Bryan

The quality of the book is great, but the overall content is wide and shallow. I was a bit sad to see only a 1/4 page write up for some of the more popular games of this decade, and some of the screenshot selections were a bit poor.

I've got most of the books from Bitmap, and this one was the most underwhelming so far.

A quirky little book encouraging you to surround yourself with the unqiue, weird little objects out in the world.

Necessary reading to scratch that 90s FPS itch.

This is one of those books you can ... smell.

I stumbled across this gem in a bookstore in Banff and am glad I grabbed it. If you're into design, you'll recognize Hay as one of the leaders in the Scandi style. This is a deep dive into their history, process, and products.

One of my favorite (and heaviest) books I own, showcasing some of the greatest conceptual art ever dreamed up. Legend.

This book contains the most well-curated collection of design I've ever seen.

My new favorite book on graphic design.

It's broken down into three categories: Typography, Gestalt, and Interface. It takes a high-level view of each section, diving into history and some interesting key moments, and then pairs what you've learned with some in-depth exercises.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in design.

Can't wait to see what they do with the movie rights to this.

I wanted to enjoy this more than I did, but when he got into the weeds with technical aspects, my eyes started glazing over.

2.5 stars

A general guide on how to learn things fast, coupled with the authors experience learning new skills from start to finish. I found some parts really interesting (learning how to program, play GO, switch keyboard layouts to Colemak), but the windsurfing chapter didn't interest me at all, and the Yoga section felt completely bloated.

Fun little read into the grind of the game development world. This definitely wouldn't' be a 5 star if I hadn't have played most of the games in the book though.

If you've read Epictetus already, I'd pass on this. Most of the book was a modern spin which I wasn't really enjoying, but the last bit of the book on Stoicism 2.0 was somewhat refreshing.

Well, I'll be damned. Turned out I didn't realize how far this rabbit hole goes.

It feels kind of dirty rating this a 2 considering it's a memoir, but oh well. It's pretty elementary in it's writing, and some of the chapters are seemingly random and disconnected from the overall narrative.

The worst part is definitely the beginning, but it does start to pick up a bit near the end.

Fun fact: The guy that composed the Jeopardy theme song earned 80 million in royalties.

50% biography, 50% meditation for skeptics. Recommended.

This is more of a 3.5 than a 3, but you know...goodreads doesn't allow that.

Great content overall, but the process is skewed towards Enterprise sized companies, and less towards startups and smaller teams.

He obviously led a wild life and tells an interesting story, but I found I never knew what timeframe I was in by the midpoint of the book.

I squeezed out some extra enjoyment by watching the fights on YouTube after he described what was going through his head, and I recommend doing the same (I do this with most biographies when I can).

An inspiring figure with an entertaining story, sprinkled with motivational bits throughout.

Good, but lengthier than it needed to be.

A nice reference guide for those looking to up their writing skills. It was written a while ago, but it doesn't show for the vast majority of the book.

There are lots of little gems in this book, and my highlighter was working overtime throughout. Some parts feel a little bit dated, but it's almost impossible not to considering this was written a decade ago.

Personally, this felt like a deep dive into a Wikipedia article. It has lots of great reviews, but boy is it not for me.

I'm a bit torn on this one. While I really enjoyed “don't make me think”, this follow up seemed to follow the same pattern too closely.

I often found myself noticing he was repeating himself not only from his previous book, but also repeating points throughout the chapters of this one.

The script was helpful, the maxims were nice, but he should have known focusing on specific software while writing this would badly age certain parts of it.

Since this is just a visual process, I'm not sure why he didn't reference a screen recording of the entire flow in his website, instead of the audio recording of the script.

While it may be a bit basic, I would strongly recommend this to anyone getting started in UX.