Milton Glasers graphic design

Don't be put off by the cover design - this is a wonderful book. Milton Glaser is one of the most influential design and illustration gurus of the late 20th century in the USA. He was responsible for the "I love NY" logo and the poster of Bob Dylan with psychedelic hair which became a symbol of the 1980s. This is one of the few design books I have come across where the text is just as interesting as the graphics. Milton Glaser has thought a lot about the fundamentals of good design, and his ideas come through here via a series of interviews, plus his own commentary on the work illustrated. And there's a big bonus. He doesn't just show his finished designs, but includes his preliminary drafts and early attempts which lead up to a successful outcome. So it's like being invited to sit in his studio whilst he thinks and works out loud.. Read more >>.

more GRAPHIC DESIGN books

BBC Guide to Pronunciation

How do you pronounce controversy? Is it kuhn-trov-ersy, or kuhn-trov-ersy? And how about schedule - do we say shed-yool, or sked-yool? Pronunciation can be something of a minefield in the UK - especially when it is also linked to class and language usage. This is is an ideal source for finding out how to pronounce controversial or difficult words and foreign names. Expert guidance is given on how to pronounce 15,000+ less-than-usual terms. Entries run from Aachen and Aalvar Alto, via Maastricht and the Mabinogion, to Zyklon B and zymurgy (which is a type of fermentation, just in case you wondered). There's a guide to how the word should sound shown by splitting it into its stressed and unstressed parts, then by showing it written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)... Read more >>

more REFERENCE books

Miles Davis

Who would have thought it! Miles Davis is composer of the week on Radio 3. It started yesterday. I feared the worst. But no - my apprehensions were misplaced. They bgan with All Blues - from the best-selling jazz albumn ever. They didn't evade the fact that he was from a wealthy middle-class family, and there was no attempt to hide the fact that his early years of creativity were conducted in a haze of narcotics dependency. I thought the BBC would be more cagey about this. Because he's only a jazz musician after all. They don't mention Igor Stravinsky's alcoholism - (though they have Malcolm Arnold's in the last week or so).

Fortunately for us, Miles kicked his habit and produced a series of recordings in the late 1950s and 1960s which represent some of the highpoints of modern jazz. Unfortunately for us (and him) he went back to substance abuse in a big way later in his career, and despite creative enterprises of a conceptual kind, his later efforts were more directed to locating drug dealers than composing.

What a loss. I've got most of his recordings, and I play them frequently. But the falling off, particularly in the later years, is tragic. I bought a triple collocation of Tutu, Amandla, and doo-bop only last weekend - and listening to the rapid descent during the 1980s was painful to endure.

Fortunately we have Kind of Blue, Milestones, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain, and even Bitche's Brew to remind us of what was - and what might have been.

Writing and New Media

Suppose you've got creative ambitions and want to make the best use of new media. What d'you do? Welll, I think sticking your 400 page novel up on an FTP site is a bit of a no-no - but there are alternatives. What you need to do is exploit the features of new media - but concentrate on its novelties, which some nifty folk are doing right now. As Victor Keegan argued in the Guardian this week:

We are at the start of a creative revolution on the Web, enabling millions of people to publish their own videos, music, phtographs, books, blogs, or whatever.

It goes without saying that you can blog stories and poems - which some people already do. But what about the prose soap opera? Why not post a daily snippet which will have us coming back for more each morning.

Or podcasting - it's so easy. You can create what's essentially your own radio station. All you've got to do is make sure there's enough of content interest to get people coming back on a regular basis.

The super-bloggers have gone one giant step .further and established their own TV broadcasts via the Net. Not many months ago professional print journalists were sneering at these guys, claiming they were unethical flash-in-the-pan gimmicks. Now they're blogging desperately (and amateurishly) in a bid to catch up.

Bands have discovered You-Tube and iTunes, photographers Flickr, and even painters and potters have their stuff mounted on web sites these days.

So there's really no excuse. All the technology is virtually free. You don't need to be a genius to get it all working. You won't become a celebrity overnight of course, but your work will be out there with a potential world audience which was previously unthinkable - until Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee put on their thinking caps for us.

 

more MULTIMEDIA articles

Mediterranean Modern

If you like looking at examples of beautiful contemporary architecture, designer homes overlooking the sea, and experiments with shapes, materials, and domestic organisation - then this new book from Thames & Hudson is worth your consideration. It's like A Place in the Sun on steroids. Dominic Bradbury has assembled mini-essays on twenty-five of the best in modern architect-designed houses. They differ in their styles, but are united by their clean lines, open plan living, and a serious commitment to integration with their surroundings. The overall style, which might reflect the editor's taste or might represent the movement of the current decade, is for buildings that are minimalist, rectangular, low-rise, and which blend sympathetically with their surroundings ... Read more >>

more ARCHITECTURE books

Podcasting

To the Manchester Digital Development Agency yesterday for an ERDF-funded workshop on podcasting. What fun! As a teacher, it makes a relaxing change to become a student again for the morning. You're given coffee, placed in a well-equipped room in front of a laptop, and talked through a PowerPoint slideshow which shows you exactly what to do. Within just a few minutes, every group in the room had recorded a snippet and uploaded it to a site which hosts audio files for free. (We couldn't figure out how they made money.)

Then came the playbacks, and a couple of young women from Rochdale brought the house down with a simple description of their office dog. It's the audio version of YouTube, and proof positive that if you've got something interesting to say, or an authentic way of saying it, then you no longer need anything more than a five quid microphone to plug in. Course, much loftier reasons for podcasting were also discussed, and I'm going to blend my efforts into online learning courses - but it was that one which hit the spot. (And that was not the dog's name.)

Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

This is a paperback cut-down version of the complete Oxford Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. It contains over 10,000 phrases, sayings, and allusions - including single words and names that crop up in cultural references - and offers a brief explanation of their meanings and origins. Entries run from Aaron and abacus to Zoroastrianism, Zorro, and Zwinglian - respectively a monotheistic pre-Islamic religion, a Californian-Spanish Robin Hood, and a supporter of the sixteenth century Swiss protestant reformer. It includes terms from the classical world of Greece and Rome, as well as other mythologies and religious beliefs - including folk customs, superstitions, and other forms of popular beliefs, as well as factual history and common record. So, there are potted biographies of St Lawrence, the Christian martyr, as well as Lazarus, the man who rather miraculously rose from the dead. Ulysses sits fairly closely alongside the Unnabomber - which suggests to me that this book would be a fairly useful resource for crossword puzzlers and participants in my local pub quiz ... Read more >>

more REFERENCE books

Using Moodle

Two or three years ago, attempts to put educational courses on line were stuck with using programs such as Blackboard and WebCT, which were costly, cumbersome, and deeply unpopular with the teachers who were being urged to use them. Now these programs are being swept away by the arrival of Moodle, the open source Course Management System (CMS), or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), which has one killing feature: it's free. Actually, it has more technical features than its commercial rivals, but that's not the only reason it's being taken up by schools, universities, and colleges. In the jargon of educationalists, this is a 'constructivist' program. That is, it allows people to learn through building their own experience of learning, possibly in contact with other students. It is student-oriented, rather than teacher-led. And this manual has been prepared for beginners by Jason Cole, an American academic now working at the Open University in the UK, where Moodle has just been adopted ... Read more >>

more ONLINE LEARNING books

Lytton Strachey by Himself

Lytton Strachey is best known through his letters, a voluminous outpouring which he maintained throughout his life. But those were written largely to amuse the recipients. This book gathers together his diaries, which he wrote in solitude for himself. It also contains autobiographical fragments, some travel journals, and two essays which were delivered to the Bloomsbury Memoir Club, plus occasional writings from periods of his life ranging from childhood to his last days. After a scene-setting opening which describes life at his family home at Lancaster Gate, the first entry is the journal of a holiday in Gibraltar, Cairo, and Capetown. Then we get a confessional fragment on the first of his schoolboy love affairs, followed by a journal of his time studying literature at Liverpool University College ... Read more >>

more BLOOMSBURY GROUP books

Gallimaufry

Michael Quinion is a word nerd. He's an expert on obscure terms, word etymologies, and the origins of strange expressions. His last book Port Out, Starboard Home discusses myths and false explanations for the meanings of well known sayings, and he runs an excellent compilation of lexical back-history at World Wide Words. This is his latest collection of notes on 'disappearing language' - terms that are vanishing from common usage for a variety of reasons. Some go because the object they describe no longer exists (liberty-bodice and sixpence) and some are meanings that disappear because the word is now used to describe something quite different (chaperone was in medieval times a sort of cap.) Mercifully, he splits up his offerings into themed chapters - on food and drink, health and medicine, entertainment and leisure, transport, fashion, then family names and ... Read more >>

more LANGUAGE books