An impressively thorough and clear introduction to a still-new discipline.
Heinz offers a guide to the complex contours of interactive design.
The author astutely observes that product design is a “slippery beast”—there is a challenging multiplicity of parts that must be seamlessly combined into a coherent whole by an intricate “co-creation” of collaborators. To help the reader learn “how to think holistically, creatively, and critically” while engaging in interactive design, Heinz presents a helpful schema that divides the process into parts. The product experience itself is broken down into four phases: “Threads” are the “assorted touchpoints” that first connect the potential user to a product, and include everything from a marketing campaign to word-of-mouth information. “Impressions” are the user’s first encounter with images of the product on a screen, a “flash across visitors’ retinas.” “Interactions” make up the bulk of a user’s experience, encounters that live in “Memories,” the fourth and final element, understood as “aggregated internal impacts of an experience.” These four elements are approached from three different perspectives that encompass the various dimensions of the user’s experience; these include 2D (words, images layouts), 3D (devices and environments), and 4D (“the moments, paths, patterns, and relationships that occur over short or long time frames”). This analytical model forms the basis of the entire book, which succinctly details the entire creative landscape of interactive design strategy. Heinz is not providing a rigid system to preempt the creative process, but rather a framework within which creativity can flourish: “even geniuses have to start somewhere.” The author has 20 years of experience as a design consultant in New York City, and her expertise is evident—this is an erudite, savvy book that communicates difficult, technical ideas with accessible, largely jargon-free prose. For both the seasoned veteran of interactive design and the unpolished newcomer, this is an invaluable resource.
An impressively thorough and clear introduction to a still-new discipline.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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