Here are 41 books that The Art of Explanation fans have personally recommended if you like
The Art of Explanation.
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I have been designing user interfaces since graduate school at Stanford, where I studied psychology and computer science. Over the five decades since then, I have designed many digital products and services, learning a lot about how to make them usable and useful. Two decades ago, I turned more towards sharing my knowledge and experience through writing (articles and books) and teaching (professionals and students). I’ve taught at Stanford University, Mills College, the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), the University of San Francisco, and at professional conferences and companies. Google invited me twice to speak in their Authors @ Google series, and ACM and SIGCHI have given me several awards.
If you design Web sites, you’ve almost certainly already read Steve’s book; it may be the best-selling Web design book of all time. If not, do.
It succinctly explains most of what designers need to know about Website usability. The title of the book – Don’t Make Me Think – is the book’s main point: “If your website makes me think about how to use it, distracting me from my own goals (e.g., booking a flight), I’m out of here.”
In relatively few pages, Steve explains how to design Websites so visitors need not think about how to use them.
Since Don't Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug's guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it's one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject.
Now Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don't Make Me Think a classic-with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it's still short, profusely illustrated...and best of all-fun to read.
In 2012, I escaped my corporate job to found Enchanting Marketing. I had discovered I love writing and I love teaching people how to write even more. I help small business owners and solo flyers find their voice and share their ideas with gusto, so they can captivate, educate, and inspire their audience. I created this list with 5 book recommendations as a mini-course on writing for the web. There’s little overlap between the books; they all complement each other. Happy reading and happy writing!
Content design is about creating content (not just written content but any type of content, including maps, infographics, and images) that best serves users’ needs, and it’s key to getting found and read online.
This short guide in plain English features many examples of how to create content that pulls readers towards a website (rather than just pushing content outwards). I especially like the chapter on the science of reading as well as the chapter on job stories and user stories.
I love how practical this guide is. It’s written by someone who’s clearly been knee-deep in the trenches of content design.
Between 2010 and 2014, Sarah Richards and her team at the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service did what many thought impossible: they took over 400 separate government websites and transformed them into a single site designed to effectively serve its users. In doing so, they defined a new discipline: content design.
Content design isn’t graphic design or just copywriting under another name. Content design focuses on what content best serves the users’ needs, whether it be the written word, infographics, visuals, videos, or charts.
At the core of content design are the needs of the users—and this means determining what…
In 2012, I escaped my corporate job to found Enchanting Marketing. I had discovered I love writing and I love teaching people how to write even more. I help small business owners and solo flyers find their voice and share their ideas with gusto, so they can captivate, educate, and inspire their audience. I created this list with 5 book recommendations as a mini-course on writing for the web. There’s little overlap between the books; they all complement each other. Happy reading and happy writing!
This book is a comprehensive guide on copywriting and selling by a legendary direct response writer. It’s not specific to writing for the web but covers the basic principles of persuasion such as how to sell on emotion and help people justify a purchase with logic. It also includes many useful writing tips such as how to write the first sentence and how to sow seeds of curiosity to keep readers engaged.
I’ve probably highlighted more quotes in this book than in any other book on writing. Highly recommended!
Great copy is the heart and soul of the advertising business. In this practical guide, legendary copywriter Joe Sugarman provides proven guidelines and expert advice on what it takes to write copy that will entice, motivate, and move customers to buy. For anyone who wants to break into the business, this is the ultimate companion resource for unlimited success.
In 2012, I escaped my corporate job to found Enchanting Marketing. I had discovered I love writing and I love teaching people how to write even more. I help small business owners and solo flyers find their voice and share their ideas with gusto, so they can captivate, educate, and inspire their audience. I created this list with 5 book recommendations as a mini-course on writing for the web. There’s little overlap between the books; they all complement each other. Happy reading and happy writing!
For writing online beyond your own website, I highly recommend this book. It presents both the big picture and the nitty-gritty of content marketing for small businesses.
What I like about this book is that the authors understand that as a small business, you can’t do everything and be everywhere. So, choose where you want to be and create content that captivates, educates, and inspires your audience.
WINNER: Small Business Book Awards 2016 - Community Choice - Social Media Category
WINNER: Small Business Book Awards 2014 - Community Choice - Marketing Category (1st edition)
Make sense of content marketing in the digital world with this award-winning, practical guide to using content to grow your business and raise your brand.
From websites, white papers and blogs to tweets, newsletters and video, content is king in the digital world, now more than ever before. Get it right and you have a huge opportunity to connect with clients and customers in ways they appreciate and trust - they will be…
My career has spanned all genres of entertainment and I have taught thousands of students across three decades. I share with those learnings. I have been trained at Walt Disney Animation Studios, freelanced for Marvel Comics, been an art director in video games for decades, owned three of my own businesses in art fields, and written many books on drawing. I share with you some of my favorite books, books that you can learn from if you apply the information within and therefore gain the ability yourself to create inspired work.
Bruce Block has taught at many of the studios in the film industry and now you can also learn about the tools of art that can be used to elevate your art to entertainment industry standards. I myself have worked in animation, video games, and comics. In video games, I have been an art director for many years and when I discovered this book, it dramatically increased my ability to be a better AD. Not only is this book broken down into clear topics with numerous visuals to help you understand but Bruce also shows you have to chart these tools allowing you to art direct your own projects. Every artist and visual creative person should own this book.
This updated edition of a best-selling classic shows you how to structure your visuals as carefully as a writer structures a story or composers structure their music. The Visual Story teaches you how to design and control the structure of your production using the basic visual components of space, line, shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm. You can use these components to effectively convey moods and emotions, create a visual style, and utilize the important relationship between the visual and the story structures.
Using over 700 color illustrations, author Bruce Block explains how understanding the connection between story and visual…
I've been drawing for over 68 years and carrying a sketchbook for over 60 of those years. I've seen success as an author, I'm an award-winning illustrator of books and magazines and animated many classic Disney features. Am I an expert on sketching humans and animals? ...No. I'm constantly learning in my effort to capture humans and animals in action by following the basic principles of drawing as they apply to quick sketching. My learning is aided by these books as I prepare lesson plans or the encouragement and inspiration found within their pages. I'm married to LaVonne, my high school sweetheart of 50 years, and have three grown children and six grandchildren.
This two-book volume of notes, drawings, wise sayings, and philosophy are and have been invaluable assets to the learning curve of myself and numerous others. I have these same handouts, in storage boxes, saved over the years. I was there in the lunch-time drawing classes Walt taught at the Disney Studio. Before each drawing session he would hand out these xerox pages. On occasion some of my sketches were included in these handouts. With humor and enthusiasm, Walt encouraged us to push the models pose, see the possibilities and more, all with a goal of making better animation drawings.
Discover the lessons that helped bring about a new golden age of Disney animation!
Published for the first time ever, Drawn to Life is a two volume collection of the legendary lectures from long-time Disney animator Walt Stanchfield. For over twenty years, Walt helped breathe life into the new golden age of animation with these teachings at the Walt Disney Animation Studios and influenced such talented artists as Tim Burton, Brad Bird, Glen Keane, and John Lasseter. These writings represent the quintessential refresher for fine artists and film professionals, and it is a vital tutorial for students who are now…
Like so many others, I discovered Disney in childhood. When I was five years old my parents took me to see a Disney movie in a theater, and the experience was so overwhelming that I still recall it vividly. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for classic films, a passion that has led me to a career as a film historian. For me, writing a book about a film is mainly an excuse to do the research, to get inside a film and explore it, and find out what makes it tick. It’s invariably a fascinating journey, and if I can share that fascination with readers, I’m happy.
Ordinarily I don’t believe in “greatest” comparisons, but this book is different. Animation historian extraordinaire Jerry Beck surveyed more than a thousand historians and animation professionals to ascertain their picks, compiled the results into a list of fifty “greatest” cartoons, and then created this book with a separate entry for each film. It’s both informative and an endless delight, with well-illustrated celebrations of classic cartoon gems from the Disney, Warner, Fleischer, and MGM studios as well as the smaller, more obscure companies. You may disagree with the rankings or the choices, but this is undeniably a deep dive into a cornucopia of treasures. And Jerry didn’t stop there; fifteen years later he followed up with a similar but more specialized volume,The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes.
Showcases some of the greatest cartoons of all time, including characters from Disney, Warner Brothers, Fleischer Studio, Walter Lantz, MGM, and others.
I was an ambitious teen, and as I entered adulthood, my relationship with ambition has continually evolved. Those of us with marginalized genders sometimes have our ambition treated with suspicion or scorn—by peers, family, or would-be mentors. I wanted to share books that don’t necessarily come to the same conclusion about ambition’s role in our lives, but that all grapple with what it means to be ambitious in a culture where that is often seen as threatening or unladylike—or where any sign of ambition gets one automatically labeled as “unlikeable.” I love these books’ narrators, and I hope you will find something to love in them too.
Hayley is thrilled to be accepted to a prestigious summer program for aspiring teen animators. But then only boys are chosen to direct the participants’ short films, and that might only scratch the surface of the boys’ club culture within the program. The multiple forms of sexism Hayley experiences throughout are so real, they were painful to read (in the best, truest way), as I reflected on my own experiences with misogynistic gatekeeping—but the community and solidarity that develop throughout this fantastic novel are very satisfying.
“Packs a swoony punch along with its feminist rage.” —Maurene Goo, author of Somewhere Only We Know
Moxie meets the world of animation in this fresh, unputdownable novel about a teen girl determined to prove herself in the boys’ club of her dream industry no matter what it takes.
Hayley Saffitz is confident, ambitious, and intent on following in the footsteps of her hero, renowned animation director, Bryan Beckett. When she’s given a spot in his once-in-a-lifetime summer program, Hayley devises a plan: snag one of the internship’s coveted directing opportunities. Dazzle Bryan with her talent. Secure a job post-graduation.…
Princess Mononoke blew my mind. And as I read about Miyazaki himself I thought: here is a kindred spirit. I thought I’d try teaching a course on Miyazaki, not sure if I could sustain a whole semester just about his work—and then I found, there’s way more than a semester’s worth to talk about. After teaching about Miyazaki for a few years, I had to write it all down. Some reviews of my book say my essays are personal, and it’s true, for better or worse—it isn’t about Studio Ghibli or the production process or even about Japan—it’s my reflections on these great films.
Whereas my book is about the ideas that come out of the films, this book is on the philosophy of Miyazaki himself, based on his writings and interviews. It is organized not by film or chronology, but by themes, such as Time, Space, Vision, and my favorite, “The Courage to Smile.” She describes the director’s picture of the world and uses the films as illustrations. The book has certain fannish qualities, but is enriched by a creative selection of contemporary philosophers.
Hayao Miyazaki has gained worldwide recognition as a leading figure in the history of animation, alongside Walt Disney, Milt Kahl, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Yuri Norstein and John Lasseter. In both his films and his writings, Miyazaki invites us to reflect on the unexamined beliefs that govern our lives. His eclectic body of work addresses compelling philosophical and political questions and demands critical attention. This study examines his views on contemporary culture and economics from a broad spectrum of perspectives, from Zen and classical philosophy and Romanticism, to existentialism, critical theory, poststructuralism and psychoanalytic theory.
I am a Disney historian, author, and editor of 50 books about Disney. I became passionate about Disney's history when I realized how rich the history of Disney is and how talented the artists who worked for Disney were and still are. Early on, I realized that when Disney built his studio in the 1930s, thanks to the Great Depression, he was able to hire the best artists from around the world (who were then unemployed). I also noticed that little was known about them. Since those artists have been revolutionizing the popular arts for 100 years, I could not help but be fascinated by their talent and their stories.
For years, I was frustrated to see Disney historians focus primarily on the role that male artists played at the Walt Disney Studio. I always felt that someone should, one day, write a full book about the many women artists who worked at Disney.
When historian Mindy Johnson filled this important gap, she did it with this massive (and beautifully illustrated) volume, which immediately became one of the most important reference books about Disney history that I own (and I own hundreds). It is a huge book, which is also an easy read!
From the earliest origins of animated imagery, the colorful link between paper and screen was created by legions of female artists working on the slick surface of celluloid sheets.
With calligraphic precision and Rembrandtesque mastery, these women painstakingly brought pencil drawings to vibrant, dimensional life. Yet perhaps as a reflection of the transparent canvas they created on, the contributions and history of these animation artists have remained virtually invisible and largely undocumented, until now.
Walt Disney's pioneering efforts in animation transformed novelty cartoons into visual masterpieces, establishing many "firsts" for women within the entertainment industry along the way. Focusing on…
