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I Am My Family

Review by Andrew Shea We all want to know what our ancestors were like 50, 100 or even 200 years ago. Rafael Goldchain’s new book, I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE), answers these questions by dressing up as his deceased relatives and taking black and white photographs that represent his scattered and forgotten family history.

[Sponsor] An Event Apart Chigago

My thanks to An Event Apart – Chicago for sponsoring The Designer’s Review of Books this month, especially with Design Disasters being the major post of the month.

Design Disasters

Disasters. We’ve all had them. The wonderful Fail Blog is a daily source of distraction and cautionary tales of idiocy. The #fail Twitter tag turns up a treasure trove of frustrations, usually with bad design or decisions.

Designing Web Interfaces

Review by David Little Theresa Neil’s and Bill Scott’s Designing Web Interfaces (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) catalogues and describes seventy five design patterns – solutions to common problems – for building rich interactions on the Web.

Parenthesis - Issue 16

Okay, I admit it. I expected Parenthesis, the twice-yearly journal of the Fine Book Association to be somewhat boring. I imagined dusty discussions of the nerdy joys of owning crumbling first editions and not a great deal to do with design.

Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories

Review by Matthew Sanders Donna Spencer’s debut Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories (Amazon US) distills several years experience applying card sorting techniques to web projects into a highly practical guide on card sorting.