What is MTIV? Besides being an awful title for a book, it's an acronym for "making the invisible visible." The term was coined by author Hillman Curtis (yep, that's his apparently unwashed, just-outta-bed self on the cover) to describe his attitude toward design. And so, if the economic lunacy that has created such an unappealing combination of bad title and greasy imagery doesn't make you question the book's content, you might find something of value in Curtis's quirky concoction of anecdotes, tales from the trenches, and Web design basics.
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Ostensibly a book about how to run a new-media design shop, Curtis fills MTIV (New Riders) with tales from his life as a designer and lovely full-page photos that have little or nothing to do with the text. The book frequently becomes a memoir, replete with accounts of at least two white-knuckle plane rides. Despite his egocentrism, Curtis's stories about reading On the Road and listening to Pink Floyd eventually get to a point, and the "inspiration" part of MTIV sometimes shines through.
At the same time, while his advice is well-intentioned, some of it might be dangerous. For example, while Curtis talks about the importance of drawing from the works of others, this has landed more than one artist in a heap of trouble due to copyright or trademark infringement.
In the latter half of the book, Curtis's "practice" information is surprisingly basic, offering more simplistic suggestions on color wheels, fonts, and layout. In fact, all of this material is provided by third parties, written as multi-page essays on one topic or another. It's safe to say that anyone reading this book should already know what a meta tag is, and his advice on how to use <tr> and <td> to set up tables is baffling. Here's a helpful hint: Get a copy of FrontPage or Dreamweaver and they'll set up table code for you.
I can't say I got a lot out of MTIV except some nice artwork used as interstitials. At least Curtis's mindset is right. Quoting a fellow designer, he notes, "You have to sell the product, otherwise the design is crap." Good point.
—Christopher Null
Buy this book from Amazon.com.
Re-Thinking the Network Economy
Hindsight may be 20/20, but clarity doesn't make the act of swiveling your head around to peer at the past any less painful. For those blinded by the "new economy" hype that proved inescapable during the latter half of the '90s, Stan Liebowitz's Re-Thinking the Network Economy (Amacom) is an eye-opener on par with a poke from a sharp stick.
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As a professor of managerial economics at the University of Texas at Dallas, Liebowitz comes armed to slaughter the sacred cows of the Internet boom—he makes quick work of economic theories like lock-in and first-mover advantage that made companies like Webvan seem like a good idea at the time.
While he softens the blow by admitting that he too took a beating in the dot-com delirium, his prose—well argued, if unadorned—takes no prisoners. After skewering the authors of Information Rules for hedging their bets about the business advantages of being first, he observes, "Still, for a business audience that finds sufficiently deep meaning in books such as Who Moved My Cheese? to keep it on the bestseller list for years, these nuances are likely to be unnoticed." Count Kevin Kelly and Mary Meeker among the targets of his subtle scorn.
There's much to be learned here, but it's hard not to think how much more welcome this book would have been five years ago.
Ironically, the book's strength is its weakness—Liebowitz, fittingly for an academic, focuses on economic analysis at the expense of intertwined social and political considerations. The result is a chapter about copyright and the Internet that argues the financial merits of digital rights management while ignoring its impact on the open source movement and on personal freedom. Still, Re-Thinking the Network Economy will enlighten investors and managers alike.
—Thomas Claburn
Buy this book from Amazon.com.
Also Noted
Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs (Perseus) is a highly researched (and heavily footnoted) treatise on community building, beyond the tired topic of Internet chat rooms...Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems (Amacom), by David J. Agans, is a short but invaluable work dedicated to helping you hunt down pesky problems online and off...In Beyond Borders (New Riders), John Yunker provides an extensive and insightful reference for companies looking to expand beyond the English-bound experience.
—CN
