I would like to think that the things I save are those that are the most important to me.  Books, records, firefox bookmarks, photographs…?  I’d like to think that these things are representative of who I am and my collected interests.  But I’m starting to realize that maybe that isn’t the case.  If that were true, I could easily reference my magic bookcase and easily identify my most influential (or favorite) books.  But that hasn’t proved to be the case.  As I posted earlier over the past year the work I’ve most enjoyed would be described more as User Experience work than Front-end Web Development.

I’ve been shopping with my generous $50 amazon gift certificate from Randal of R2 Communications (who I’ve had the pleasure of developing several sites with in 2008) and I realized that I’ve read, loved and given away most of my favorite Interaction Design books, most notably the following:

• Web Form Design by the amazingly wonderful Rosenfeld Media (I gave to Bryan of Huber+co)
• Defensive Design For the Web the first book by 37signals (pre-Rails) (I think I gave it to Liz at Smith Street Design?)
• Don’t Make Me Think (maybe my buddy Jon?)

I’m about to order:

• Tog on Interface (one of the classics)
• Use Case Modeling (I’ve been very interested in learning more about ways to think of functional requirements)
• User Interface Design for Programmers (Spolsky, whom I usually find annoyingly opinionated, but he knows what he’s talking about)

Basically I’m just trying to get better at what I do.  (I think I’m going to read Mental Models shortly as well)

In the meantime, I’m working on some mock-ups for my own projects as well as one for a client.

Want to hire me?  I’d love to talk!     kremdela at gmail

Related posts:

1. YUI Theater — Nate Koechley: “The YUI CSS Foundation� » Yahoo! User Interface Blog
2. YUI Theater — Nate Koechley: “The YUI CSS Foundation” » Yahoo! User Interface Blog
3. 2009 – Time for some new things.
4. One of my favorite designers out there… Although I can't exactly describe why.
5. Your Favorite Assassin » About

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