Derek Beck UI Designer & Front-End Developer

Criterion Collection

I’ve always been drawn to the Criterion Collection aisle at Barnes & Noble for their stunning covers of beautiful artwork and simple, timeless design. The website by 45Royale is just as stunning, beautiful, simple and timeless.

Everything from font usage to color scheme draws the eyes to the artwork of the films, which is really the point. The user experience is easy… everything is clear and where you’d expect it to be.

Check it out and order a great film while you’re there.

www.criterion.com

Books – December 2011

Below are a couple recently read books that made me think a little differently about project management, my development process and also gave me a bit of inspiration:

Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

From the team at 37 Signals, this is an interesting and inspiring read about how to get an online business, software or product up and running fast, for little investment and while you have a full time job. I’m usually not into business books, but this one held my attention throughout and I feel I gain not only business advice, but also how to succeed as a developer and designer without becoming a workaholic.

Jquery. Novice to Ninja and HTML5 & CSS3 For The Real World by SitePoint

SitePoint books are the best. Whatever the subject matter I want to learn more about, SitePoint gives it to me in a precise and easy to understandable way.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I’ve been using Macs for nearly 25 years and have been interested in the man behind them since I studied, in a design course, the hire of Paul Rand to design the NeXT logo (at the time I knew more about Rand than Jobs) and his return to Apple shortly after. Pirates of Silicon Valley is part of my DVD collection. Jobs was an interesting figure for my generation and this was a great look not only into his contributions to our industry, but also his psyche.