Who else can show us these things better than CSS creators themselves?

The best part about this book is not how to use CSS, but how it was created to handle certain tasks. For example, the em unit is developed to make scalable style sheets. The creators describe the thinking behind it, and prove why we should always use ems to set font sizes. Their clarification on using ems over pixels is making much more sense to me than ever before. The short background on em is interesting to read, and clearing up some confusion as well.

Even though the book does not delve into advanced techniques such as styling a menu or design a complex tableless layout, it nails the fundamental concepts to the ground. From “CSS Selectors” to “Space Inside Boxes” to “Relative and Absolute Positioning” to “Colors,” the explanations are clear and the theories behind the elements are invaluable. The authors also remind us to “know when to stop” by keeping our styles clean and simple.

Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web is an important book to learn CSS the proper way. With the third edition, the book covers all the features in version 2.1, making it the definitive guide. Even though I have been using CSS heavily in my work, I still find the theories (what each element was created to do) to be intriguing. My favorite reading is the chapter on “the CSS Saga,” in which the authors give a brief history on CSS and how browsers play an important role in it. Believe it or not, Microsoft Internet Explore 3.0 was the first browser that supported CSS.

After Charles Wyke-Smith answered a lengthy question on CSS, his friend told him, “You should put this all in a book – I’d buy it.” Through his connection with an editor at New Riders, Wyke-Smith landed himself a book deal.

Like many CSS books on the market, Stylin’ with CSS introduces web standards, XHTML, and of course CSS. Wyke-Smith explains how CSS works, how to style text, how to create page layout, and so forth. Since the book offers nothing new or unique, isn’t it a bit too late to come out with a beginner CSS book at this time?

In Wyke-Smith’s introduction he writes, “Stylin’ with CSS is all about designing and building Web pages that look stylish and professional…” Yet the examples provided in the book are anything but those two elements. Although the book is not about design, and the main focus is on CSS, the author should at least try to create something visually appealing to attract the designers. The example does not have to be like a Zen Garden piece, but a simple layout with a nice use of type is good enough. Unfortunately, the screenshots provided in the book turn me away. The pages look as if they were designed in 1994 – when the author first started designing for the web.

If Stylin’ was published a year ago, it might make some impact, but it is too late now since there is an array of well-written CSS books already published. From a designer standpoint, I have no need for this book. Why should I learn to create something that does not pull me in? Besides, the raw tutorials covered in the book could be found online.