books, magazines, reading
I’ve been able to launch another new client site, this one for Australian writer Elisabeth Holdsworth. Elisabeth is an essayist and reviewer who has just published her first novel, Those Who Come After. The book is based on and extrapolated from Elisabeth’s own experiences, which she previously covered in an essay that won the inaugural …
Just My Type is, as the cover points out, a book about fonts. More than that, it is a very well-researched and engagingly written account of the still evolving history of type, typography, typefaces and fonts. That it is classified as both Reference and Humour gives you some idea of its approach. It is always …
My summer festival of reading continues with Shots by Don Walker, keyboard player formerly with Cold Chisel and more lately with Tex, Don & Charlie. Like Paul Kelly’s How to Make Gravy, this is part memoir and part autobiography and there is a considerable overlap in the chronology between the two works. Both authors are …
I went to see the Sydney Festival production of The Giacomo Variations at the Sydney Opera House on Saturday night. It was as challenging, engaging and inspired a piece of theatre as I have seen in many a day. To my mind, it is ideal festival fare, stretching the boundaries of how theatre and music …
How to Make Gravy is a memoir by Paul Kelly, sometimes called Australia’s greatest living songwriter, a people’s poet, or our master songsmith. But it’s not really. This is a book about Australia: the Australia I grew up in, and now live in. Really, this is a book about me. If you don’t like reading …
It’s been a summer where I’ve rediscovered the joys of reading – in print, I mean. For a while there, my reading seemed to be restricted to the online variety – which is fine – but having reacquainted myself with the tactile and visual pleasures of print on paper and being presented with a range …
It’s probably no real surprise that it takes something non-webby to get me back to the blog. In this case, yesterday’s death of writer Ruth Park has prompted me to write. Park’s story is one of lyrical romance and harsh reality, both in her books and her life. She famously won a 1946 newspaper prize …
I feel very fortunate to work in an industry where art and science, creativity and technology, form and function come together in the way they do. The web industry, in turn, is fortunate to have people like Andy Clarke, Mark Boulton and Elliot Jay Stocks to inspire us to seek and achieve beauty in our …
This is a particularly timely book for me. It’s quite a different kettle of code to Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers. That book explained how I could confidently starting using HTML5 with my existing and planned web projects. This book, Introducing HTML5 by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp, goes into much greater detail about …
It must be a year ago that I stayed overnight with my brother in Melbourne, and he told me about this book. He made it sound fascinating, and I said I’d make sure to look it up. Naturally, I forgot all about it. Until a month ago, when @vanderwal mentioned it in a tweet. I …