Eva

Thank you, Leslie, from the bottom of my heart. I wish I could tell you in person how much this meant to me.

If you have zero experience gaming and want to read a textbook list of Things That Games Do, read Playful Design. If you're a UX designer who wants to apply game design principles to your work, find another book. This one won't help.

So many aspects of my life make so much more sense after reading this book. I marked up almost every page. Some passages noted things I've done, exactly, like pursuing freelance over full-time work to shed the expectation of socialization, or skipping lunch because I was so hyperfocused on a task.

After reading Unmasking Autism, I've gained significantly more empathy for myself and for my family (who is also highly neurodivergent). It's nice to know that I am not uniquely broken. It's nice to know that there's a framework I can use to understand how I relate to the world.

Clear, concise, level-headed resource on building resilient transit networks. Read as a textbook for a graduate-level public transportation planning course. Enjoyed it!

Cover art, you wronged me for the first time. Stay away from this b-rated horror “thriller”. Wearisome characters and disjointed, tactless writing makes this 300-page read a chore. The plot doesn't get going until page 200 or so, and at that point, you care about the characters so little, they could all expire and you'd feel no grief. But hey, at least it looks pretty on the bookshelf.

Valuable reference. All told, could have been shorter.

Interaction of Color is comprised of two halves. The first half of the book contains the main text and is printed in black and white. The second half consists of color “plates” which showcase specific examples from the main text, along with some supplementary text of its own. This format requires keeping two bookmarks—one for your position in the reading, and one for the corresponding illustrations some 100 pages later. For a book devoted to the study of color, this is baffling and mildly infuriating.

I suspect this format is held over from the book's original 1963 edition, when printing a full color book may have been prohibitively expensive. To blindly adopt this design over 50 years later is an unfortunate oversight.

Albers's writing seems directed more toward teachers like Josef Albers and less toward people like Josef Albers's students. It instructs readers why colored paper is best for classroom projects (mixing paints and textures is distracting), why to restrict a certain project to vertical strips of color only (shapes are distracting), and which brands of acetate sheets to buy (“Zip-a-tone,” “Artype,” and “Cello-tak”).

Like a true academic, Albers's tone is pretentious and dry. Oddly, he seems to love inserting line breaks at arbitrary points. He may fancy Interaction of Color a work of poetry, but I'd really rather read text with a predictable line-length.

Form and format aside, the content is quite good. At its original publishing, Albers's work was revolutionary, and it still holds its own in 2017. Interaction presents novel ways of interpreting and applying color, it's opened my mind to colors and color combinations I may have dismissed previously. If you're a designer, Interaction of Color is a book worth adding to your collection.

Regrettably, nowhere in the 50th anniversary is there a mention of how to apply these techniques to screen design for digital designers like myself.

I would love to see an updated edition—or perhaps a new book entirely from one of Albers's students—which corrects the issues listed above, goes beyond staged classroom examples to point out meaningful uses of color in the real world, delves into the differences between print and screen, and overall makes the book more practical and approachable without losing Albers's pioneering spirit.

This isn't a book about how to make comics. It's a book about understanding what comics are—and even beyond that, what art is. That may sound pretentious, but it's essential context for understanding how comics can shape the way we perceive sight, sound, language, time... even how we perceive the self. Excellent and comprehensive book. Essential reading for anyone interested in visual art and communication.