Reading

Technical books

Designing with Web Standards

Jeffrey Zeldman.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Taking Your Talent to the Web

Jeffrey Zeldman. A fantastic how-to book for designers looking to get involved in web publishing and design. Takes the reader through writing, usability, architecture and technical tips.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design

Eric Meyer. One of the leading proponents and practitioners of css on the web explains his ideas and techniques.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation

Owen Briggs, Steve Champeon, Eric Costello, Matt Patterson
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web

Håkon Wium Lie. The inventor of CSS1 explains advanced w3c standard site design techniques.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Database Design for Mere Mortals

Michael J. Hernandez. High level design guidelines for designing relational databases, covering categories, fields, relationships and the end-user.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Building Accessible Websites

Joe Clark. Valuable work on the techniques for improving the accessibility of online media.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com / website

Posted in Interaction design, Reading, Research, Technology

Film books

Film Art

David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson. Classic textbook, required reading.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Sculpting In Time

Andrey Tarkovsky.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Time Within Time

Andrey Tarkovsky.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Kieslowski on Kieslowski

Danusia Stok, Krysztof Kieslowski. A thorough insight into Kieslowski’s process, thinking and ideology. Wonderful.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Art and Science of Screenwriting

Philip Parker. Essential reading for screenwriting, not just the usual Hollywood basics.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Film Architecture

Dietrich Neumann.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Audio Vision

Michel Chion. Essential for anyone thinking about the interaction between audible and visible.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Photography books

Another Way of Telling

John Berger, Jean Mohr.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Ways of Seeing

John Berger.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Reconfigured Eye

William J. Mitchell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

In Our Own Image

Fred Ritchin.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Paul Graham

Paul Graham, Andrew Wilson.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Andreas Gursky: Photographs from 1984 to the Present

Marie Luise Syring et al.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Modernism Rediscovered

Pierluigi Serraino, Julius Shulman.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Cameraworks

David Hockney.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Lomo: Just Shoot

Fabian Monheim.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Art, Photography, Reading

Media theory books

The Language of New Media

Lev Manovich.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

On the Internet: Thinking in Action

Hubert Dreyfus.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

Lawrence Lessig.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Hackers

Paul Taylor.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com An extraordinary insight into hacker culture – academically rigorous but very readable and entertaining.

Affective Computing

Rosalind W. Picard.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Abstracting Craft

Malcolm McCullough.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Being Digital

Nicholas Negroponte.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Interface Culture

Steven Johnson.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Electronic Culture

Timothy Druckery.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History

Manuel de Landa.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Manuel de Landa.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Media Equation

Bryon Reeves, Clifford Nass.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

If/Then Play

Janet Abrams.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Media, Reading, Technology

Narrative books

Hamlet on the Holodeck

Janet H Murray.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative

Mark Stephen Meadows.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Computers As Theatre

Brenda Laurel.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Joseph Campbell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Interactive Acting: Acting, Improvisation, and Interacting for Audience Participatory Theatre

Jeff Wirth.
amazon.com

Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence

by Roger C. Schank, Gary Saul Morson.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Understanding Comics

Scott McCloud.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Comics & Sequential Art

Will Eisner.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narrative

Will Eisner.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Art, Film, Media, Narrative, Reading, Research, Television

Information architecture books

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville. Now in its second edition, undoubtedly the best introduction to IA.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Information Architects

Richard Saul Wurman.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Practical Information Architecture

Eric L. Reiss.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web

Christina Wodtke.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Mapping Web Sites

Paul Kahn, Krzysztof Lenk. A suprisingly badly designed book, but packed full of very inspirational information architecture examples, from isometric site-maps to flow charts and wireframes.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Dynamics in Document Design

Karen A. Schriver.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Content Critical

Gerry McGovern
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Web Content Style Guide