Game Engine:

Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory, best you can get.

Game Coding Complete by Mike McShaffry. The book goes over the whole of making a game from start to finish, so it's a great way to learn the interaction the engine has with the gameplay code. Though, I admit I also am not a particular fan of his coding style, but have found ways around it. The boost library adds some complexity that makes the code more terse. The 4th edition made a point of not using it after many met with some difficulty with it in the 3rd edition. The book also uses DXUT to abstract the DirectX functionality necessary to render things on screen. Although that is one approach, I found that getting DXUT set up properly can be somewhat of a pain, and the abstraction hides really interesting details about the whole task of 3D rendering. You have a strong background in graphics, so you will probably be better served by more direct access to the DirectX API calls. This leads into my suggestion for Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX10 (or DirectX11).



C++:

C++ Pocket Reference by Kyle Loudon
I remember reading that it takes years if not decades to become a master at C++. You have a lot of C++ experience, so you might be better served by a small reference book than a large textbook. I like having this around to reference the features that I use less often. Example:

namespace
{
//code here
}

is an unnamed namespace, which is a preferred method for declaring functions or variables with file scope. You don't see this too often in sample textbook code, but it will crop up from time to time in samples from other programmers on the web. It's $10 or so, and I find it faster and handier than standard online documentation.



Math:

You have a solid graphics background, but just in case you need good references for math:
3D Math Primer
Mathematics for 3D Game Programming

Also, really advanced lighting techniques stretch into the field of Multivariate Calculus. Calculus: Early Transcendentals Chapters >= 11 fall in that field.



Rendering:

Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX10 by Frank. D. Luna.
You should probably get the DirectX11 version when it is available, not because it's newer, not because DirectX10 is obsolete (it's not yet), but because the new DirectX11 book has a chapter on animation. The directX 10 book sorely lacks it. But your solid graphics background may make this obsolete for you.

3D Game Engine Architecture (with Wild Magic) by David H. Eberly is a good book with a lot of parallels to Game Engine Architecture, but focuses much more on the 3D rendering portion of the engine, so you get a better depth of knowledge for rendering in the context of a game engine. I haven't had a chance to read much of this one, so I can't be sure of how useful it is just yet. I also haven't had the pleasure of obtaining its sister book 3D Game Engine Design.

Given your strong graphics background, you will probably want to go past the basics and get to the really nifty stuff. Real-Time Rendering, Third Edition by Tomas Akenine-Moller, Eric Haines, Naty Hoffman is a good book of the more advanced techniques, so you might look there for material to push your graphics knowledge boundaries.



Software Engineering:

I don't have a good book to suggest for this topic, so hopefully another redditor will follow up on this.

If you haven't already, be sure to read about software engineering. It teaches you how to design a process for development, the stages involved, effective methodologies for making and tracking progress, and all sorts of information on things that make programming and software development easier. Not all of it will be useful if you are a one man team, because software engineering is a discipline created around teams, but much of it still applies and will help you stay on track, know when you've been derailed, and help you make decisions that get you back on. Also, patterns. Patterns are great.

Note: I would not suggest Software Engineering for Game Developers. It's an ok book, but I've seen better, the structure doesn't seem to flow well (for me at least), and it seems to be missing some important topics, like user stories, Rational Unified Process, or Feature-Driven Development (I think Mojang does this, but I don't know for sure). Maybe those topics aren't very important for game development directly, but I've always found user stories to be useful.

Software Engineering in general will prove to be a useful field when you are developing your engine, and even more so if you have a team. Take a look at This article to get small taste of what Software Engineering is about.


Why so many books?
Game Engines are a collection of different systems and subsystems used in making games. Each system has its own background, perspective, concepts, and can be referred to from multiple angles. I like Game Engine Architecture's structure for showing an engine as a whole. Luna's DirectX10 book has a better Timer class. The DirectX book also has better explanations of the low-level rendering processes than Coding Complete or Engine Architecture. Engine Architecture and Game Coding Complete touch on Software Engineering, but not in great depth, which is important for team development. So I find that Game Coding Complete and Game Engine Architecture are your go to books, but in some cases only provide a surface layer understanding of some system, which isn't enough to implement your own engine on. The other books are listed here because I feel they provide a valuable supplement and more in depth explanations that will be useful when developing your engine.

tldr: What Valken and SpooderW said.

On the topic of XNA, anyone know a good XNA book? I have XNA Unleashed 3.0, but it's somewhat out of date to the new XNA 4.0. The best looking up-to-date one seems to be Learning XNA 4.0: Game Development for the PC, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone 7 . I have the 3.0 version of this book, and it's well done.

*****
Source: Doing an Independent Study in Game Engine Development. I asked this same question months ago, did my research, got most of the books listed here, and omitted ones that didn't have much usefulness. Thought I would share my research, hope you find it useful.

Hey, I'm not too sure how much I can help with the college choices, I come from a different country so I don't know enough about that, but I am big on learning things myself and if you'd like to strengthen your knowledge in graphic design, maybe even while studying, here are some awesome books to get yourself going in the right direction:

Meggs' History of graphic design: I love this book. before I bought it I found another on design as a whole but this is specifically related to graphic design. with a lot of briefs it helps to know what kind of association your font choice will create, and it's useful to look back at old graphic design to see if there's something you can re-purpose for your brief. if that's the case, this book is for you. Megg doesn't leave anything out too! it starts all the way back from the beginnings of written language!

The A - Z of Visual Ideas: How to Solve any Creative Brief: Imagery is almost as important to a brief as type. You'll need to be able to create something that grabs attention and gets a message across as quick as possible. If you're having trouble finding a way to express an idea, flip open this book and page through countless ways you could do it.

How To Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul: Work experience is the best kind of learning there is. and if you feel like you're lost when you begin, this book will be your faithful mentor. There's a lot about freelancing and starting your agency too, it's just invaluable all around.

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design: If you'd like to become a web designer, this is a good book to start with. I'm an experienced web designer so I find some of the points a bit obvious, but I found a lot to learn all the same.

I don't like to waste time when it comes to learning things through the books I've bought so I can tell you first hand that these books are absolutely useful and won't just waffle on about what successful agencies have done. I'd also like to let you know that one of the finest graphic designers my previous agency had was a guy who came straight from high school and just really loved doing graphic design. When he left, he left a huge space to fill. On the other hand, I've met designers with honours degrees who didn't stay for longer than a year. But get a degree if you can, it helps to get your foot in the door. Getting a masters is awesome, and if you went magna cum laude I'm sure you would knock it out the park :) you aren't over your head in the slightest.

> What you are trying to do is impose a moral scale, a ranking, on life that says that taking this life is moral but taking this one is not.

So, I'll try to get this straight. Please set me straight if I have any of this wrong.

You're asserting that in moral terms, ALL LIFE is equal, completely regardless of its nervous system, capacity to perceive the world, form social connections, experience emotion, or suffer. For example, a herd of cows should be given exactly the same ethical consideration as a leaf of spinach: none whatsoever. Right? Because humans have a moral mandate to kill. And since all nonhuman life is equally worthless in these ethical terms, according to our moral mandate, we are allowed to destroy as much life as we please in order to eat what we'd like. Deciding if I want to be responsible for the "death" of a few beans or some spinach, or be responsible for a lifetime of captivity ended by a violent death of a cow (not to mention all the "plant death" that was necessary to make it grow in the first place).

Except humans. We can't kill each other, because we can acknowledge rights for each other.

What would you say about very young children and or mentally handicapped humans who don't have the mental capacity to "respect and protect the rights of others?" If this is where rights come from, then obviously not all humans have rights. Or is there more to it than just that?

> The arbitrary categorization of one life as more valuable than another is not made for moral reasons. It cannot be because morality is binary. A choice is either moral or immoral.

Please cite any theory of morality or ethics at all that says that there is no gradient of morality. While you're at it, please cite any theory of morality or ethics at all that says that if you must kill something, then you're justified in killing anything you want.

Actually, if you could cite anything to support your position, instead of just asserting things, that would be great! In particular, I'd love to see any credible ethical argument that all nonhuman life should be treated exactly equally in ethical terms.

> If this theory is true then the pure herbivores of our species did not survive natural selection - the omnivores proved better adapted for survival.

So, we should take our ethical cues from natural selection, then? I thought you said earlier that we shouldn't.

Regarding "human efficiency," what do you think of the environmental destruction caused by animal agriculture? Or, if human efficiency is only measured on an individual scale, how is it affected by the mounting evidence that eating animals isn't so great? (each word is a distinct link.) What about the antibiotics issue? Please address this.

> Yes - if both animals and plants suffer and several lives have been given already to create the animal then the animal causes the least loss of life and the least suffering. How many plants do you have to slaughter and digest screaming to equal one animal?

You said earlier that plants can't scream. And can't suffer. And the answer, once more with feeling, is: about a 10:1 ratio! Remember? I linked those wikipedia articles for you! Did you read them?

Which reminds me, I've been careful to only cite things that are reasonably "impartial": news articles, PubMed, wikipedia, that sort of thing. Nothing from the Humane Society or anything like that, since I imagine that you'll probably just dismiss it. If you'd be willing to read those things seriously, then by all means let me know and I'll share a few. And if you wouldn't mind addressing some of the things that those linked articles address, I'd appreciate it.

I'll go back a couple posts of yours, if you don't mind, because I forgot to address this point:

> The animal would have eaten the plants regardless of your decision. By eating the animal you are not participating in the death or the potential suffering of the plants.

Yes you are! You've paid for the animal to be bred, raised, fed, and slaughtered. You are contributing to the demand for this process. Are you claiming that by supporting something financially is completely divorced from all ethical responsibility? Please explain this, since I don't understand this view.

> Farming an animal for food is not torture. Torturing an animal for the sake of seeing it suffer is morally wrong.

Well, if you're in America, more than 99% of the time it is. Is it permissible to torture an animal to eat it more cheaply?

Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals, by the way, is an excellent and very honest investigation of the ethics of eating meat. It's written from the perspective of someone who's oscillated between eating meat and not eating it for his life so far, and I hope you'll believe me when I say that it is absolutely not judgmental of those who do. There's no way around the fact that it's been a human tradition for a very long time, and there's a great deal of sentimentality around it, and this book approaches the subject with great intellectual and moral honesty. I hope you'll at least consider reading it, if you would like to, I'd even be happy to send you my copy in the mail (although I'd probably be unwilling to give out my address over the internet), and you can keep it after that. And if you're right about the ethics of it, you'll blast through it in a few days and come away completely unchanged, since your position is totally bulletproof. If there's no threat, all you have to lose is a few hours of reading time. And, if you don't want to read anything, he's given a couple brief interviews 1, 2, 3, 4 that you can watch in a few minutes (the longest is an hour).

And of course, since I'm suggesting some reading material for you (I hope you're actually reading those articles by the way... it's hard to tell, since you haven't address any of them except the ADA abstract, which you dismissed with an appeal to nature), it's only fair that if you recommend any books or articles or films to me at all, I solemnly swear to read (or watch) them with an open mind. I'll even get back to you about what I think!

I think it's extremely telling that the industry has fought so hard to pass laws against documenting abuse in their operations. Would you agree that given a choice between cheap meat that has been raised in torturous conditions, and expensive meat that was raised in a way to give the animal a good life while it was alive, one has a moral obligation to choose the one that caused less suffering? This, I expect, is in line with your moral mandate to kill. After all:

> Certainly limiting the amount of pain inflicted is a desirable choice.

Try this: go to your refrigerator, and look at the label for the animal flesh you already have in there. See what farm it's from, and look up a phone number. Give them a call, and pretend that you're interested in taking a tour of their facilities to see the conditions. Then, when you're at the farmer's market, find someone selling meat and ask if it would be possible to go see the farm sometime.

Look, I don't want to be hostile. Clearly we disagree on some very fundamental things (like the notion that suffering has anything at all to do with ethical decisions) but I want to be very clear that I'm not trying to pick a fight or belittle you in any way. I just find some (most, frankly) of your views baffling, heartless, and honestly, pretty terrifying. But honest discussion is the whole point of CMV, right? And, I'd like to encourage you again to cite anything to justify your assertion that plants and animals should be given exactly the same ethical consideration (none). And again, please cite anything at all to support the notion that the capacity to suffer is of no moral consequence.

Thanks! I'm looking forward to your reply. I've tried to be very clear about the points I'd like you to address, and hopefully I succeeded.

The following comment operates on the assumption that you are interested in American urban planning from an administrative or public policy focus. For real estate development, urban design/architecture, or international issues, look elsewhere.

A solid, all purpose undergraduate major: philosophy. You can teach yourself subjects and even methods, but to learn how to think critically and write about complex subjects in a clear way you need quality, focused instruction and that's the purpose of philosophy. Outside of your general major requirements, take exclusively analytic philosophy courses. Typically there is an analytic philosophy survey course but for other courses identify which professors in your department operate in this tradition (and take teaching seriously) and take whatever courses they offer, regardless of your personal interest in the subject going in. Common subjects include logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, epistemology, etc. These courses will discipline your thinking and writing in ways that other majors won't. These skills are absolutely fundamental and lay the groundwork for a successful, highly adaptable career.

Outside of that major, which will fulfill your humanities requirements, you should fill your general requirements with courses like U.S. government (typically fulfilling a social science requirement), microeconomics and macroeconomics (social science, business, and occasionally quantitative), and environmental science (natural science). Take as many economics courses as you can. You can also take a basic geography course focused on cities but in my experience these courses teach you what you can easily learn from disciplined study on your own time. Focus your electives on methods courses, specifically statistics and digital mapping (GIS). You can also easily learn these online but if you have to fill up requirements, stick with these.

"But wait, don't I need to know something about urban planning?" Definitely! But you don't need to use up valuable course time on this subjects unless you have top urban planning scholars teaching undergraduate courses at your school, which probably isn't the case. Feel free to share your program and I'm sure the great community here can point out any top scholars active there. Otherwise, focus on teaching yourself the subject over summer and winter breaks. Read books by esteemed experts/scholars/writers in the field. A few broad essentials, all of which should be available at your public library:

• "Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs (the essential urban planning text)
  
  
• "Triumph of the City" by Edward Glaeser (urban economics)
  
  
• "Zoned in the USA" by Sonia Hirt (land use planning)
  
  
• "Walkable City" by Jeff Speck (transportation/urban design)
  
  
• "Cities of Tomorrow" by Peter Hall (urban theory/history - don't hesitate to save a ton of money by buying an older edition!)
  
  Other users are welcome to contribute what they see as essentials. The key here is to read about urban planning relentlessly in your free time (important: this includes blogs!) and focus your coursework on skills development. This combination of philosophy/methods coursework and disciplined, independent reading will make you not only an issue expert, which are a dime a dozen, but a productive expert, someone who can approach a completely new problem and produce useful results.
  
  This is the path I have followed and I have been happy with the results. Hope this helps.
  
  Edit: grammar errors, typos, etc. fixes.

Dear Mr. Lapointe,

Thank you for taking the time for answering questions in this AMA. My question goes to the recent NPA proposal to make metered street parking outside the downtown core free on Sundays and statutory holidays. I apologize in advance, but this post may get a bit long, but it is an important issue and I am interested in learning about your policy rationale and some background I feel is necessary.

I am curious, in coming to this decision, have you, or your policy team, read The High Cost of Free Parking? The author of this book is none other than one Donald Shoup. Dr. Shoup is a professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners, and has served as Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA.

If you haven’t read this book (admittedly it is 800 pages long, although it is currently the bible in the parking and urban planning world), have you, or you policy team, listened to the podcast on this subject by Freakonomics? And, if you still haven’t listened to a 30 minute podcast on this extremely important issue, have you at least read this op-ed in the New York Times by Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics at George Mason University?

If the answer is no, let me provide you with a brief synopsis of what the most prominent experts in the subject say.

Currently, the cost of parking in North America is grossly underpriced. As I am sure you understand, nothing in life is free, including parking. Not only are their costs to build, pave and maintain parking spots. But more importantly, there is the opportunity cost of parking. We are using a valuable limited resource, urban land space, for parking rather than other possible uses (car lanes, bike lanes, pop parks, land development for housing, commercial uses etc..). In fact according to the NYT articles, the average cost of a parking space in LA, a place not known for limited supply, is $31,000 per spot when taking into account maintenance and land costs. That is more than the actual cost of most cars parked in the spots. If we don’t give people free cars, why should we give them so called “free” parking?

Additionally, the negative consequences of “free parking” are profound. According to Dr. Shoup, “A surprising amount of traffic isn’t caused by people who are on their way somewhere. Rather it is caused by people who have already arrived. Our streets are congested, in part, by people who have gotten where they want to be but are cruising around looking for a place to park” Actually between 30-45% of congestion is people simply looking for parking in some areas. So by underpricing street parking, you not only giving a subsidy to cars and encouraging driving (while discouraging other possible uses for the land space), but also this will further encourage drivers to continuously circle the block looking for underpriced parking further increasing road congestion.

So it light of the above, my questions are as follows:

• Have you or your policy team read The High Cost of Free Parking in coming to this decision?
  
  
• Do you deny Dr. Shoup's and Dr. Cowen's thesis that underpriced parking is a subsidy for drivers that encourages driving? If so, why? If not, why do you support further underpricing parking?
  
  
• Can you please defend your position against Dr. Shoup’s thesis that cities must properly price parking to reflect its true costs to efficiently allocate a limited valuable resource, urban land space, among various possible uses?
  
  
• What studies lead you to suggest that the proper price for parking outside of the downtown core is free after 8pm, on Sundays and on statutory holidays?
  
  
• If you believe, the market price outside of the downtown core is not free after 8pm, on Sundays and on statutory holidays, why do you support giving a subsidy to drivers for free parking rather than a subsidy for other possible users of the space (such as for drivers for another car lane, cyclist for another bike path, people for a pop up park, residents for more land for housing or businesses for more land for commercial development, etc…)?
  
  
• How will you make up the lost revenue from this policy proposal? (I would prefer specifics over generalities)
  
  
• In light of the above, do you still stand by this position?
  
  
• If you do still stand by this position, why do you support shifting the true costs of parking from drivers who park in those spots to other people, residents and businesses of the City of Vancouver.
  
  Also, I posted a very similar post on your blog and you never answered or defended you policy rationale. Hopefully you can do so here
  

For a first project, this looks really good. Others have said some of the stuff that I'm going to say, but there's a couple other comments I haven't seen others make.

First, learn how to export images. Every arch program I've used has the ability to do this and it makes things look much nicer than taking a picture of a screen, which leads me to...

Learn how to Google efficiently. If you don't know how to do something, think of what you're trying to do, take the keywords out of it ("I want to build a wall that is sloped outward in Google Sketchup" turns into "slope wall sketchup"). In high school, I ended up knowing the programs we used better than my teacher because of this. Now in college, I am one of 3 out of about 125 that everyone goes to for help with programs. About 50% of the stuff they ask I don't know, but I can Google it and find an answer in under a minute.

Now, for the design itself. It's important that every design decision you make, you ask "why?" If you cannot fully justify it, think of a couple alternatives, and choose the best option. Then at the very least your reason would be "I explored a few options and determined this was the best solution." Sure, some will be able to argue it, but you have a reason. Always try and push it though. For instance, why did you choose wood planks for part of your facade? Is it because it looks good or because you had a location in mind and it matches the style of that location?

Next, materiality on facades. My general rule of thumb I use is one main material, one accent material (larger amounts of glazing would count, simple windows like you have would not). When you start having more than that, it starts to look rather busy and can be distracting. But like in the last paragraph, try to have a reason for the material. Pick a location for the building, learn the style and material of the location, and design with that in mind.

Finally, it's never too early to start learning about how buildings are actually constructed. If you can, get access to books by Francis Ching. If they are available at your library, check them out. If not, they're relatively cheap ($20-$30 each iirc). Building Construction Illustrated, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order, and A Visual Dictionary of Architecture are three books I highly recommend to get started on. It will help you understand how buildings are actually put together (and provide tips like nominal construction so you aren't doing things like cutting a CMU in half so that it fits). I notice a few things (such as being able to see the outlines of your stairs from the outside) that you want to watch for so they don't show up. This can be solved by understanding where different elements stop, how they're connected to each other, etc.

So, like I said, this looks really good. Starting at 15 is awesome, I started when I was 16 and now I'm applying to some of the top grad schools in the US, so definitely keep at it! One last tip, if you haven't already, start sketching/drawing by hand. It's an invaluable skill to have and will help you immensely if you decide to study architecture. Even if it's drawing one object a day, just spend 10-15 minutes every day sketching things out. You'll be surprised how much you improve just from practice in even a month.

Not OP, but I can tell you that all of those dishes are super easy to "veganify." Start buying different veggie burger patties, check out Beyond Meat products (they make burgers, ground beef, and chicken type meat currently - honestly I've been meat free for so long that it's all a little too meaty for me, but I wish the Beyond brand had been available when I first stopped eating meat). There are a ton of other veggie patties out there. Check out your nearest vegan restaurant if there are any around you. If you're a milk drinker, I honestly prefer plant-based milk, pea milk, oat milk, almond, flax, soy... all so good. When my husband first went vegan we went and bought a whole bunch of different plant-based kinds of milk to do a taste test b/c he's very picky about the creamer in his coffee. He ended up choosing the pea milk - it's got a good creamy feel to it in coffee. Chao Cheese is delicious (a lot of vegan cheeses aren't so great but that one is).

Easy snacks: almond butter and banana, or avocado and hummus sandwiches, soup and bread is easy, something about coconut oil on toast tastes EXACTLY like butter to me, but there are vegan butters available that mimic the real thing very well also... there's a lot of vegan junk food out there like chips, Oreos, cookies, and ice-cream too to get that fix. Ben and Jerry's dairy-free ice cream is unreal. I didn't even know it was vegan when I used to eat it as a vegetarian.

Vegan cooking blogs:

[Minimalist Baker] (https://minimalistbaker.com/) - she has a good shepherds pie.

[Hot for Food] (https://www.hotforfoodblog.com/welcome) has a lot of good comfort food

[Thug Kitchen] (https://www.thugkitchen.com/)

[Here's a list of the Top 50 vegan food blogs] (https://www.culinarynutrition.com/top-50-vegan-blogs/)

Reading ["Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer] (https://www.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer/dp/0316069884) was really instrumental in helping me make the shift as well. Foer is a fiction author who went vegan irl and the book is autobiographical of his decision making, so it's very approachable and not guilt-trippy at all.

Welcome to the right side of history! Also, I didn't feel different at all going from meat-eater to vegetarian, when I went from vegetarian to vegan, however, I felt a world of difference in terms of improved mood and energy and getting to poop like three times a day ha.

And, like someone else said, you don't have to do it all at once. Maybe try cutting out one animal group at a time. If I had to do it over, I would start with dairy, then chicken, fish, pork, beef... Dairy is really just awful in terms of cruelty and health impact.

Okay now I'm rambling. Take care!

Edit: formatting wall of text.

I seem to get asked this a lot, but here is my list, posted here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1uq58s/good_graphic_design_books_for_a_beginner/ceklj3y



> These are all books that I absolutly love, and bought for either personal use or to accompany different courses while I was getting my BFA in GD. I have seen some of them both are brick and mortar book stores, and college book stores. If you get a chance to see them in person before buying, leaf through them to get a feel.
>
> Megg's History of Graphic Design, absolutely essential to understanding where graphic design comes from historically. IMO the best GD history book on the market, at least the most encompassing. One of my favorites, was very helpful writing different papers and researching historical styles.
>
> Graphic Design School. Another great book, focuses more on design process and stuff like that. This one more walks you though being a designer. Gives tutorials on different things too, which is useful.
>
> Graphic Design Referenced is a really great book that is a bit of a hybrid. This book describes a lot of design terms, styles, and general knowledge while referring to historical and modern examples.
>
> Those three for me are really essential books for new graphic designers, I learned more from those three than I can express. Below are a few more books I really like, but might be a bit more advanced than someone just getting started might want.
>
> Another book I have used a lot, and almost included with those three is above. Thinking with Type. Really great intro into typography.
>
> More advanced even.
>
> How to be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul
>
> A Graphic Design Student's Guide to Freelance
>
> Hope this helps!
>

Keep in mind this is just a starting point. There are tons upon tons of inspiration books out there for graphic design stuff, not to mention educational books on all sorts of specialties. I love graphic design books, the hard physical copy of them. When I'm stuck on a project I like to flip through them, read a bit, and then revisit my work again.

Here are the books currently in my amazon wishlist, so I can't vouch for them, but I do plan on eventually owning them.

Wish List:

• Graphic Design Solutions
  
• Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills
  
• 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design
  
• Graphic Design Thinking
  
• Burn Your Portfolio: Stuff they don't teach you in design school, but should
  
• Making and Breaking the Grid

Don't look at other people's portfolios and be concerned, you are looking at work from people who have spent literally years studying and practicing a single subject, so are way more specialized than someone your age who has to take on a number of subjects and give them equal importance, not to mention its a subject that you haven't yet had the chance to try out. See it more as inspiration.

Its great that you've got some experience lined up! Very important to give it a try before you commit in case you outright hate it, university will be different from real life practice though. Before university be prepared for your work experience to feel like 'just a job' (but hopefully one that you can see yourself enjoying) after university you will have the knowledge and hopefully passion to see that job as an opportunity to create things in the world.

Don't worry about architectural knowledge before university, any prior knowledge will be useful but its a level playing field no-one will go in knowing what to expect, and having too much of a preconceived idea will probably be a bad thing. The easiest thing to do would be to just check a few blogs every now and then, just to look at things and see what you like, don't take it to seriously just see if there's any styles or designers that catch your eye. Try these:

Dezeen

DesignBoom

Architectural Review

If you really want a book to read this is probably the best 'my first architecture' book you could get its simple, but very informative.

As for drawing, it is important, you should practice whenever you can. You don't need to have picture perfect hand drawing skills but you need to learn to 'think' and 'describe' and 'observe' with your hand - its one of the key skills of an architect. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect but you need to be able to describe and understand texture and light and shadow and 3d objects in space. Sometimes a rough sketch with energy and emotion like this peter zumthor study can tell us more about the weight, feeling, texture, lightness or darkness of a space than perfect drawing, although perfect drawings do have their place as well.

Architecture has a lot in common with graphic design, the ordering principles, problem solving, composition etc. But graphic design tends to lack, both 3d dimensional work but also and importantly an emotive aspect. I would encourage you to take up art as an A-level, if thats not possible, don't worry but it would be good to find a short course where you could practice art away from the formal and practical constraints of pure graphic design. Hope that helps!

Hah. It's complicated. I don't think there is such a list. If you build your list purely by data, let's say population or wealth, it doesn't work. Seattle, or San Francisco, which to me are T1 cities, have smaller populations than Houston, Texas, which to me is a T2 (despite being one of the biggest cities in the country).

To me, a Tier 1 city is typically one people outside of the country have heard of. New York. Boston. SF. LA. Seattle. Chicago. When I visited Paris and told people (a cab driver and a worker at a bakery) I was from New Orleans, I shit you not, they had never heard of it. I had to say, "Louis Armstrong? Jazz?" and that gave them sort of a light bulb...

A Tier 1 city has everything you expect. Density of population, residential and commercial spaces in close proximity. Insane traffic. Wealth. The aforementioned things to do. Tier 2 cities tend to be more spread out, like Houston or Atlanta (but, again, LA is insanely spread out so you can't judge cities by density, either), and they tend to have sleepier commercial activity (most stores or restaurants downtown shut down around 5-6 or are only open for lunch).

They tend to have some wealth but not crazy wealth. Charlotte, NC is flush with bank money (I think). Houston and Dallas with energy. Miami with tourism and probably drugs, I dunno. Someone mentioned Boise, I think Boise has been home to a tech scene for a long time but it hasn't ever put the city on much of a map. Oddly I was driving cross country and went past Boise and it looks absolutely miniscule, like a small town that's really proud of having a couple 50 story buildings in it. Not hating, just an example of a place having a bigger reputation than it should.

You might find this book helpful: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. I read this early on while hunting for a place to live because I wanted to really understand how to recognize a great city without having to visit many of them. I ended up traveling a lot anyway but her work is very insightful. She was instrumental in how Toronto evolved (she even had an impact on New York I believe) and I briefly lived in a neighborhood with her fingerprints all over it, that was essentially her model neighborhood. A perfect blend of medium density residential (some single family homes next to 20-30 unit apartment buildings a few blocks deep) astride a commercial corridor for groceries and entertainment -- the neighborhood is called "The Annex", check it out on Google Street view here. The neighborhood has a mix of students, professors, bankers, artists, etc. Or, it had -- I'm sure it is gentrified like crazy by now.

A Tier 1 city is also a city that is insanely expensive to live in. In San Francisco I rented a 330 sq. ft. apartment in a truly awful neighborhood for $1650/month five years ago. That was a great price back then...in New Orleans I had a 1300 sq. ft. house and was paying the equivalent of $800/month in mortgage. I paid the place off just before I moved away from there, something I never thought I'd be able to do in my lifetime. It is something I will never likely be able to do in a Tier 1 city.

So...probably more of an answer than you wanted or expected, and probably not a very helpful one. My suggestion is to think about what is important to you and find a place that has that. Do you love the outdoors? Denver/Boulder, Portland OR, Seattle, etc. are great cities with that. Do you want to spend tons of time at a beach? San Diego is pretty affordable (for California) and you get that. Do you like hiking and camping? Plenty of places to do that in texas. Find a subreddit here and ask the locals :)

Very cool how much you want to support him.

The biggest misconception about the industry is probably how little math we actually use. There is of course a spectrum to our field that spans from sculptors and artists to programmers and engineers. By and large, however, we are visual people who hone our skills by practicing art. I was happily surprised in my first term of college to find out how much time we'd spend sketching and drafting. Hopefully that's appealing to him!

As far as what skills to learn: I took a CAD drafting class in high school that gave me a good head start in college. Sketchup is easy to pick up and I'd encourage him to get comfortable with Rhino to really be able to model digitally. I would not recommend Revit at this early stage as it's extremely technical. Physical modeling is also helpful. I grew up on Legos before moving to paper / cardstock / cardboard sketch modeling. Messy and fast and gives three-dimensional insight you can't get from a page or a screen, plus having the ability to make clean models is a great way to impress professors early on.

Regarding reading material. These books made an enormous impression on me:

• 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
  
• The Fast Guide to Architectural Form
  
• Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language
  
• Francis D.K. Ching's Form, Space, Order
  
• and Architect? A Candid Guide to the Profession
  
  I would highly recommend each and every one to him. All very approachable reading for a 14 year old already sketching commercial spaces.
  
  And Bjark Ingel's Yes is More is a fun read in graphic novel form.
  
  Lastly— reach out to your local AIA chapter. They can connect you and your brother with resources specific to your area including firms to check out / potentially shadow at, scholarships to apply for, and summer programs and other workshops to attend.
  
  ​
  
  Best of luck to you both! It's quite a journey and a rewarding one if it fits.
  I'm happy to talk more if you'd like to message me.

Just dive in head first. In the summers and after you've graduated, do internships, find mentor programs to be paired with working professionals (AIGA and similar organizations have these), take on freelance gigs - do anything to get some real life experience. The technical prowess you can gain from school is just your toolbox, you need to get working on something to learn how to apply those tools. Plus, doing internships and the like are a great way to get your foot in the door of various design departments, and could lead to a great, steady job.

Also, for a more specific suggestion - I highly recommend the book "How to become a graphic designer without losing your soul" by Adrian Shaughnessy. It is a very well written book about all of the details they never teach you in school - best ways to promote yourself, interview tips, networking, what type of design work environment could be the best fit for you... etc. Not to mention its beautifully designed.

Don't be discouraged by designers you admire, they had to work hard to get to that point as well. Use them as benchmarks and inspiration, and realize that you have a lot of self-motivated work to do before you can enjoy success as well. Hope some of this helped, best of luck! :)

Draw. Draw. Draw.
When you're tired of drawing, draw some more.
Focus on light and proportion. learn from the classics. learn about hierarchy. Visit buildings or even streets or neighborhoods that have some significance. Take a lot of pictures and then draw those pictures. Buy this book and draw the pictures and diagrams inside it.
Blogs are nice to help you build a vocabulary and to help you figure out what you like, but for now you should focus on only the greatest works by the greatest architects. The only modern architecture you need to look at is Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Look at different scales of design. You might find yourself more interested in furniture design or interior design, or you could gravitate towards landscape architecture or urban design.

Also, do some research about the schools you are applying to. Are they focused on construction or design? Theory or built works? conceptual collage or technical drafting? is there a style that is preferred by the professors? Where I went to undergrad, Corb was the messiah and Gehry is the antichrist. Every school has a different pedagogy, and its important to find one that you can work with. You will spend many sleepless nights in studio so try to find the best fit for you.

Other than that, enjoy your freedom while you still have it! Good luck and have fun!

In addition to the fine critique others have given you, I have a core list of books that i adore and highly recommend.


Basic tips on working with type I like this book because half of it lays out all the "rules" and then the other half breaks them all - in a good way. Really laid back, easy to read, and good advice.

A good book on just some basics and a little history of typefaces This one's a little more in depth, but still a great book on type.

If you're interested in learning a little history

More history

And also, a wonderful book that reads a little more like a novel than a text book: Just My Type I absolutely love this book. It shows you some history, but at the same time everything is in layman's' terms and very easy to understand. Simon Garfield is a colorful writer and goes through lots of effort to show you all the things about type you might not ever notice.

As far as your type site goes, parts of it are really slick, parts are a little awkward. As others have said, legibility is (for the most part) king when working with type. I've made a couple of critiques on some screen shots for you.

Anyhow, you've got a lot of great advice from everyone here to work with. Just keep practicing and of course looking at examples type and analyzing why it's good or bad. Best of luck!

It was hard, until all of a sudden it was easy. My method? I learned as much as I could about the issues with animal agriculture. At first I continued to eat eggs and dairy (I'd already been a vegetarian for several years), but I'd feel conflicted and guilty afterward. Still, convenience or cravings would keep me coming back. But I kept reading everything I could find on the subject and one day, suddenly, no amount of tastiness or convenience could justify my continuing to support those practices.

Two of the main sources that informed my decision were the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and Colleen Patrick Goudreau's Food for Thought podcast.

Eating Animals is an extremely well-written and comprehensive overview of the ethical, environmental, and health effects of animal agriculture. Food for Thought touches a lot on the "why" of veganism, but where Colleen's work has really been helpful to me is in the "how." She explains, among other things, how to make sure you're properly nourished, how to stave off cravings for old foods, how to respond to questions and confrontations, and how to really take joy and pleasure in your new lifestyle.

As far as specific advice, here are a few tidbits.

1. Learn to cook. Fake meats are fine when you're just getting started, but you're going to find yourself bored and dissatisfied with your diet really quickly if you continue to rely on them. Experiment with new cuisines and vegetables, don't let yourself get into a food rut.
   
   
2. Research nutrition. Vegan Health is a good place to start. You can be healthy and thrive on a vegan diet, but it does have different strengths and weaknesses than an omnivorous diet. As long as you eat a wide variety of unprocessed fruits and vegetables and get enough calories for your size and level of activity, you should get most of the nutrients you need in abundance. There are some things that you should consider supplementing: B-12 (absolutely essential!), omega-3s (recommended), calcium and vitamin D (better to obtain through diet, but can supplement if needed). Don't even worry about protein.
   
   
3. Don't avoid talking about your veganism, but in general it's better if other people initiate the conversation. Keep any dialogue brief and matter of fact unless people seem genuinely interested in learning more. Many people will become defensive because your behavior is making them examine their own more than they are comfortable with. Talk about your experience and your reasons, and avoid telling other people what they should do. Be happy and eat delicious food, and people will come around in time.
   
   
4. Build a support network. Ask questions and share experiences here or on other vegan forums. Join a vegan MeetUp group in your area. Volunteer with relevant organizations. It can seem intimidating to make different consumption choices than those around you, but do whatever you can to remind yourself that you're not alone and that you are making a difference :-)

you have a good start and it's always fun to sketch by hand and figure out how space works.

I know a lot of people here have said to pick up computer programs but I would start with learning how to scale and proportion first and the best way to do that is by hand. The computer is an amazing tool and can help tremendously but there is no replacement for hand sketching.

Check out some books by Francis DK Ching, they are a really good resource. Specifically Form, Space, and Order and since you seem to like laying out space also look at Interior Design Illustrated.

These aren't the end all be all resources but they are great for getting started and also show what a really well done sketch looks like.

Good luck and keep posting those sketches!

1. Yes it is.
   
   
2. Well my experience has shown me the finish turns out nicer if you have a perfectly smoother flat surface. The depth of the finish also seems to improve. I have done some experiments and I think you can tell the difference. I know I have heard people say you can’t improve the appearance beyond a certain grain of abrasive but once you do it… you will change your mind. The better the underlying surface the better the finish will look. I have also noticed better performance with adhesion on well prepared surfaces. I would rather apply many thin coats of finish to a perfectly flat surface. This is an outstanding book. It is the bible of finishing IMO. I would recommend it. I have read it 3 or 4 times. http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Wood-Finishing-American-Woodworker/dp/1565235487/ref=la_B000APORGS_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346872818&sr=1-1
   
   
3. General finish Satin Arm-R-Seal
   
   
4. I like the domino system. I have owned mine for 3 or 4 years I think. I use it all the time. I used to fart around with routers and templates guide bushings. I do cut real old school mortise and tenons sometimes still. These are generally timber frame stuff or very large furniture. As long as the size is right I don’t see much of drawback at all. Price is the only con I can see. It is an expensive tool. The domino and guerilla glue make an amazingly strong joint. The speed and ease of the domino is amazing.
   
   edit:fixed some spelling and added Bob.

I totally love the Christopher Alexander books. Definitely check out his The Timeless Way of Building which is a great companion piece to A Pattern Language. You should know that his works, while great in my opinion, are sort of considered idiosyncratic and not really in the mainstream of architecture/urban design.

Here's a short reading list you should look at:

The Smart Growth Manual and Suburban Nation by Andres Duany & Jeff Speck. Another set of sort-of-companion works, the Manual has a concrete set of recommendations inspired by the critique of modern town planning in Suburban Nation and might be more useful for your purposes.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs is probably the most famous and influential book on city planning ever and contains a lot of really original and thoughtful insights on cities. Despite being over half-a-century old it feels very contemporary and relevant.

The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler is similarly mostly a critique of modernist planning principles but is both short and very well written so I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Makeshift Metropolis by Witold Rybczynski: I can't recommend this entire book, but it does contain (in my opinion) the best summary of the history of American urban planning. Really useful for a historical perspective on different schools of thought in city design over the years.

The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup is the book on parking policy. It's huge (700+ pages) and very thorough and academic, so it might be harder to get through than the other, more popular-audience-oriented titles on the list, but if you want to include parking as a gameplay element, I really can't recommend it highly enough. It's a problem that's thorny enough most city games just ignore it entirely: Simcity2013's developers say they abandoned it after realizing it would mean most of their players' cities would be covered in parking lots, ignoring that most actual American cities are indeed covered in parking lots.

Finally there's a bunch of great blogs/websites out there you should check out: Streetsblog is definitely a giant in transportation/design blogging and has a really capable team of journalists and a staggering amount of content. Chuck Marohn's Strong Towns blog and Podcast are a great source for thinking about these issues more in terms of smaller towns and municipalities (in contrast to Streetsblog's focus on major metropolitan areas). The Sightline Daily's blog does amazing planning/transpo coverage of the Pacific Northwest. Finally [The Atlantic Cities] (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/) blog has incredible coverage on city-issues around the world.

I hope this was helpful and not overwhelming. It's a pretty big (and in my opinion, interesting) topic, so there's a lot of ground to cover even in an introductory sense.

Well, if it's 100% tung oil then you could just put a couple of coats on and then let it dry. If it's Tung Oil Finish, which is pretty much anything that doesn't say 100% tung oil, then it also has varnish in it and you'll want to wait overnight, maybe sand with some 400 to get out any dust nibs or bubbles, then recoat and wait and see if you like it the next day.

Just make sure you let that stuff dry completely before you topcoat it with anything. Your shellac would actually make a good topcoat and you can really shine the hell out of it if you like that look, although it will add a little bit of color. It's nice, though, because if it gets nicked up you can just add a new coat of shellac and it'll completely reamalgamate into the finish and look new.

You can do that with some other topcoats, too, but any of the urethane stuff, water based or not, is going to build in layers and so it's harder to repair. If you have a good paint shop anywhere near you, or if you own a compressor and sprayer, you might also try lacquer. You can get spray cans of lacquer at good paint stores and it works pretty well and is still more repairable later than urethanes.

Just make sure your oil coats are totally dry before you topcoat. Get your nose down in that thing and really try to sniff the fibers out of it and make sure you don't smell any more of the finish anymore!

If you have some time before you do it and want to really investigate some options, check out this book by Bob Flexner (no, I'm not him pimping my book!).

Really great book that is very, very comprehensive and easy to follow on different types of finishes, the pros and cons of each, application techniques, surface prep, etc. I use this book constantly, as evidenced by the bent up, finish-stained pages that sometimes stick together now. Any of the books by Jeff Jewitt are also really good for finish types and techniques, but the Flexner one is a great go-to for just about anything. If you live anywhere near a Woodcraft or Rockler or other woodworking store then they probably stock it.

Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. Just finish your sample piece the way you think you want to finish the guitar first and then you'll know exactly what you're getting and what issues to expect.

As an architecture student who asked himself this same question not so long ago I'd say:

• Modern Architecture: A Critical History by Kenneth Frampton.
  The most introductory, simple to understand, first book you should pick up when ready to jump into some actual architecture. This is the book that you need to read even before architecture school, for your entrance test and just because.
  
  
• Architecture of the City by Aldo Rossi.
  This one is also an easy read that will make you realise how important architecture is for us as human beings, as a society, as a city, as a community, as people... how architecture is not just a free standing building by some "starchitect" in a magazine but a part of something bigger. Great read and one of my favourites.
  
  
• Towards a new architecture by Le Corbusier.
  Love him or hate him Le Corbusier changed the world and studying and understanding how and why will greatly help you understand architecture today. This book might be a bit philosophical and theoretical but it's written for people to understand, not just architects. A must read I'd say.
  
  
• Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture by Christian Norberg-Schulz.
  I'd say this is a book you should read to complement and expand on Aldo Rossi's. Genius Loci is the spirit of a place, it's character and distinctive self. Great read.
  
  
• Architecture As Space by Bruno Zevi.
  Great book to understand how Architecture are not just façades and photos but designed spaces and experiences and how we experience them with our senses, the way they make us feel. This book will make you look at architecture from a different perspective, and you will since then experience the world differently.
  
  BONUS:
  
  
• 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick. Simple and to the point, might not seem like much and honestly don't take it too seriously but it's nice to keep around and going through it will remind you of things that sometimes we tend to forget.
  
  Hope this helps and gets you started on a good path. :) Have a nice day.

It's something I've adapted from a few sources on urban planning/design. It's something I never thought about until recently, but the way we build places can have a huge effect on the people who live in them. Personally, I noticed that I was always happier in cities where I could walk around and see other people walking around, versus when I was in small towns where I had to drive to get to anything. I couldn't put my finger on what it was, exactly, until I was in college and got to read Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities. Suddenly it all started to make sense.

If you're interested in learning more, check out New Urbanism, r/urbanplanning, and maybe a good book on the subject, like Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. This is a great place to start, it highlights some common problems in our current building patterns and pulls examples from all over the world to show ways that work better and help build happier places.

Some other good reads:

• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
  
  
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
  
  
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Well, governments sort of do already, but not anywhere near the scale of the subsidies that are given to drivers.

Every car lane on a road that isn't a private toll road is an indirect subsidy for drivers and the frequent mandates that new development contain X amount of free parking spaces. There is a good book on this called The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup and you can read his original paper here for free. Free parking also subsidizes the car experience by taking valuable real-estate and making it free to use by motor vehicles.

If we take into account the subsidies for Oil and Gas Companies that keep the price of gasoline down it emerges that tens to hundreds of billions are being used in the US alone (the article references Australia but I'm more familiar with US statistics) to subsidize driving.

Some cities install bike lanes and bike parking but use a fraction of the resources to do so. Given the long term health benefits of cycling and the ecological impacts of mass driving it makes sense to me to shift some of the massive subsidies already going to drivers to cyclists.

Most cities spend less than 1% of their transit budget on bicycle infrastructure even though a much higher proportion of their population rides a bike regularly or as a commuter.

Given that the US government is willing to subsidize new electric vehicles with multi-thousand dollar tax breaks I see no reason why it should not be possible to write off on one's taxes 25% of the cost of a new bike or some similar scheme.

Alternatively it could set up a system where people who can verify that they bike to work 50% or more of the time receive a $1,000 health tax credit at the end of the year. This would also encourage people to work close to where they live (if your commute is only 2 miles it is a lot easier to achieve this tax credit) which would encourage density.

1. Illustrator is a very useful tool, it would serve you well to know how to use it. Illustrator also uses a very similar skill set to other applications you will end up using like indesign for example.
   
   
2. No not at all, I think people love to complain no matter what industry they are in. However it is very competitive, there are plenty of very very successful designers out there and lots of really unsuccessful ones. No where is it more immediately obvious how "good" or "bad" you are at something than with a visual portfolio, people can see at a glance exactly how competent you are, that's pretty intimidating. For instance you might be able to escape notice as a mediocre insurance claims adjuster for much longer than a mediocre designer. If you can find a handful of solid clients and build good relationships with them it can go a very long way to having a long and comfortable career.
   
   
3. Pay varies dramatically and theres a reason that very few people can give you a straight answer, your dealing with at least 3 variables at any given time if not more. What you are worth, what your client is worth and what the client is asking you to do. So for instance if your doing a multi million dollar marketing campaign and rebranding of a huge corporation while sitting in your manhattan office expect to be paid a little differently than if you are doing the CD cover for your friends band (that they recorded in garageband), the skill set, stakes and experience are dramatically different in those scenarios.
   
   Graphic design is everywhere and at all levels, expect to be paid accordingly. Understand too that $1000 for a logo is completely relative and doesn't by any means reflect the work that goes into it. You may have a someone who whips something together in a few minutes or have a team of designers slaving away iterating on an identity for weeks to make sure it's perfect, to make sure it becomes a household/highly recognizable piece of branding.
   
   
4. One of the toughest and most technically challenging things I feel like you will have to deal with is typography. Having a good understanding of how to wield it's awesome power can go a very very long way. I think as far as learning your tools goes, for me at least the internet has been a far more valuable resource than any book, if you need a problem solved google can do that pretty quickly, theres also a ton of good tutorials or articles on design process out there, I have yet to see any books that come close.
   Now on the typography I can make a few suggestions, some of these are pretty dry and not so flashy but have very solid fundamentals in them. If you go to art school (and I highly suggest you do if you can afford it, it can be a phenomenal experience) then these are the kind of books you will be reading in the first year or two.
   
   Typographic Systems of Design ~Kim Elam
   
   Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type ~Kim Elam
   
   Thinking with Type ~Ellen Lupton
   
   Elements of Typography ~Robert Bringhurst
   
   
5. I started doing some design work and drawing in high school. Both my parents are designers so I'm sure that helped, from there I went and got a BFA in illustration. While my first love is drawing and most of my work is illustration I still end up doing lot's of design work because it is (in my experience at least) very frequently in demand.
   
   Hope that was helpful and I'm sure lots of other people have had very different experiences and will share their stories and opinions. It's a very diverse field.
   

That's an awesome decision to look into going vegan! It's so much easier than you'd think once you start. This veganuary website is loaded with tips and info to get folks started. Plus the FAQ on the side bar might answer some basic questions.

If you're up for more motivation Earthlings is a very powerful movie which will likely cement your resolve to step out of an unnecessary system. Also Forks over Knives and Vegucated are on netflix which are much less graphic and provide lots of info.

I also like to recommend books to help people learn more about the ethics of animal consumption. Eating Animals is a great read from an investigative angle from a renowned novelist and Eat Like You Care is a short and very powerful case for the ethical necessity of not consuming animals.

Regarding your health, so long as you eat a varied diet and occasionally add a B12 supplement you health will not suffer and very possibly improve!

You're making an awesome decision and you will be amazed at how easy it gets after just a few weeks!

Firstly, drawing, Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop are just tools. Learn how to use them well but they are only tools. Design is more psychology than it is software expertise. Learning the tools is important of course, just don't confuse the two. Design is the "why" and "what" you are trying to communicate, the function. Art, illustration, type, etc is the "how" you create the form. Form follows function.

With that said. Keep drawing. Everyday. Look into illustration as an art discipline, it's very closely connected to graphic design as far as purpose and mindset. Far more so than traditional studio arts. (painting, sculpture, etc).

Learn typography. Really learn the difference between typeface and font and families. Learn why serifs work for body copy generally better than sans. Learning how to hand render type, and do it well, is an invaluable skill especially paired with illustration.

In my view these are essential to add to your reading list:

• Die Neue Typographie by Jan Tschichold
  
  
• History of Graphic Design by Meggs
  
  
• Thinking with Type by Lupton
  
  
• Essays on Graphic Design - Bierut, editor
  
  There are about a hundred others I could add. Look beyond "Best Design Of The Year" kinda crap and seek out critique and theory. These skills far outweigh the ability to look at what's popular and ape it.
  
  Finally, remember that graphic design is communication above all else. Think about who you are trying to reach, what you are trying to say, and why you are trying to say it. Be true to yourself and your audience, and you will do good work.
  
  Good luck!

Great question, and great idea! Off the top of my head:


The Basics

Landscape Architect's Portable Handbook - This one does get a bit technical, but it's a good guide.


Sociology/Psychology

Social Life of Small Urban Spaces - Just a good book about how people experience spaces

Design with People in Mind - An older film, but a classic. Funny and with great observations about how people use spaces and interact with their environment


Design Theory

Architecture: Form, Space and Order - This is a great guidebook for architects and landscape architects alike


History of Landscape Architecture

Illustrated History of Landscape Design - A great intro to the history of landscape architecture.


Urban Planning/Design

Death and Life of Great American Cities - It's a classic and should be a required read for anyone in landscape architecture or architecture


This is the short list - I'll add to it as I think of more!

Fiction or non-fiction?

My favourite "happy" non-fiction is Bill Bryson. I just finished At home and it was the sort of book that made me laugh out loud, and also want grab random people and read out cool little passages about random things.

Nice little piece of popular science, The Red Queen is a well written and interesting book about the evolutionary basis for sex.

I love David McCullough...He's like Bryson, except where Bryson would spend 5 pages on something, McCullough will spend a thousand, and leave you feeling like you know the person he's writing about better than you know your family. My favourites of his aren't the biographies (he wins a Pulizter for damn near every one), but the stories of buildings and events. The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, The Path Between the Seas...All great, though the Pulitzers were for his Truman biography, and his John Adams biography.

For fiction? Hmmm. Intellectual and not depressing is tricky. I like Michael Chabon, but he flirts with depressing on a regular basis. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is amazing, and so is The Yiddish Policeman's Union.

Woah, easy killer.

Look I get what you're saying. Highways and wide lanes seem like sexy things. That's exactly what I used to think as well before I started learning about urban planning and transit design. There's a lot of intricacies about it but here's some good beginner stuff

First, check out r/urbanplanning. Super interesting sub about the city ecosystem and how to design a successful city.


Books:

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs. Basically the bible of city design.

"Walkable City" by Jeff Speck is also an awesome book. That guy is a great presenter as well

Videos:

How Highways Wrecked American Cities

Why Public Transportation Sucks in the US

Why Trains Suck in America

How Closing Roads Could Speed Up Traffic - The Braess Paradox

How to Fix Traffic Forever

Presentations:

Basically any presentation by Jeff Speck

What it boils down to, is you destroy the urban environment by introducing cars. They take up so much room that can be used for dense development but requiring parking sports and wide streets.

Great representation of what car do to cities

This is my last comment here. I can't argue with someone about urban development/planning if they haven't studied the topic themselves. It's a topsy-turvey thing to us living in the post automobile United States, but it makes sense after you do some research.

Enjoy!

The advice I will give will reproduce (some of) the steps I performed to make my guitar. I put aniline dye on ash.

Get a piece of alder similar to the one you're using for your guitar. Practice spraying dye on. Make sure you do both the face grain and end grain, and are happy with the results. Look at it while wet for the best idea of post-finishing look.

Alder is known to have blotchy tendencies when adding dye. If you spray on very light coats of dye, the problem is mitigated. Some recommend a light wash coat to prevent blotchiness, but this will limit the depth of color you can apply, and if your wash coat is uneven, your color will be uneven. So I prefer not to use a wash coat. You can always experiment with both techniques and find out what works for you.

1. Sand down to bare wood. Get rid of all of the Sand and Seal, get rid of all dye.
   
2. Spray the dye on. Borrow a friend's sprayer if you don't have one. It will look a lot better than wiping on. Spray on a few light coats. Blotchiness probably means your coats are too thick (too much dye at once). Avoid drips or formation of droplets on the wood. Immediately wipe away any that form, and spray more lightly.
   
3. Now apply your sealer. Be extremely careful not to sand through when leveling the sealer. Spray on several coats before doing any sanding.
   
4. Now apply your topcoat.
   
   > I'm not hoping for perfection but I would like it to look decent (better than it does).
   
   I know what I proposed above is a good bit of work. Trust me when I say it's worth it. You will have this guitar for the rest of your life. You want it to look good and be proud of your work. Now go forth and make an awesome guitar ;)
   
   If you want more information on finishing, a good source is Understanding Wood Finishing.

I'll start off with some titles that might not be so apparent:

Unexpected Fundamentals

These 2 books provide much needed information about making reusable patterns and objects. These are life saving things! They are not language dependent. You need to know how to do these patterns, and it shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to implement them in your chosen language.

• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
  
  
• Game Programming Paterns
  
   
  
  Good General book
  
  
• Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs
  
   
  
  This book is great if you're going to make a browser based game
  
  
• HTML5 Canvas Cookbook
  
   
  
  General Knowledge books
  
  
• Pro HTML5 Games (Expert's Voice in Web Development)
  
   
  
  Provide a working moveable 3D model with C++ and DirectX, Very cool.
  
  
• Character Animation With Direct3D
  
   
  
  More general game base building
  
  
• Game Engine Architecture, Second Edition
  
  
• Programming Game AI By Example
  
   
  
  Working product results books, little if any modification needed
  
  Releasing in a couple months (hopefully) 2 Very good books using C++ to develop by.
  
  
• Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 12
  
  
• Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 11
  
   
  
  Not presented in the best manner but still noteworthy:
  
  
• DirectX 11.1 Game Programming
  
   
  
  I used to love XNA...but now it's not feasible for commercial development. If you're a beginner to game design...starting out with XNA might actually be useful. It's easy to pickup and put out a working product. XNA is C#
  
   
  
  
• Learning XNA 4.0: Game Development for the PC, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone 7
  
  
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 Programming: Developing for Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360
  
  
• XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginners Guide
  
  
• Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in XNA)
  
  
• XNA 3.0 Game Programming Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Expert's Voice in XNA)
  
  
• Building XNA 2.0 Games: A Practical Guide for Independent Game Development (Books for Professionals by Professionals)
  
   
  
  Working product books, modification needed to make run on current systems
  
  
  Provides a working FPS game in C++ on DirectX 9. Good for some starting out knowledge for an FPS
  
  
• Programming Mutliplayer FPS Direct X
  
   
  
  Good for 3D Terrain rendering in DX9...however much of this is outdated...some concepts still apply, and it's not the worst idea to see a working example.
  
  
• Real-Time 3D Terrain Engines Using C++ and DirectX9 (Charles River Media Game Development)
  
   
  
  TLDR: Click links starting at top, buy, read, profit

Since you said you're a meat lover, I'd encourage you not to rely on substitute meat (fake chicken, sausage, etc.). Even though some of them are good, chances are they're not going to live up to actual meat (at least not at first), you may get disappointed and then ultimately get discouraged and go back to eating meat.

Instead, I'd recommend a gradual process where you stop eating one type of meat at a time, starting with your least favorite and ending with your favorite. This will simultaneously encourage you to keep going (because it will be easier to stick to) and it will also slowly train your mind to start focusing your diet around other types of food! You may also start viewing meat in a different way, and may find that it's actually a little weird-feeling when you eat it.

I'd also recommend learning more about factory farming and where food comes from. I know many people recommend Eating Animals, by the author of Everything is Illuminated (great book). He wrote it when he was about to have a son and wanted to explore the farming business and decide how to raise his son (vegetarian or not). He's a fantastic storyteller, and you'll see it has some amazing reviews :)

Whatever path you take, I congratulate you for having a higher consciousness about your food! Best of luck!

There is always a lot of ways to get involved. Nobody can hold you back from being successful but yourself. If you have the drive to get involved, you can succeed, regardless of your 'inate programming intelligence'.

Check out gamedev.stackexchange.com. Can you answer the questions people have there? If not, figure out why! Read the answers they get, and learn that stuff. Someday, you'll be able to answer that for somebody else.

Try making some games, too. Start with simple stuff, in whatever language you know (but I always like to recommend C++). Then work your way up. Hangman, Pong, Asteroids, Pacman, Tetris. You can write all of these by yourself, and you can expand on them to make them cool. I wrote a bot that plays Bejeweled 3 that I still use on my resume, because it's cool!

Want to learn some graphics stuff? Check out this opengl tutorial. Need to understand these topics better? Buy some books! I'd recommend Pracitcal Linear Algebra: A Geometry Toolbox, and Frank Luna's DirectX books.

I'd type more but I'm sort of tired. Please feel free to send me a PM if you're interested in more references that could be helpful to you.

Thanks for the tips! The pie shakes at Hamburg Inn sound amazing. I actually just caved in tonight and got a burger/shake combo after a week of eating healthy...

As far as recommendations go, I have a feeling you've likely read most of the fiction I'd suggest. That said, here's a couple non-fiction suggestions you might not have read:

Walkable City, by Jeff Speck. If you've ever been interested in cities, what makes them work (or not work), and what types of decisions urban planners make, check it out. It's a quick read, entertaining, and you'll never see your city or any other city in the same way.

Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick. Told primarily through the eyes of two people, this book provides readers with a glimpse of what life is like for the millions of ordinary North Korean citizens.

Anyway, I know it's well past the time frame for your AMA, but if you get a chance, I'd love to know if there's any one book that helped you the most as a writer (e.g. King's, "On Writing"), or any one piece of advice that has carried you the most. I don't ever plan on writing professionally, but I've always wanted to write a novel just for the satisfaction of creating something, regardless if anyone actually reads it. I just feel like I spend so much time consuming things others have created, while creating nothing in return. Plus, getting 'lost in a world you're creating' sounds immensely satisfying.

Basic macroeconomics tells us that lower interest rates supposedly results in more spending, borrowing, and thus more economic activity and growth.

But there are some glaring holes in the mainstream economic understanding:

(1) After a transition period of a few months, the economy settles into a equilibrium that isn't much better than before the rate change. If the federal funds interbank rate is adjusted downward by only 0.25 percentage points (known as "basis points"), then there's no reason to think such a tiny adjustment will result in a meaningful boost to the economy.

(2) In fact, with baseline interest rates so low, we are in danger of entering a "liquidity trap" in which people don't even bother saving their money or investing it because the rate of return on investments and savings will be so low, the benefit of investing versus spending it today would be much weaker. Less money will be saved for financial emergencies, retirement, college savings, etc now that the benefit of doing so is reduced.

(3) Also, any boost to growth that results from reducing interest rates can only be sustained by continuing to reduce the interest rates over a prolonged period. A one-off decrease by such a small increment simply will not ripple through the economy in a way that people will appreciate.

(4) There is also the reality that simply making debt and other capital cheaper by lowering rates is not going to translate into new innovations, factories, warehouses, product lines or other new products and investments.

If new growth is the goal, we need to stop tinkering with monetary policy and commit to more Keynesian or Georgist macroeconomic fiscal policy:

• Improve our land use policy.
  
  
• Reduce barriers to entry for upstart minority entrepreneurs.
  
  
• Make college and grad school significantly cheaper or tuition-free.
  
  
• Reform the healthcare and health insurance sector so that employees are not tethered to their current employer due to health insurance.
  
  
• Toughen up our antitrust laws to not have such a narrow definition of "monopoly". Prohibit all exclusive partnerships and other contracts, unless parties to the agreement wish to pay an exclusivity tax.
  
  
• Implement a land value tax, and make federal block grants dependent on states' adoption of land value tax and reduction of income and sales taxes.
  
  
• Implement a carbon tax
  
  
• Implement congestion pricing for major roads and interstates. Incentivize states and cities to abolish free parking and to implement surge pricing and remove the minimum on-site parking requirements in their zoning ordinances.

One thing that I'd urge him to consider if he's serious about this is that the areas of Detroit that are doing best are the ones that are walkable (namely, Midtown and Downtown), and based on this streetview of Dexter and Davison, it's very, very much not walkable.

There are a few really great books on how you can start to make an area walkable: Walkable City by Jeff Speck was the first one that I read. I'd love to read more about a real strategy to make this the sort of place that people really want to live in, but that's a really, really hard job and is going to require some very deliberate execution.

A few steps that I believe would help a lot, all of which are pretty hard:

• Identify one or two adjacent areas of the neighborhood that already receive the most foot traffic. These are the areas you're going to improve.
  
• Work with the city to narrow the roads in these areas. People don't feel safe walking next to an eight lane road.
  
• Find one or two anchor tenants that will get people to come to the area. Something equivalent to what Craftwork and Sister Pie were for West Village.
  
• Make sure that any new development in the area makes things more walkable, not less. He mentions a new Flagstar bank, but if that new bank takes up too much space, it's going to disincentivize people from walking because banks aren't interesting to walk by compared to, say, a shoe shop with a display in the window or a pastry shop. (See Walkable City or Jane Jacobs's writing about how too many banks is actually a sign of an area becoming less walkable. I can't remember which.)
  
• Make sure that the area is as well connected to other already-walkable areas of town as possible.
  
  I know a lot of this probably sounds like "Shit, this guy is just trying to make his rough neighborhood better and might not have a ton of money to do it. How can you expect him to do this stuff?" This stuff is not easy, though: if it were, there would be a hell of a lot more walkable areas in Detroit. The fact of the matter is that you don't fix the city by making it look more like the suburbs, and his suggestions of adding a CVS, Aldi, Comerica, and Flagstaff don't make me terribly optimistic that he understands the factors that are making other areas attractive.

Uncategorized:

Thoughts On Design: Paul Rand


Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design

How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul

100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design

Paul Rand

Paul Rand: Conversations with Students

Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design

Bauhaus

The Vignelli Canon

Vignelli From A to Z

Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible

It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World's Best Selling Book

Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent!)

Josef Muller-Brockmann: Pioneer of Swiss Graphic Design

Popular Lies About Graphic Design

100 Ideas that Changed Art

100 Diagrams That Changed the World

Basics Design 08: Design Thinking

Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920-1965

Lella and Massimo Vignelli (Design is One)

The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

History of the Poster

How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer

The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics

George Lois: On His Creation of the Big Idea

Milton Glaser: Graphic Design

Sagmeister: Made You Look

Victore or, Who Died and Made You Boss?

Things I have learned in my life so far

Covering the '60s: George Lois, the Esquire Era

Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

[Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration]
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0812993012/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=VEJ64Y4T0U6J&coliid=I1WMMNNLTRBQ9G)

Graphic Design Thinking (Design Briefs)

I Used to Be a Design Student: 50 Graphic Designers Then and Now

The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design

Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills

Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference

Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Envisioning Information

The elements of dynamic symmetry

The elements of content strategy

Corporate Diversity: Swiss graphic design and advertising

Book Design: a comprehensive guide

Meggs' History of Graphic Design

Jeff Speck’s “Walkable City: How Downtown can Save America, One Step at a Time”” is a personal favorite. He quotes his work in Lowell, MA throughout the book.

I’ve also been recommended to read Cheryl Heller’s “The Intergalactic Design Guide: Harnessing the Creative Potential of Social Design” and while I haven’t yet had the chance to pick it up, I think it might be up the alley of what you’re looking for.

I’m halfway through James and Deborah Fallows’ “Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America” which is also excellent, and provides a great set of case studies in urban revitalization.

My own masters practica (in Emergency management) is on creating greater access to healthcare via some urban planning interventions in a similar New England city, if not the same one.

I’m local to Boston, and would be happy to loan you the first and last books, should you be interested.

Cheers!

Unpopular opinion here but Earth Hour is not only misleading, it actually gives people a false concept of sustainability.

This American urban planner pulled some of the latest research and found that someone who lives in a super "green" suburban house and drives to it in a hybrid car still produces more carbon emissions than someone who lives in an old house downtown but doesn't drive as much because they can walk or use transit.

Our built environment (i.e. whether you have to drive for every daily task or not) is a real driver of sustainability, not light bulbs or appliances. Plus light bulbs are improving anyways as LED bulbs are becoming more popular and they use very little energy so turning them off for hour almost accomplishes nothing.

Earth Hour essentially tells people it is okay if you live in a McMansion in the deepest of suburban sprawl and burn fuel to drive to pick up even a carton of orange juice - as long as you just turn off a few bulbs once a year. It makes people feel good and ignore the true causes of their carbon footprint. This isn't a call to live like a hippie. It's a call for better urban planning with less sprawl, more transit, and more walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods.

RN styling is pretty much modern CSS styling using Flexbox.

Good mobile UX design is independent of what framework you are using. If you want to start adding animations and such, then you need to dive more into the RN ecosystem, but to just make something that is visually pleasing, learn basic design principles.

Pick up a copy of Design for Hackers. Yes it is a large book, but UX is a field people get a 4+ year degree in!

Same author, you can sign up for his online course.

After you understand the basics, Google's Material Design page can then give you insight as to how larger companies think about design.

Knowing what a visual hierarchy is, how to create it, and how to purposefully direct the user's eye around is fundamental though. It is the difference between an app that is easy to use an an app that is frustrating to use. It is also the difference between a landing page that converts and a landing page that doesn't convert!

Drop shadows and rounded borders and even icons go in and out of style, but good use of typography, not over-using colors, and good visual hierarchy are universally fundamental to all good design.

Edit: Best $ I ever spent was paying a good designer to give me UX guidelines.

The angle that us advocates/urban planners are arguing over parking about goes way beyond 'aesthetics', which I sometimes have to remember also includes those tastes that see nothing wrong architecturally, economically, or culturally with parking structures.

Above ground and underground parking in towers are affected by, among other things, off-street parking regulations - whether minimums or maximums - and pseudoscience about how much parking is 'needed' at a site. The reason most of us want it built into the game - rather than simply being satisfied with mods that allow you to plop parking as you please to replicate your own mid-western peak-car American city - is because parking can be used as a subtle hint about the performance of your transportation network and your economy/tax efficiency of the land, in a similar to the appearance of abandoned buildings. It's really hard to encourage people to download a mod that does this and I argue it's a critical lesson in the game, aside and maybe more importantly than a bunch of other niche policies the game teaches you through ordinances.

Parking one of the biggest aspects of car-centric transport planning that we've recently questioned and debunked with with lots of data; it's upending the disciplines of transport planning and development.

So it's not just about the aesthetics of having parking garages to make cities more life-like or a more accurate simulation of where all those cars go when they're standing around doing nothing.

It's more about the fact that the game misses a crucial opportunity to teach just one more subtle but important lesson about the connection between parking (or more accurately, just the right amount of it) and the type of environment that makes a city successful and one that people want to live in. This is a HUGE issue on a daily basis for many professionals and citizens on the front lines - for me personally as I fight with neighbours over reducing parking requirements in buildings so developers can build more units to satisfy the housing crunch in Boston.

Sim City inspired a whole generation of people to become city planners. The next generation of city sim can inspire another generation of lay people to understand more viscerally the problems last generation's city planners left us with... If you want to make your city look like parking-pocked downtown Houston, Indianapolis, or Brasilia, that's great! Power to you. But your city shouldn't perform economically or with the same return on taxes vs city expenses as New York City, San Francisco, or Portland, OR. It's the same lesson that you learn when you put your dirty industrial right next to your residential - your choices make your city that much more or less desirable to live in.

In my humble opinion, the following are great and important reads for a newcomer into the subject.

Experiencing Architecture by Rasmussen

Any and ALL of Frank Ching's books, starting with Form, Space and Order

Sun, Wind, and Light is a timeless reference book.

The Dynamics of Architectural Form by Rudolf Arnheim is a great study on environmental psychology.

Also, Pattern Language if you're a complete masochist and really want to go DEEP into the subject.

I've got more if you're interested, but that should keep you busy for quite a while haha. Best of luck and I hope you find them as enjoyable as I have.

Oh sorry. My bad. Muller-Brockmann is a legend. I haven't read his book. Is it any good?

I suggested Alan Fletcher's "The Art of Looking Sideways". It's good for replenishing the creative juices. Also, "False Flat" by Aaron Betsky is awesome. And you can't go wrong with Phillip "Meggs' History of Graphic Design". Far too many people don't have that book.

EDIT: I haven't read Muller-Brockmann's book but I imagine it's a great take on the modernist/rationalist grid. Though, times are a-changin' my friend. If you look at the top design programs out there, say Yale MFA Graphic Design, Werkplaats or KABK for example, things aren't exactly the way they used to be. The only name we have for what's happening right now is Contemporary Graphic Design. I love it. It's an amazing time to be practicing Graphic Design. Though most web design doesn't even come close to interesting, unfortunately.

The Bringhurst Bible

James Victore's book is amazing. It's a quick read but is packed with inspiration.

Envisioning Information is great for info design.

Megg's History of Graphic Design


The rest of these I haven't read yet, but here is a list of things I currently have on my amazon wish list:

Some People Can't Surf by Art Chantry

Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design by Jennifer Bass

Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut

Damn Good Advice by George Lois

How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy

How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman

The Design of Dissent by Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic

Iron Fists: Branding the 20th Century Totalitarian State by Steven Heller

Welcome and congrats on your decision!

Here are my tips on getting started:
There is a great plant-based diet you might be interested in, it's called "The Starch Solution by Dr. McDougall":
https://www.drmcdougall.com/health/shopping/books/starch-solution/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_7rrkG3xYk

1.1) Learning new recipes
It takes a few weeks to learn new recipes and get to know new products.
Also, there is quite a bit of misinformation in the area of nutrition.
It will take a while until you see "through the fog". Just hang in there :)
http://www.chooseveg.com/switchnditch (get their free guide on the homepage!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmnPM6QzDTw
https://www.youtube.com/user/thevegancorner
https://www.youtube.com/user/hotforfoodblog
veg restaurants: http://www.happycow.net

1.2) Doing your research (health, ethics, environment)
No worries, 3 documentaries and books and you are fine :)
http://www.forksoverknives.com/the-film/
http://www.cowspiracy.com/
http://www.nationearth.com/earthlings-1/ (graphic)
Watch these with your husband, if possible, so that he is part of your journey and understands the basics.

http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer/dp/0316069884
https://www.drmcdougall.com/health/shopping/books/starch-solution/
http://www.amazon.com/Love-Dogs-Pigs-Wear-Cows/dp/1573245054/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457183607&sr=1-1&keywords=why+we+love+dogs+eat+pigs+and+wear+cows
Also has a great TEDx talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0VrZPBskpg
(I am not affiliated with amazon, btw)

2) Really, no need to worry about protein
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/natural-health/vegan-sources-of-protein/
http://www.forksoverknives.com/slaying-protein-myth/
http://nutritionfacts.org/topics/protein/
You can enter your meals into http://www.cronometer.com just to be safe.

And finally some basic help on getting started:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2k4NHjAP84
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htf5eCgyt5Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o9uzH_vrXA

That will keep you busy for a month or two, but it will also get you over the hump :)
Let me know if you got any questions or need help.
Good luck!

The books mentioned so far are great ones to start with. The Geography of Nowhere is also a good primer for the amateur; Kunstler's style is provocative and interesting to read.

I've always found good planning histories to be pretty accessible as well (for those interested in the subjects). Here are some recommendations that aren't the "main offenders" people normally reference:

Bourgeois Utopias is an interesting history of "suburbia", and the various forms "suburban development" has taken throughout history.

Sprawl by Robert Bruegeman is a good "contrast" to a lot of books about planning. His essential premises are that sprawl isn't bad, that underlies our economic growth, and that people want it.

Well, the kitchen is pretty far from the garage, and through a lot of doors and a tiny room. This makes carrying groceries inside suck.

and, as many others have mentioned, the dining room is too far from the kitchen to be functional. Does anybody actually USE a formal dining room anymore? I'd suggest a flex-space addendum to the living room where a formal table can be set in the event of guests, but is normally a nice part of the living room or a usable space between the kitchen & living area.

Overall, it seems messy and inelegant.

If you don't want to scrap the design completely, I would suggest clustering the bedroom/office on the left behind the garage, making the entry central next to the garage, and positioning the kitchen, dining & living areas on the right side. I also like to cluster water-walls for ease of plumbing.

The mudroom is a wonderful idea, but it needs to be big enough to set down groceries, remove shoes & coats, put them away. Also a great place for a laundry/dog sink.

I am not understanding the "dressing" room. Do people dress outside of their bedrooms?

Personally, I'd start over.

I love reading this book for refining ideas.

Civil engineering to shipbuilding: Structures and The new science of strong materials, by J.E. Gordon. These are incredibly enlightening.

Physics (also some chemistry and biology): It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science is a collection of essays by great scientists - among others, it contains a very insightful discussion on the birth of the Schroedinger equation, which is rather different from the usual stories of cats in boxes, chicken crossing the road, gods playing dice, and the like.

Chemistry: The Elements: A Very Short Introduction, by Philip Ball.

Biochemistry: Chance and necessity, by Jacques Monod. Seems it's out of print, I guess my knowledge of the field is a bit out-of-date. There must be some other book out there that explains elegantly protein folding and enzymatic regulation, which are the base mechanisms of living matter.

Which is, on occasion, a wonderful form of payment. As I outlined above, having friends or family pay you back with beer is (occasionally) acceptable.

And I'm sure it would have been hard to have anything remotely like the creative freedom you seemed to have enjoyed were the people paying you in cash.

However, the fact stands that without legal tender changing hands you are, at best, saying "the efforts of my labor are worth a few cold ones." At worst you set a dangerous precedent for this company, and other companies reading about them on reddit or other websites, to think that any creative work should be valued at a lower rate.

To put it another way: What if you'd walked into the restaurant and said "generally the going market rate for a dinner at a restaurant is $25/person. But why don't you feed us for $2/person and we'll tell all our friends?" The restaurant is hard up for cash, so they agree. You eat, they lose money on the deal, but they hope you bring in your friends. And you do... only you've told your friends "there's this great restaurant I went to that feeds you for two-bucks a piece."

A new wave of folks come in, they all want the same deal. The restaurant argues, maybe they get some people up to $5. They've increased their pricing by more than 200% but they're still losing money.

Suddenly they have a wave of people in the city talking about cheap meals. Other restaurants are hurting, so they have to slash their prices to compete. Which means that the first restaurant has no hope of arguing up in price because not only do they have a history of giving away food at absurdly low amounts, now the people next to them are doing the same thing so they have no choice put to match or they fail to compete.

Pretty soon, you can't charge more than $5 a head at a restaurant, wait staff are cut, quality of food suffers, customer service sucks... and now $5 for what used to be good is now looking pretty shitty.

Things go that bad, that fast. That's why the market comes to a natural, healthy level and people shouldn't drastically undercut it.

I'm sure you didn't think about that, and (in all honest) the restaurant you did work for probably doesn't have nearly the budget of... say... taco bell or chi-chi's or whatever they're competing with. But the fact remains that some greater value needs to be applied.

If this is a career you want to persue, I really recommend you check out this book. It applies mostly to the design world (print and web), but the lessons translate very well to any creative medium.

Senior Level Software Engineer Reading List

Read This First

1. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment
   
   

   Fundamentals
   

   
   

2. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
   
3. Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions
   
4. Enterprise Patterns and MDA: Building Better Software with Archetype Patterns and UML
   
5. Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail
   
6. Rework
   
7. Writing Secure Code
   
8. Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries
   
   

   Development Theory
   

   
   

9. Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
   
10. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications
    
11. Introduction to Functional Programming
    
12. Design Concepts in Programming Languages
    
13. Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective
    
14. Modern Operating Systems
    
15. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
    
16. The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
    
17. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
    
    

    Philosophy of Programming
    

    
    

18. Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It
    
19. Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
    
20. The Elements of Programming Style
    
21. A Discipline of Programming
    
22. The Practice of Programming
    
23. Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective
    
24. Object Thinking
    
25. How to Solve It by Computer
    
26. 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts
    
    

    Mentality
    

    
    

27. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
    
28. The Intentional Stance
    
29. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine
    
30. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
    
31. The Timeless Way of Building
    
32. The Soul Of A New Machine
    
33. WIZARDRY COMPILED
    
34. YOUTH
    
35. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
    
    

    Software Engineering Skill Sets
    

    
    

36. Software Tools
    
37. UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language
    
38. Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development
    
39. Practical Parallel Programming
    
40. Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computer Systems
    
41. Mastering Regular Expressions
    
42. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
    
43. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C
    
44. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
    
45. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
    
46. SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design
    
47. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques
    
48. Data Crunching: Solve Everyday Problems Using Java, Python, and more.
    
    

    Design
    

    
    

49. The Psychology Of Everyday Things
    
50. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
    
51. Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
    
52. The Non-Designer's Design Book
    
    

    History
    

    
    

53. Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
    
54. Death March
    
55. Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
    
56. The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
    
57. The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad
    
58. In the Beginning...was the Command Line
    
    

    Specialist Skills
    

    
    

59. The Art of UNIX Programming
    
60. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
    
61. Programming Windows
    
62. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
    
63. Starting Forth: An Introduction to the Forth Language and Operating System for Beginners and Professionals
    
64. lex & yacc
    
65. The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference
    
66. C Programming Language
    
67. No Bugs!: Delivering Error Free Code in C and C++
    
68. Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied
    
69. Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
    
70. Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit
    
    

    DevOps Reading List
    

    
    

71. Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart
    
72. The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services
    
73. The Practice of System and Network Administration: DevOps and other Best Practices for Enterprise IT
    
74. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
    
75. DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective
    
76. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
    
77. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
    
78. Cloud Native Java: Designing Resilient Systems with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry
    
79. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
    
80. Migrating Large-Scale Services to the Cloud

check out A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Great book for corralling up all the elements you'll want in a home. It's a collection of 'patterns' or elements that make Architecture work well for human life. A lot of great stuff that's often taken for granted, but very simple. And often cheap!

The nyTimes did a story on this fellow a while back- he's pioneered interior vertical garden walls. Very neat stuff.
http://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com You might find some inspiration there.

good luck!

1. I read Eating Animals, by Jonathan Saffron Foer and could not find a rational argument against veganism as the ethical choice given my access to alternatives to animal products. I was reading a whole lot of books on all sort of food-related topics, had no intention of going vegan or even vegetarian, but that was that. Went vegan the following day (July 4, 2011)
   
2. My spouse is working on decreasing animal product use. He kind of tapered - he was avoiding red meat, then lacto-ovo-veg, now he's closer to 80% vegan with occasional LOV meals. He also found meat substitutes he likes so he can do burgers, tacos, and other foods that are comfort food to him. I don't really have much practical advice, I guess, except that meat substitutes / analogues are a perfectly reasonable option if those flavors/textures are significant to you.
   
3. I'm boring. On a typical day I have oatmeal and coffee with soy milk for breakfast, some kind of grain plus frozen veggies and either beans of chopped up baked tofu for lunch (I make a big batch, portion it out, and freeze it ahead of time for the week), and tofu and some veggies for dinner. All boring, all easy, all tasty and inexpensive. For good recipes, I recommend checking out the post punk kitchen. Two of my favorite cookbooks are [http://smile.amazon.com/Mediterranean-Vegan-Kitchen-Donna-Klein/dp/1557883599/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1415407055&sr=8-1&keywords=mediterranean+vegan](The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen) and The Oh She Glows Cookbook.

1.) Write 3D graphics with DirectX11. Sure I learned OpenGL first but I regret not learning graphics with DirectX11. I personally believe DirectX11 is easier to learn than modern OpenGL.

Resource for both: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-graphics-pipeline-2011-index/

Resource for OpenGL: https://learnopengl.com/Introduction
Resource for DirectX: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-3D-Game-Programming-DirectX/dp/1936420228

If you are a beginner DON'T start with Vulkan or Directx12.

2.) Depends on how much you work at it. Also be smart how much you work / how you work. You said 15hrs a day for 3 years. Learn to pace yourself. If you think this is realistic or healthy, you are going to learn the hard way. However, you are older than me so this approach might work for YOU. But I have friends with a similar mentality and it is just self destructive.

3.) Don't worry too much about this one. The main thing is knowing the difference between a low level vs high level graphics API. OpenGL, DirectX11 are high level (meaning easier to use and require less knowledge). Vulkan and DirectX12 are lower level (harder to use require more knowledge, but can be a lot faster).

Other than that to answer your question: PS4 has its own API. Other than that special case I already listed the APIs used in consoles / PCs.

4.) You need to know linear algebra. Can't get around that. Take a class or pickup a book on it.

Resources:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab

Strang, Gilbert, Linear Algebra and Its Applications (4th ed.)

5.) No it is not a waste of time. Any game studio worth its salt uses C++ to do their graphics under the hood. C++ offers complete control over performance. However, a lot of studios do not use STL data structures. Since games/graphics needs to be super optimized and the STL is too generic at times and not fast enough sometimes.
https://github.com/AnthonyCalandra/modern-cpp-features

Also I learned graphics programming very recently so I can definitly relate. I started freshman year 2015 and am currently in my junior year with a graphics internship. A lot of my advice here is based off what I tell freshman at my school, and things I hear from friends working at triple A companies / Nvidia / AMD.

Tage Frid Teaches Woodworking Books 1 and 2 by Tage Frid. Book 3 is optional but worth the read in my opinion. Books 1 and 2 go over techniques and skills in an very organised way making it easy to understand. Book 3 looks at projects and their designs teaching you how to design a project and why it should be designed that way. You use to be able to get Books 1 and 2 in a combined paperback for $20 but I can't find it for sale anywhere. There's a box set of all three books for $60 on amazon. You should be able to get the books second hand seeing as the books have been around 20-30 years.

Understanding Wood Finishing by Bob Flexner is probably the best book on finishing. It goes over a range of different finishing techniques and gives tips and solutions to common issues you might have.

There's plenty of other books that are good to read but these are the only ones I'd call essential.

You know, that's not a bad approach when I think about it. Adobe Apps are easy to self-teach with something like a Lynda.com account; but the process and the business side... that's something that so many designers are sorely lacking.

If you can learn Adobe to a solid level, and continue to refine the process side into project management, you could potentially land a creative director position without having to go the usual route of being a graphic designer for a decade or more first.

My advice is to start with InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. InDesign is the canvas on which your vector components from Illustrator and your raster components from Photoshop come together into a finished piece. You can learn motion graphics and web and app design a bit further down the road with these solid foundations.

There's a third area, besides processes and software skills, that you can't neglect, and that's design theory. What makes a truly standout designer isn't how good they are with the apps or how efficient they are with project management, but how much context they have in terms of the history and fundamentals of design. Megg's History is a great place to start with that.

For schools- Capilano University's IDEA program is pretty reputable within the industry. It recently became a 4-year degree program, and it offers a really great curriculum with a good balance of theory and application.

But, I'm also really pro self-teaching! If you don't have it already, I think Megg's History of Graphic Design would be a great book for you to study.

Also, you can get a free lynda.com membership via a lot of public libraries, so I'd look into that too. I find Skillshare more fun because you're encouraged to complete a project for every course, but Lynda has been around a while already and has a huge library of courses that may interest you. :)

Read Design for Hackers, it's catered towards educating developers and engineers on the basics of design : Color, Layout, Typography, etc...

My process is for product design (building web apps and software) but it applies to static sites as well.

1. Consider your end goal for each piece of the product and optimize your UI/UX (User Interface and User Experience) for that goal. Start on larger site-wide goals and work your way into more granular component based goals. Establish a hierarchy of user needs and make give the most important things the most prominence.

>e.g.If you're building a blog site: Your overall goal is for users to find consume your content. The goal of the Navigation component is for users to easily get a sense of where they are on the site (information/site architecture) and navigate to different areas of the site.

2. Design and build your site with these goals are paramount, discard anything that doesn't advance your site towards these goals. Don't include something just because it's a typical convention or it's trendy (does a blog really need a rotating banner or carousel). Anytime you add something make sure it can pass this litmus test:

>Is this relavent to the siteIs this fulfilling a user need? Is this the best way for users to consume this piece of content?

The rubber duck method of debugging is also useful for critiquing design. Explain to your rubber duck why you choose these colors, this typeface, why you made the body copy this size, etc...

3. Establish rules, and stick to them unless absolutely necessary. People are great at recognizing patterns and prefer to have their content consistent. Could you imagine how frustrating it would be if every chapter in a book was typeset in a different font? In the same way it's frustrating as a user to identify a pattern (eg all of the links are blue and italicized) only for it to change arbitrarily throughout the site ("Wait. Why are the links not italicized now?"). If you have to change a pattern make sure it's for a good reason.

Even ignoring your immediate and inappropriate insult, your post is full of emotional regurgitation of Big Agriculture propaganda and simple marketing campaigns.

You've been sold a commercial you reiterate without realizing it. America is not "Feeding The World™". Since your post was entirely lacking in facts and sources, I'll provide some:

• 86 percent of the value of U.S. agricultural exports last year went to 20 destinations with low numbers of hungry citizens and human development scores that are medium, high or very high, according to the U.N. Development Program.
  
  
• Only half of one percent of U.S. agricultural exports, calculated according to their value, went to a group of 19 countries that includes Haiti, Yemen and Ethiopia. These are nations with high or very high levels of undernourishment, measured by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
  
  So no, we are not the World's Breadbasket. Modern factory farming is not sustainable and constitutes at least 10% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the US. The only purpose it serves is to stuff the coffers of Big Agri.
  
  Farm Subsidies are a big part of this. Initially meant as "a temporary solution to deal with an emergency", the majority of these (still active and growing) subsidies go to farmers corporations with net worths of $2 million. That's not to mention the > $130 million spent on lobbying last year from these same companies, companies which already own many local representatives from Agricultural meccas in the mid-west.
  
  Despite the hard data representing the U.S.'s contribution to combat global hunger, Monsanto claims that feeding the rest of the world is America's "moral imperative", and not only in the interest of their bank accounts and stock options.
  
  No aspect of factory farming is intended to be humane. The sole purpose is to be as cheap as legally possible, and where possible, change the laws. There's much more data and news articles regarding the scummy practices in local politics, in spraying feces-and-toxin coctails into the air because you can't legally keep it in pools (in some areas). I highly recommend you do some research and come to understand the true motivations of this industry.
  
  I could go on, but others have done it much better. If anyone's interested in a non-preachy and fact-oriented account of a fantastic author researching what would be best to feed his child, I highly recommend Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.

My brother got me that book for last Christmas. It doesn't go over any particular topic in depth but it really provides a great overview of most woodworking topics. I particularly appreciated the sections on joinery and different wood types.

The next book I would add to your collection is Understanding Wood Finishing by Bob Flexner. It's a great read that provides useful information I just couldn't find online.

thanks for posting. I think you have a great attitude, and honestly, attitude counts for more than you think.

I'll not critique the website, but, knowing you're new to the fundamentals, try to share some more general thoughts.

1. do more. I think you're starting this already with some of your sketches for mini cooper. but always, always, do more. 50 iterations, 100 iterations. Keep pushing beyond the obvious, and use sketching as the tool to do that. I read an old design book, from the 70s, that said "only one solution is the symptom of an inflexible and untrained mind." /r/52weeksofdesign
   
   
2. Time to get up on the basics. That means the basics of drawing (if you so please). It's not a requirement as a designer (I'm a piss poor artist), but it definitely helps sometimes. http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419898682&sr=8-1&keywords=right+hand+drawing
   
   What sketching is important for is flexing ideas and testing compositions before going to the computer.
   
   
3. Learn the basics of typography:
   http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Graphic-Design-Communication-Courses/dp/0321934288/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419898490&sr=1-1&keywords=stop+stealing+sheep
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Version-Anniversary/dp/0881792128/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419898879&sr=1-1&keywords=robert+bringhurst
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Type-2nd-revised-expanded/dp/1568989695/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419898800&sr=1-2&keywords=typography
   
   
4. Grids
   http://www.amazon.com/Grid-Systems-Principles-Organizing-Design/dp/1568984650/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419898762&sr=1-1&keywords=kimberly+elan
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Graphic-Systeme-Visuele-Gestaltung/dp/3721201450/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419898837&sr=8-1&keywords=grid+systems
   
   
5. Photography (if you like)
   http://www.amazon.com/Black-White-Photography-Manual-Revised/dp/0316373052/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1419898921&sr=8-2&keywords=black+and+white+photography
   
   and
   
   
6. remember that this is detail work. So things like spelling errors in this post, and on your website, should be resolved.
   
   Above and beyond the basics, I see your passion is impacting the world through design. So the question becomes HOW can graphic design impact the world, and does it at all? and what can you make or do directly? I think above all, a designer is an entrepreneur these days. Especially with that main driving passion.
   

http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm

This is widely considered to be one of the most comprehensive art tutorials anywhere.

I urge you to keep in mind; Simplicity. Flat shapes and well coordinated colors (Think about saturation, use color palette creators like Adobe's KULER thing- there are dozens of free ones around the web) A basic, but well explored understanding of artistic principles can net you fresh, competent visuals. Good art doesn't need to be complex.

Other great things:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_scheme
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_elements_and_principles
http://www.amazon.com/101-Things-Learned-Architecture-School/dp/0262062666
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Color-Light-Guide-Realist-Painter/dp/0740797719

Personally, I liked Learning Web Design 4th ed.. It gives you a nice overview of everything you're going to work with on the front-end.

Duckett's book is good and easy to read, but as far as learning, it didn't do it for me--you may be different.

You would also be well-served to learn some design theory. Don't Make Me Think is probably the penultimate in this area. Design for Hackers is also very good.

Learning jQuery is also a must. Code School has a great jQuery course.

Like /u/ijurachi said, a scripting language like PHP or Ruby on Rails would be a next step after that.

I won't, but I will give you several sites and subreddits you should check out.

/r/urbanplanning

/r/urbandesign

/r/urbantransport

/r/highspeedrail

/r/transit

Congress for the New Urbanism

Congress for the New Urbanism's YouTube Channel

Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (planning firm)

Smart Growth Online

NewUrbanism.org

Strong Towns YouTube Channel

Notre Dame School of Architecture YouTube Channel

_____

Here are also some good book recommendations (links to Amazon pages), many you could probably find at a local library:

A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb by Philip Langdon

The Architecture of Community by Leon Krier

Architecture: Choice or Fate by Leon Krier

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch

The Smart Growth Manual by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck with Mike Lydon

Sprawl Repair Manual by Galina Tachieva

Retrofitting Suburbia by Ellen Dunham-Jones

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany

History of Urban Form Before the Industrial Revolutions by A.E.J. Morris

The Language of Towns & Cities: A Visual Dictionary by Dhiru A. Thadani

The Eurocode series.

Ah but really, I quite like this: Reinforced Concrete Design

This is supposed to be quite good:Dynamics of Structures: Theory and Applications to Earthquake Engineering

I used to love this book, but I wonder if there is an updated version for eurocodes, will have to check it out

And of course it always depends on your field of interest, for instance I particularly like this book: Theory of Shell Structures

Also, this is supposed to be a classic: Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down


I now apologise if you don't live or work in Europe.

Which are the last two? Assuming capitalist development and codes...

By far the most famous geographer studying global capitalism is David Harvey. He recently wrote The Enigma of Capital which is a pretty easy introduction to his work. I think his Spaces of Global Capitalism is a more useful summation. He's very famous for a few other books, but I think the most important work he's done is in The Limits to Capital. The last one is a tough, meticulous book. Also worth checking out is his protege Neil Smith, either his Uneven Development or for a focus on cities The New Urban Frontier.

There really are not many books that take up housing and building code specifically, though Ben-Joseph's The City of Code is a useful introduction. If you're looking for a good rant (and a reliable one) on how we got to the less-than-stellar spatial arrangements of American cities, James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere will get your blood pumping. If you're more interested in the cultural politics of place, one of my all time favorites is Landscapes of Privilege by the Duncan's.

J. E. Gordon's Structures : or why things don't fall down had a very entertaining and informative explanation of the differences between a Greek temple and a Gothic cathedral. One thing he said particularly stood out: "If the Greek architecture of the Parthenon was inspired, the roof was intellectually squalid."

The Greeks laid wooden beams across the pillars and walls, then piled dirt and straw on top and smoothed them into gables, then laid tiles on top of the dirt to shed water. This filling made a good home for vermin, he noted. Trusses were beyond the Greeks.

I would like to see lacy steelwork on the inside, with a copper (treated) or bronzed roof that will resist tarnishing (I would love to see a copper-colored Lady Liberty again, as well). It should be good for 400 years.

George Costanza, the quintessential New Yorker, once said, "My father didn't pay for parking, my mother, my brother, nobody. It's like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I can get it for free?" The High Cost of Free Parking, Donald Shoup's 733-page tour de force, has the answer. With the exception of a Monopoly board, there is no such thing as free parking. In fact, free parking turns out to be the biggest problem you never thought about. "We all want to park free," Shoup writes. "But we also want to reduce traffic congestion, energy consumption and air pollution. We want affordable housing, efficient transportation, green space, good urban design, great cities and a healthy economy. Unfortunately, ample free parking conflicts with all these other goals."

MONDAY

I highly recommend 1984 by George Orwell if you haven't read it. I know it's a classic, but many people still haven't read it. It's by far my favorite book of all time.

I would love Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.

Thanks for the contest!

https://www.youtube.com/user/ChiliTomatoNoodle/playlists

That guys youtube channel has DirectX 11 C++ tutorials. He has a beginner series, intermediate, and advanced. He still adds to the advanced occasionally, like SSE explanations and so on.

His videos are long, you really get to know him and his personality. His beginner videos teach you C++ too, he doesn't expect you to know anything going in. He swears fairly often, I thought it was funny back in high school when I watched these, but others might not.

These videos are where I started from in the very beginning, and I wouldn't be where I am programming wise if it weren't for Chilli. He has allowed me to educate myself on my own time, for free. After I had done the beginner and intermediate tutorials I went and read this.

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-3D-Game-Programming-DirectX/dp/1936420228

That will teach you the basics of 3D Programming.

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Rendering-Computation-Direct3D-11/dp/1568817207

And that will teach you how to really understand the pipeline. Both books have their merits and both have very useful information for someone learning all this stuff. I'm currently making my own 3d game engine at the moment, so that's what understanding the information above can do for you. Takes time, though.

First of all a short background of my past experiences.
I'm a fairly experienced programmer I've mostly dealt with stuff that is closer to the hardware (kernel/networking dev). Hence I have a good amount of experience with C and C++.

I've also got a good amount of knowledge in the field of mathematics (currently reading up on functional analysis and galois theory). So any maths prerequisites shouldn't be an issue.

I also know absolutely nothing about computer graphics, currently have a particularly poor knowledge of UX, have never created a game before, and know much less about programming in Windows than Linux (I have at most a vague idea of what a COM object is).

I'm interested in writing a game since I want to pick up gamedev as a hobby. I don't really care what type of game I end up writing since I see this project as being more of a learning experience than a fully fledged game. I'm also taking this project as an occasion to get more comfortable programming in Windows. Before I start coding I've got a couple of questions for the people of /r/gamedev since I don't want to pick up a whole bunch of negative habits or bite off more than I can chew and get discouraged.

• What would be an adequate complexity for my first game? Should it definitely not be 3D? Would even a simple platformer be too complex?
  
  
• I really like the idea of creating a game "from scratch" so I've started screwing around with directX and reading this book. However, I've come to realize that while this might teach me a lot about computer graphics, I won't actually be learning about game design concepts any time soon. What would be a good C++ library to get started on? I've heard mentions of SDL and allegro for example. Ideally I'd like something that I will actually use later on too.
  
  
• What would be a good resource to learn said library?
  
  
• A lot of the tutorials and books I've been looking at have been focused on how to get specific aspects of game programming done. For example, how to draw things on the screen and animate them using directX. At the other end of the spectrum there are resources that go into much more abstract concepts like what makes a game fun but assume a non-technical audience (e.g. extra credits). However I'm yet to find something focusing on the big picture at the programming level. How the code should be architectured (I imagine even simple 2d games go beyond having a whole bunch of code in one big while loop), best practices, common pitfalls, etc... Are there any resources I could look into that would give me the bigger picture of game development?
  
  
• As mentioned above I am terrible when it comes to UX design since I haven't really worked on anything significant that has a GUI, other than for web apps. I'm working on improving that skill in a general sense but I wouldn't mind a few pointers that apply to games specifically. Are there any resources that would give me tips on how to make a game that looks and feels good.

Neat question. The two obvious big names from Urban Planning are Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. They epitomize Modernist planning and Post-Modern planning, respectively.

Robert Moses was one of the most important non-elected officials in the 20th Century, with the most popular account being Robert Caro's massive biography, The Power Broker. He was a fantastically smart legal wiz who came to power in the 1920s in New York and was the standard-bearer for sweeping top-down government approaches to development. He used his knowledge and authority to gain more and more power, creating some of the first modern highways in bridges all over New York City and state that helped influence the Interstate Highway Act and the urban car-centric model.

He can be viewed as quite a villain these days (think the unbridled power of Mr. Burns on the Simpsons), especially as academic planners now generally recognize the huge negative impacts that Modernist American planning had. There was massive economic and social displacement where things like the Cross Bronx Expressway ripped working-class immigrant neighborhoods in half, allowing commerce to escape urban centers and help create mid-century ghettoization. In short, the modernist approach can be seen as paternalistic at best and willfully concentrating power at the expense of the masses at worst. That said, depression-Era New York had huge problems (dilapidated housing and political corruption, to name two) that Moses' public works projects helped alleviate, and he was one of the country's most powerful advocates for public parks even in the face of massive growth and sprawl.

Moses sat on countless commissions and authorities for decades, his power only finally waning in the 1960s as the top-down modernist approach of (Post) World War II America faced its loudest criticisms with the related Civil Rights, Hippie, Environmentalist, Anti-Vietnam movements: Americans were finally scrutinizing the "Build Build Build Cars Cars Cars Roads Roads Roads" model that had driven cities for decades, which brings us to Jane Jacobs.

Jacobs (who got herself a Google Doodle last week for her 100th birthday), was a Greenwich Village liberal and fierce critic of the Moses-type technocratic planning. She was a community organizer who helped stop Moses as he tried to push through plans for highways in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. For those unfamiliar, these are two of the economic and social cores of New York City - she argued that roads are supposed to serve us, not destroy our important urban spaces.

If you ask a city planner what sole city planning book to read (myself included), the overwhelming favorite will be Jacobs' 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the most important critique of modernist planning to date. Instead of sprawling highways and engineering projects, Jacobs saw the healthiest urban spaces as walkable, intimate, friendly and inviting and on a human-scale. She advocated for small city blocks, much wider sidewalks and mixed-use spaces instead of the classic Sim City "Residential/Commercial/Industrial" segregated zoning.

While there has since been plenty of critique of Jacobs' post-modern model, today's planning leans much closer to Jacobs' vision (at least in academic settings): Planners are more focused than ever on the post-modern walkability, mixed-use, high-density, equal-access, participatory planning model. Although this seems like a healthier place for planning than the Moses model of old, the academic ideals clash with the huge legacy of the Modernist planning approach (We can't just up and rebuild cities every time a theory changes, after all), along with the neoliberal financialization and privatization of so many of our spaces over the last few decades, so it's still as muddy as ever.

Anyway, that's a slight oversimplification of some of the history, but Moses and Jacobs were certainly the biggest avatars of the Modernist and Post-Modernist planning movements and have been as influential in the field of planning as anybody.

Haha, that's awesome and I think you're probably right.

I can definitely understand the hesitation. There are a lot of reasons that going vegan is hard that often get undervalued by people that have already done it and adapted to the lifestyle.

It's hard to imagine what you would eat if you gave up animal products. You probably have favorite foods you'd never be able to taste again. Food is such a big part of our culture, too, that it's scary to consider self-ostracizing yourself. You'd have to tell grandma you can't eat her special chicken soup from the old country anymore. You wouldn't be able to go in on the bulk buffalo wing buy at the next Super Bowl party.

Then there are concerns about nutrition. How do I get enough B12? Omega 3s? Protein? Is a vegan diet even healthy long-term? Will I be sacrificing athletic performance in the sport I care about?

And finally, it can sound exhausting to have to read every label, remember to take the cheese off every burrito order, plan every lunch outing at work so you'll have something to eat, and suffer all the other small inconveniences required of a vegan living in an omnivorous world.

Fortunately, dealing with all those concerns doesn't have to be done all at once. You can reduce your meat consumption and experiment with vegan food while still eating grandma's chicken soup whenever you visit her. Plus, it's better for your health, the environment, and the animals.

I recommend this book to people who are interested in investigating the issue: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.

I think you would enjoy "Building Construction Illustrated" by Francis D. K. Ching. Link here. Our office has a copy of this and it does a reasonable job of explaining "conventional framing." By that I mean the kind of layout and details that contractors are familiar with, less likely to complain about, and less likely to improperly install. I think it focuses more on timber framing. We rarely spec masonry but have to deal with it with existing structures; I think CERM's chapters on masonry are a good primer on that.

​

Off the top of my head I don't know of any publicly available drawing and design calculation examples, but for low-rise structures you'll rarely see performance-based design unless it's a (well-funded) historic or institutional building. Lateral design will largely come out of ASCE 7-10, SDPWS, and TMS 402/602 and be copied into MS Excel. I've seen engineering calc packages from other firms and the visual/ functional quality is all over the place. I also saw an ASCE 7-10 wind design spreadsheet online last year if that helps. The International Residential Code (as adopted by California here) has some figures in there if you're interested in how prescriptive timber design looks. There are some figures in R602 and R606 that set the baseline for timber and masonry construction, respectively.

I don't really care about building a tower. Kilbourne Group can do whatever they want. My concern is that building the tower hinges on the city building a ramp and plaza for the tower, which goes above and beyond economic incentives given to other business development. There ought to be a level playing field for developers throughout the city of Fargo. I don't see any reason why Kilbourne Group should get special treatment.

Secondly, parking ramps tend to sit empty when there are free options on the street, even if those ramps are also free (count cars inside and outside the Island Park or City-owned ramp sometime). I know it sounds counterintuitive but there are books about this sort of thing. Unless the ramp is free, people will continue to use on street parking instead, which adds to congestion and noise. If the city wants to encourage use, and help pay for the maintenance and, ideally, other business improvement districts, they ought to add parking meters downtown and offer a ramp for less in fees or for free.

Edit: I realize that parking meters are currently illegal in ND, which is a dumb law that ought to be changed.

Also if you are interested in learning what each type of finish does and how it works, the best book you could buy is Understanding Wood Finishing.

Bob Flexner is amazing, he writes pretty much all the articles on finishing for Popular Woodworking. This book is probably the most enlightening woodworking book I have read. Prior to reading it I always found finishing to be a bit of mystery and definitely intimidating, not anymore.

I've found all of these books to be helpful. I think you mainly would find the Grid Systems book useful.

Grid Systems by Kimberly Elam is a pretty good reference for using grids and better understanding composition. It has alot of examples of works that are accompanied by transparent pages that have grids to lay over them.

Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton helped with just understanding typography better.

Designing Type by Karen Cheng is good for understanding the intricacies of type and the differences between different typefaces by using grids.

Francis Ching is the industry standard for building details and architectural drawing. His books primarily focus on contemporary building but it will give you a good understanding.

Here is a link to his bibliography

This is a great book showing construction details

Good luck!

I don’t know where the other poster pulled 3600 from, but I still agree with his main argument that parking shouldn’t be subsidized as it’s ridiculously expensive to construct and takes up too much space in our urban areas. If your interested in the topic, there’s plenty of literature on it.

The Hidden Cost of Bundled Parking - Access Magazine

“Unbundling” Parking Costs is a Top Way to Promote Transportation Options - Mobility Lab

Unbundling Parking Isn’t Easy but It’s Worth It - The Greater Margin

The High Cost of Free Parking

This sub can seem overwhelmingly anti-car because, for many, it's a place to vent.

Look at it this way: the dominant public policy in the United States for several generations, stretching back 70+ years, has been to orient nearly every transportation, land use, and development decision around the automobile.

That has resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars (probably trillions, actually) of direct and indirect subsidies promoting car ownership, free and/or cheap car storage (parking), car-oriented residential development (suburban sprawl), and on and on. This in comparison to paltry support for public transportation, dense urban development, etc. Put succinctly, cars and cities are a bad match.

Don't get me wrong: the personal automobile is amazing technology. It makes sense that people have gravitated to it. But the planners of 1940s and 50s – whose system we largely emulate today – simply couldn't (or wouldn't) predict the massive negative side effects that accompany car-oriented development.

These planners thought that cars and suburbs would mean an end to urban gridlock. Instead, they accelerate it. They thought that building highways through urban cores would revitalize them – instead, those highways decimated communities, many of which have never recovered.

In fact, the original Interstate Highways System was supposed to connect cities (great idea!), not go through them (not so great).

For those of us on this sub who follow these trends, and have found that modern research is firmly against much of the so-called benefits of cars, parking lots, and highways, it's immensely frustrating that so much of the public conversation adamantly refuses to recognize the shortcomings of car-oriented development. So yes, you get a lot of "anti-car" sentiment around here, but I think it's more fair to say that we're pro-balance, not anti-car per se.

Cars will continue to make sense for the vast majority of people for the vast majority of trips. What we want to see are more options so that you don't have to drive everywhere, all the time, which is bad for our environmental and physical health, and is economically unsustainable to boot.

As for parking lots specifically, you won't find a better resource than Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking, which is basically the Bible around here (for good reason). I imagine you don't feel like reading a whole book about parking policy (and I wouldn't blame you!), but google the phrase and you'll find plenty of articles about it that get across the main points.

I'd also encourage you to check out the Strong Towns organization, which was started by a (conservative) former traffic engineer in suburban Minnesota (i.e. not your typical member of this sub). They come at these points from a very practical, non-ideological perspective. Here's a good post to start with.

On typography:

• The Elements of Typographic Style, the Bible of Typography.
  
• Thinking with Type, a nice overview of how type works.
  
• Detail in Typography, on the finer points of type.
  
  On grids:
  
  
• Raster Systeme, by the eminent expert of the Swiss School.
  
• Making and Breaking the Grid, a modern update on the timeless grid.
  
  On colour:
  
  
• The Art of Color, a classic on color.
  
• Interaction of Color, another classic text on color (theory).
  
  On usability:
  
  
• Don't Make Me Think, a classic on web usability.
  
• The Design of Everyday Things, a general usability Urtext.
  
• Understanding Comics, a great primer from an unlikely field.
  
  On information design:
  
  
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, the master at work.
  
  On inspiration:
  
  
• How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, inspiration from the field.
  
• How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul
  
  On theory:
  
  
• What is a designer, philosophical musings, existential questions.
  
• Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field, theoretical backgrounds on the craft.
  
  On history:
  
  
• Meggs' History of Graphic Design, a canonical classic.
  
• Graphic Design: A New History, an alternative narrative.
  
  Monographs:
  
  
• From Lascaux to Brooklyn, the inimitable Paul Rand.
  
• Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design, the art of Saul Bass.
  
• Tibor Kalman, Perverse Optimist, the exceptional work of Mr Kalman.

Personally, I don't think a full repeal to all of the residential zoning is the best practice. A full repeal would likely only increase land values
(here's a good explainer as to how that can happen). I do believe they need to be loosened significantly. At the rate this city is growing, it needs to have all of the tools necessary to help increase density and banning thing such as having both an ADU and DADU on single family lots and requiring their sizes to be such that they cannot accommodate families is a bad thing. Duplexes and triplexes also should be legal in single family zones. These allowances also should be paired with strategic rezones that allow for some sort of corner market/commerce zone within a 5-10 minute walkshed of every house in SFZs in order to make it reasonable for people in SFZs to live without a car in these now densified neighborhoods.


In regards to more reading: are you looking for more reading regarding Seattle zoning law exclusively or are you looking for reading recommendations that follow an urbanist bent? For Seattle specific stuff, The Urbanist and Seattle Transit Blog post a lot regarding land use in the city. If you are looking for books that talk about general city planning the gold standard is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I personally really enjoyed Walkable City, Suburban Nation, and Happy City.

Interaction Design

• About Face 3 by Alan Cooper
  
• Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge
  
• Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell
  
• Designing for the Digital Age by Kim Goodwin
  
• Making Things Talk: (2011) (2007) by Tom Igoe
  
  Interior Design
  
  
• The Decoration of Houses by Edith Wharton and Ogden, Jr. Codman
  
• Domino: The Book of Decorating by Deborah Needleman
  
• Design*Sponge at Home: A Guide to Inspiring Homes by Grace Bonney
  
• The Vintage/Modern Home by Katherine Sorrell
  
• The Fundamentals of Interior Design by Simon Dodsworth
  
  Landscape Architecture
  
  
• Landscape Architectural Graphic Standards by Leonard J. Hopper
  
• Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
  
• Landscape Graphics by Grant W. Reid
  
• Cities for People by Jan Gehl
  
• Design with Nature by Ian L. McHarg
  
  Lighting Design
  
  
• Stage Lighting Design by Richard Pilbrow
  
• The Architecture of Natural Light by Henry Plummer
  
• Painting With Light by John Alton
  
• Made of Light by Anthony Tischhauser
  
• Color, Environment and Human Response by Frank H. Mahnke & Rudolf H. Mahnke
  
  Product Design
  
  
• Sketching: Drawing Techniques from Product Designers by Koos Eissen
  
• Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek
  
• The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
  
• Mythologies by Roland Barthes
  
• Cradle to Cradle. Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart
  
  Product Design
  
  
• In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World by John Thackara
  
• The Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore
  
• Universal Methods of Design by Bruce Hanington & Bella Martin
  
• Cradle to Cradle. Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart
  
• Mental Models by Indi Young
  
  Sound Design
  
  
• Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema by David Sonnenschein
  
• Designing Sound by Andy Farnell
  
• Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen by Michel Chion
  
• The Sound Effects Bible by Ric Viers
  
• Sound Theory Sound Practice by Rick Altman
  
  Urban Design
  
  
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
  * Cities for People by Jan Gehl
  
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
  
• The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler
  
• The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch
  
  Web Design
  
  
• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
  
• HTML & CSS: Design and Build Web Sites by Jon Duckett
  
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird
  
• Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS by Ben Frain
  
• Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke
  

• The big name in the genre is Peter Singer's [Animal Liberation] (http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Liberation-Peter-Singer/dp/0060011572). Singer has had a number of titles to follow this original, and they are all worth reading in their own right.
  
  
• Another would be Michael Polan's [Omnivore's Dilema] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History/dp/0143038583/ref=pd_sim_14_4?ie=UTF8&dpID=51QJJGnAsaL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR103%2C160_&refRID=0JY11DAZ0RT4P0PPBND5). Though not specifically about veganism, it endorses the lifestyle enough to warrant a read.
  
  
• I personally liked [Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of our Fellow Creatures] (http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Wise-Thoughts-Emotions-Creatures-ebook/dp/B00985DZQ4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1450016974&sr=1-1&keywords=animal+wise) by Virginia Morell.
  
  
  
• I haven't read it, but I've been suggested [Eating Animals] (http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer/dp/0316069884/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&dpID=51flAsKFoAL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR104%2C160_&refRID=0JY11DAZ0RT4P0PPBND5) by Jonathan Safran Foer.
  
  There are a number of books on the topic of Evolution or Evolutionary Psychology that will provide a greater understanding of how connected and similar we really are.
  
  
  Hopefully this is something to start this thread off in a positive direction.

Honestly, a good history of design book would be the route I would recommend going first.
This is one of my favorites. http://www.amazon.com/Meggs-History-Graphic-Design-Philip/dp/0471699020/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396721586&sr=1-9&keywords=history+of+design

After that I'd recommend learning your terminology as far as the different parts of letters goes. Once you have that down, moving to learning about points & picas will help a lot, especially if you want to get into designing grids and/or fonts. A lot of designers I know still don't understand those, and it gives me the edge every time.



One of my favorite books to keep around as far as reference goes is "Forms, Folds, and Sizes".
http://www.amazon.com/Forms-Folds-Sizes-Details-Designers/dp/1592530540/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396721691&sr=1-1&keywords=forms+folds+and+sizes

These two books were heavily used at my college. They're pretty useful, specifically for architectural work. They're geared towards creating your own designs, which I would encourage you to try.

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Drawing-Francis-D-Ching/dp/0471286540
http://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Francis-D-K-Ching/dp/0471752169

If you want to learn some of the more technical aspects, particularly perspective drawing, I would recommend taking a course from a local college. It can help you to start off on the right foot. Also, try doing some copy drawings of other artists work, and incorporate elements of their style that you enjoy.

I can't be THAT smart, because I can't tell for sure if your comment is sincere or you're being a smart-arse :)

I'm an architect, I know stuff, but can't possibly pretend to know everything in the field- it is vast, so you never stop learning.

There's a lot of good online resources if you just want to look at the subject of architecture/ design. Here are just a few for you to check out if you really are interested:

http://www.dezeen.com/

http://archidose.blogspot.com.au/

http://www.designboom.com/

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com.au/

http://www.ilikearchitecture.net/

http://www.lifeofanarchitect.com/

http://inhabitat.com/

http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_architecture

http://www.architizer.com/blog/history-of-modern-architecture-through-movies/



Also, Some Great Books:

http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Architecture-Critical-History-Edition/dp/0500203954

http://www.amazon.com/Towards-New-Architecture-Dover/dp/0486250237/ref=pd_sim_b_7

http://www.amazon.com/101-Things-Learned-Architecture-School/dp/0262062666/ref=pd_sim_b_5

Within Australia, budgets for design are closely linked to advertising spend. This means that economic downturns results in downturns for design and vice versa.

Growth has been pretty consistent over a long enough period of time, IBIS World indicates an annual average of 5.36% between 1995 and 2008. The total number of designers in the marketplace has definitely exceeded that rate of growth however, so yes, you are in an over saturated market. Like others have made clear however, focus on your skills and pay attention to trends and you are maximising your chances of weathering it.

The key word you used is 'professional' - you'd be surprised how many people from supposedly top quality insitutions don't conduct themselves professionally.

Have you read How to be a Graphic Designer without losing your soul?

For every dollar spent on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure you get a twenty dollar return. What that looks like is an uptick in vitality and health, less emergency rooms visits (as a result of increased cardio vascular health and the downstream impacts of being in the sun like combatting depression and increasing testosterone), less pollution and car accidents, and more people going at a slower rate actually taking in the surroundings, just to name a few positive benefits.

Funnily enough people going slower in the neighborhood (whether its urban downtown or suburbs) has an enormous impact psychologically, and that can be understood by anyone who always rides and decides to go for a walk, if that person then operates a motor vehicle less and chooses to commute via bicycle the impact is all the larger. Simply saying that you don't understand or see how it was worth it doesn't speak to the fiscal responsibility of the expenditure but the ignorance you have regarding the whole picture.

If you'd actually like to have a conversation about this I'd like for you to spend some time reading and watching a few videos.

The idea of cycling and pedestrian centric infrastructure and how it became so prevalent in modern planning.

Health and safety an abstract of a study with cycling. I'd link to dozens if I thought you'd actually read them but here is at least one that is relatively short and simple to understand.

Why prioritizing walking and cycling is important for the future of urban design and the health and wellbeing of society.

There are a great many resources if you're actually curious and wondering whether or not that strip of bike lane was worth it. If you're looking at it in terms of a single neighborhood or even just a city, that's a bit narrow, and you should maybe take that 10,000ft birds eye view of things.

• 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
  
• Learn how to bill for your value, not for your time. The value to your client of a 5 hour design is likely much higher than you realize. The clients perception of how long it would take them to execute the same design is closer to the value than how long it took you.
  

1. Initial client meeting
   
2. Schedule review meeting a week to ten days out
   
3. Do the work quickly and professionally
   
4. File the work away, work on another project
   
5. At the appointed time, no sooner, meet with the first client to review your work. Rinse and repeat.
   
6. Clients are more accepting of a higher bill because calendar time adds the perception of value - they tend to assume that they are your only client and that you spent 'ten days' on their project.
   
7. Be great to your clients, referrals are the easiest way to sell your talent and service.
   

Excellent. Thanks.

Here are the Amazon links for those books for anyone interested.

• The High Cost of Free Parking (Paper book only)
  
• Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile (Kindle and paper book)
  
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Paper book only)
  
• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Kindle and paper book)
  
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (Kindle and paper book)
  
• The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World (Kindle and paper book)
  
• $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better (Kindle and paper book)

First, I would study some basic design principles. Look at a few books on typography, grid, etc. Learn about some of the major design movements.

Check out these book:
http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Principles-Design-Revised-Updated/dp/1592535879/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299115160&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Grid-Systems-Principles-Organizing-Design/dp/1568984650/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1299115186&sr=1-7-spell

What tends to happen is most people dive into these tutorials knowing how to use the programs, but not knowing anything about design in general. Knowing how to use Photoshop doesn't necessarily mean you are a designer, like knowing how to play a few chords on a guitar doesn't necessarily make you a musician.

Web design is big now, but if you want to hop on the next gravy train, I'd suggest getting into Mobile / Tablet visual design. The demand is hot and theres not enough people who know how to do proper visual design for touch screen devices.

Oh yeah, and Lynda.com and tutsplus is good too. Learn the programs, but don't expend too much energy learning fancy lighting tricks until you've learnt the basics of design. It'll help build a foundation on which you can go from there.

Francis Ching has some good reference books for a starter: Building construction illustrated and Architecture: Form Space and Order. It might be a good idea to regularly visit sites like ArchDaily to see what contemporary architects are doing. If you want to start learning design programs, try downloading SketchUp or Rhino (both have free versions). Good luck!

I have compiled a reading list to be read in order just for this question.

I strongly believe that these books will make you better than 90% of designers out there.

Level One

Start with Thinking with Type it is a really good introduction to all things graphic design. It focuses a lot on typography and it is really basic. I

Next is Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type This book takes what you learned in Thinking with Type and allows you to develope it further in a grid based system. Its good, basic, and has exercises for you to do to play with composition.

Third on the list is Graphic Design: The New Basics It will take what you learned in Thinking with Type and Grid Systems and open them up a little. You learn about design elements other than just type like scale, rhythm and contrast. It really good, and has some projects to do.

Level 2

Now You can get into more "advanced" stuff. There are a lot of books that can go here, but Ill recommend some of my favorites. Its not as important to do this section in order.

Grid Systems in Graphic Design is the bible when it comes to grids. Its german and dry as fuck, but it is basically awesome. Its expensive, but worth every single penny.

Elements of Typographic Style Not alot about grids in here, but it tells you every insane crazy thing that typographers do when they massage text.

You can look at other designers work too. Heres a list of designers I like a lot:

Stefan Sagmeister

Paul Rand

Massimo Vignelli

James Victore

Paul Sahre

Wolfgang Weinhart

Paula Scher

Tibor Kalman

Most of these designers also have books out about their life and work.

Get a sketchbook and play around in it. Draw, collage, glue bubblegum wrappers in there. Just make it a diary of your visual life.

You could also get into Visual Theory here:
Norman Bryson has a book on still lifes that awesome
JWT Mitchell's What do pictures want is great

After this, its just a matter of making a lot of really bad shit and eventually its just a little less worse and maybe one day it might be good.

Ive got more, but that should keep you busy for a year or two.

I'm very inspired by Jane Jacobs, organic growth, and "density done right." I want to see more growth driven by the market, so long as those who are receiving the benefit are the ones paying the cost. The more choice, the better. I oppose Ward 11 communities having to subsidize growth on the outskirts of the city.

In Calgary, we see a focus on commuting people into a planned downtown core. Allowing more employment/education/housing options elsewhere enables a multitude of transportation options besides driving - if you so choose.

I upvoted you, but I want to add that I also used to make jokes to disassociate from the reality of what I was contributing to by eating meat, so one day several years ago I just stopped. It was a lot easier than I anticipated and the physical and emotional rewards of that decision have been pretty profound so I just wanted to encourage everyone who was disturbed by this picture (in the least preachy way I possibly can) to read the book "Eating Animals" and give this issue just a little more thought.

In this exact order:

1. Start with Suburban Nation by Duany, Zyberk, and Speck. It's super easy to read, totally skimmable, and has a lot of great graphics and diagrams that help explain things. It's not the deepest book out there, but it's the best place to start.
   
   
2. After that, try Geography of Nowhere by Kunstler. The author can be cranky and there are no diagrams, but he does a nice job of explaining how suburbia happened, why it made sense at the time, and why it's not so great anymore. Basically it's a primer on the key issue facing city planning today.
   
   
3. After them, you'll be ready for The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jacobs. This is the bible of urbanism, the most important and influential book written about the form of cities since the invention of the car. But it's not as accessible as the first two, so I wouldn't start here.
   
   
4. Walkable City by Speck. This is the newest of the bunch, and provides the data to back up the claims from the previous 3.
   
   
5. Image of the City by Lynch. This one is a series of case studies that will teach you how to "read" how a city functions based on its form. The examples are all woefully obsolete, which is too bad, but still teaches you an important skill.

I'm taking the pre-architecture courses now, and I've recently graduated from a computer drafting program (AutoCAD and Revit with some Sketchup).

If I was going to start over again, I'd want to know how to draw. Definitely develop good line control (through contour, blind contour, and just line drawing exercises).

Model building is another important aspect. It's all about craft and getting familiar with the materials. You may end up using other materials but foamcore and basswood are the two go to materials in my classes.

For now, and my knowledge is limited, if you're going to learn any software, I'd focus more on Photoshop, Sketchup, and Rhino.

Helpful books would be Form, Space, and Order, Design Drawing and Drawing, A Creative Process all by Francis Ching.

I'd also study art and architectural history. Having a good knowledge base of different styles would help you in your own designs.

I was a delivery driver and worked 15-20 hours per week while in undergrad. I also worked about the same amount during graduate school, which was much harder. The key is to work smart, not hard. It took me 4 years of school to realize that up to 50 percent of my time spent in studio was wasted. When you are in school for hours with getting seemingly nothing done, just go home. You will soon recognize when you will be productive and for how long. Once you reach this point, find a part time job (preferably with tips) that fills those gap times.

I would also recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/101-Things-Learned-Architecture-School/dp/0262062666

I didn't read it until I was almost done with my masters, but it contains a lot of concepts and tips that I spent years realizing on my own.

Hopefully this helps you a bit, and good luck!

Edit: I suggest a job with tips, because it will generally give you a higher hourly rate than many other part time jobs so you can work less and still support yourself.

The political and marketing influence of the car industry played a huge part, but it's as much a cultural and urban planning thing as it is industry driven. Entire cities are built around catering to people in cars... there are vast swathes of strip malls and supercenters where there aren't even sidewalks but there are huge multi-story parking garages. Cities are zoned to have most of the population separated from areas where they participate in commerce... our entire life has become decentralized and auto-focused. Public railways serve a very small niche when both endpoints are, by design, far-removed from anything you'd want to explore. By contrast, in places in Europe and Asia, you get off the train and onto the bus or subway, and the bus stop or subway station is smack dab in the middle of shopping and business, and business is much more local.

A couple interesting books on this topic are Fighting Traffic (Peter Norton), Geography of Nowhere (James Kunstler) and Asphalt Nation (Jane Holtz Kay), worth a read if you're really interested in the topic.

You might be interested to see how San Francisco addressed street parking. They installed meters that would allow for variable pricing based upon supply and demand. I think this could work in Hoboken, especially along Washington Street, to encourage more short-term parking for the street and encourage people to use garages for long term parking.

Also there's a good book called "The High Cost of Free Parking" by Donald Shoup. There's an excerpt here that people can read.

Do you know if he'll actually be drafting by hand? A lot of schools are all digital now.

As an alternative, here's a set of items I would have loved to receive as a freshman in architecture school:

https://www.amazon.com/101-Things-Learned-Architecture-School/dp/0262062666/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539622984&sr=8-1&keywords=101+things+i+learned+in+architecture+school&dpID=51ktCo7dHTL&preST=_SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Francis-D-K-Ching/dp/1118745086/ref=pd_sim_14_10?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1118745086&pd_rd_r=31750c2b-d09c-11e8-a1fa-3b320cf86cd1&pd_rd_w=uX57r&pd_rd_wg=F1H8M&pf_rd_i=desktop-dp-sims&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=18bb0b78-4200-49b9-ac91-f141d61a1780&pf_rd_r=YP0989T1CKSAE842J6N0&pf_rd_s=desktop-dp-sims&pf_rd_t=40701&psc=1&refRID=YP0989T1CKSAE842J6N0

https://www.amazon.com/Sakura-Pigma-30062-Micron-Blister/dp/B0008G8G8Y/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1539623052&sr=8-3&keywords=micron+pen+set&dpID=51bMxXKP9NL&preST=_SY300_QL70_&dpSrc=srch

and a nice sketchbook. I'm a fan of the dot grid ones. The Frank Ching books are invaluable. I wish I still had my entire collection.

What an amazing video! It's fascinating to see him think about it because he's purely speaking him mind - not worrying how what he says will be perceived by others, and how it fits in society and what not.

As someone else said, a lot of kids don't feel like they have an option, or are tricked into eating meat - and then when you're old enough to decide for yourself, it's a big thing like rejection religion - your whole family may not take it well.

It's great that she just listens to her kid and respects what he says, rather than forcing him to do things. Think kind of thinking should be nourished and sadly so often it's just shut down and the kid is told to go along with what "everyone" does.

I'd also like to plug Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Great book, and he's not preachy about it at all.

http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer/dp/0316069884/

Talk to a lawyer, then an accountant, in that order. Don't take advice about starting a business from the internet. I would also recommend getting the book How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, as it has good advice about getting started on the path you are talking about.

On a more practical note, if you are actually turning down work on a regular basis, then you are ready to get started with freelance. Otherwise you may not be able to cover your overhead. Good luck man!

This isn't guitar specific, but maybe something like this would be of interest to you: https://www.amazon.com/Harmonic-Experience-Harmony-Natural-Expression/dp/0892815604 (Though it does cover just intonation extensively, and while that's something I find very interesting, it's not really directly applicable to guitar, except as a way of understanding equal temperament.)

The music book that I wish someone would write is to take the general idea and structure of this amazing book: https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Construction-Environmental/dp/0195019199, and apply it to music instead of architecture.

I've been doing my own home maintenance and repair for about forty years, and I think these Readers Digest books -- here and here -- are very good. I've used them through multiple editions, and I bought them for my son-in-law when they bought their first house.

Some specialized topics (like gas fireplaces) receive only the most superficial treatment, but that's inevitable in books like these. One thing you'll learn is when to try something yourself and when to call someone. For instance, I've hooked up gas stoves and dryers, but when it comes to working with the gas lines themselves, I'd rather pay someone who knows what he's doing. And so far I haven't asphyxiated anyone or blown anything up.

Anyway, those are the books I've recommended to quite a few people. Good luck.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer might interest you. Almost seven years old now, but still interesting.

Maybe you would like something written by the animal rights philosopher Tom Regan. His Empty Cages are a great read, and he has written a very readable introduction to moral philosophy on ~150 pages: Animal Rights, Human Wrongs

>But it would appear that the argument is that parking needs to be priced accordingly to cost of maintained the parking structure of what-have-you.

Nope, I'm not. Never have, never will.

Parking needs to be priced at the rate that will leave enough spaces free at any given time that people seeking parking can find a space in their first try, rather than circling. Fines have to be set at a rate where people feel that the risk of the fine is great enough that they'll pay the meter. Given how high our rate of unpaid meters is in Los Angeles, our fines aren't high enough (though I think this is more about average fines... in other words, rather than increasing the dollar amount of the fine further, I think we need to increase the chance you will get a ticket, but that's another discussion.)

That article, BTW, is one of his first efforts on the subject. The book was published in 2011. Since then, there have been a lot of other articles. Municipal parking garages are definitely a piece of the puzzle (he's opposed to requiring businesses to build in their own parking, for a lot of good reasons), but they don't really interact with meter rates. Instead, they're supported by their own parking fees and in-lieu fees from businesses who get exemptions from parking requirements.

I seriously recommend Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran. It's awesome for understanding why we're doing this and how it helps. It's a look at the factory farming industry and is great if you need to debate family members who think you should start eating meat again.

You can get used copies for like $2, too! That's what I did.

Welcome! I am so happy you made this decision!!!

If you're interested, do some reading up like Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals.

Browse blogs for recipes. My favorites are Oh She Glows and Post Punk Kitchen.

Enjoy the vegan life :D

I'm a big fan of Not so Big House by Sarah Susanka. The book doesn't really contain actionable information -- it's more about presenting and promoting her thesis that we should spend our housing budgets on well designed, well built homes with smaller footprints rather than using the same budget to build a larger house with worse design or materials.

I personally think you should use an architect if you have the budget. The knowledge they can bring to the process isn't really something a layperson can replicate well. If you do want to try designing your own, A Pattern Language would be an interesting read. It can provide some useful rules of thumb regarding specific design elements that you might not otherwise consider.

Also you should familiarize yourself with passive solar building design. If you consider the concepts when developing a design and choosing a site you'll be able to leverage them for cheaper heating/cooling at little or no additional design cost. Building a well-insulated structure (a big part of passive solar design) also makes for a more comfortable home in terms of thermal regulation, noise management, air quality management, etc.

Hi, I am in school for graphic design at the moment as well. For me, the most important thing was/is taking time outside of the classroom to just work on your own projects and discover things about your own approach for your work.

One thing that really worked for me was reading about the history of graphic design. I felt as though I not only picked up on how styles developed, but it also just taught me "how to look" at the world and the visual communication that is all around us.

The book that really fascinated me and helped me understand the impact of what we do as visual communicators was this Philip Meggs' History of Graphic Design: https://www.amazon.com/Meggs-History-Graphic-Design-Philip/dp/0470168730

I go back to this book all the time as I think it's one of the most useful tools I have gained after I started doing graphic design.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life

One of my favorite books from my favorite author. Definitely a good read for anyone who wants to learn about the things you'd never think you'd want to know about. Like why forks have 4 tongs instead of 3 or 5 and why we have such an abiding attachment to salt and pepper instead of cinnamon and cardamom.

Would also maybe throw on "At Home" by Bill Bryson it's not too relevant, but it's a fun history of western houses and can help inspire with Scenic design.

Sometimes it's good to provide info and let people come to their own conclusions. If you're interested in how parking policy shapes land-use, affordability and opportunity in cities here's a great read. I can lend you my copy if you like. https://www.amazon.ca/High-Cost-Free-Parking/dp/193236496X

The first class I ever took was a mechanical drafting course in high school. We learned the fundamentals of drafting: orthographic projection, how to dimension a drawing, intro to CAD, etc. I still use those skills every day. So that's where I'd start on the - 'how architects communicate their ideas to clients, contractors, and engineers.'

Another aspect of architecture is learning how buildings get built. For this I'd recommend a book like Building Construction Illustrated. It's got a lot of info that will seem intense at first, but will become common knowledge if you go into the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) field. One way to get the most out of a book like this is to read a section of it and look up all the terms you don't understand or that interest you. You'll go down rabbit holes that never end. A lot of the knowledge in the construction industry is held by manufacturers and their trade groups. They publish reports, white papers, do testing, etc. on how to use their products. I reference this material constantly and I learn stuff every day.

There's also architectural history; fundamentals of design; sustainable design; structural, mechanical, civil engineering; there's a whole area of legal expertise surrounding architecture; current software being used (Revit, Rhino, Sketchup, AutoCAD, Grasshopper...); etc. If any of these topics interest you let me know and I'll point you towards some sources.

There is no such thing as free parking. It cost money to build and maintain parking spaces, and that cost typically gets past on through the resident via either rent or purchase price. You pay for the premium weather you want to or not, but by requiring parking by law, you force others to pay for the premium as well.

If you're interested, I would recommend The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup

the below is a bit disjointed and more like a ELI10, but based on real life ppl I know:

Paying a lot more than you needed to for something is always a bad idea, whatever its for (unless helping a friend with some new business, like buying overpriced breakfast at their new cafe).

Too many ppl think that if you bought a house to live in it doesn't matter what you paid for it since 30yrs later it should be worth more anyways. From a non-Australian perspective, this is sheer madness, and for me a great illustration of how masses of ppl just buy into bad ideas.

A real, concrete, very hard to deal with issue with overpaying for housing is that lots of ppl did so at the extreme utter super duper maximum of what they could conceivably afford if everything went well. But many signs point to that everything might not go swimmingly, from global events (US/China tariffs, climate change) to local things - an Australian recession triggered by one of the many ongoing factors, like a government unable to implement decent policies, slowing construction, slowing demand for Australian exports, yada yada.

there are real life ppl who have committed to humongous mortgages in Australia in the last 2-3 yrs which are already underwater - this means they can't sell their house if they are struggling with payments, or they bought the wrong thing, or they realised (too late) that they don't like having to pay half their income to the bank, and the associated pressures of needed to stay in that high paying job with no option of ever switching to other things they always wanted to do.

To some extent, this is a firstworldproblem, I mean they have their cake (a nice job) and the icing (a nice house) but its still stressful and lowers quality of life for ppl who are otherwise seemingly doing quite well. I'd argue that debt is a huge mental burden for a significant amount of the people holding overpriced mortgages, and there isn't enough discussion in this country about it.

Besides the personal stuff, there are a lot of big picture society level implications of high housing pricing - see Death and Life of Great American Cities for a nice intro discussion on how housing effects ppl living there.

The other thing which has been ongoing in Australia for many years now is that the very fabric of Australia is changing - I don't know of many older Aussies whose kids stay anywhere close to them - except in a few cases where the bank of mum and dad essentially bought the house or rented one of their IP's for cheap to their kids. This doesn't seem very healthy to me.

Its not good for society to form communities based mostly on income. You end up with communities which are very stratified by income and family wealth, and some books argue quite convincingly that this really makes it hard for real close knit communities to form.

In this sub many ppl blame ppl for overpaying for houses but most ppl just do what society, banks, governments, newspapers, everyone is telling them to do - to take out a max loan, put in a little bit more, then buy a house.

Leaving aside the bottom 25% or so and looking at how the middle class to upper ppl live in well off countries, like Europe and USA, nobody (hyperbole but still) has anywhere close to the debt ratio that so many Australians have. Australia has been a "lucky country" in many respects but that doesn't give Australia a magic exemption from debt.

From what you wrote in your post, it seems that you are interested in the actual nitty gritty relating to graphics. For that, Game Engine Architecture is a much more suitable book compared to Game Coding Complete. However, if you are really interested in graphics and stuff like DirectX, I'd highly recommend getting a book like Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 11: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-3D-Game-Programming-DirectX/dp/1936420228

I personally read the DirectX 12 book, but for newbies to graphics programming, DirectX 11 is much much easier to grasp. There are similar books for OpenGL, but imo you'd be better off learning DirectX 11 because it's a lot more modern.

> However, do you think my idea of left-right-left layout is aesthetic or at least interesting?

Sure! You can get weird with type layout, but that’s a solid choice. This page has a few more examples.

> Do you suggest googling "horror/scary fonts" and experimenting?

No. Baskerville is a classy, timeless font. If you try to convey “spooky” with a typeface, it’ll probably come across as corny/miserable reading. Keep Baskerville, but convey spooky with colors and possibly texture that don’t affect the reading experience. You could also try getting weird with text animations.

> I love those typography hacks! Do you have more?

A quick 10-minute read has a few more tips: Typography in 10 minutes. Beyond that, it’s probably time to buy a book on typography like this or this. Sadly, there just aren’t any online resources or articles that match the quality of old-fashioned printed material when it comes to type layout.

The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. I'm a fan of time-travel, and history, and I was completely sucked into it. She's got a number of books in the same universe- some comedic, some very dramatic, but The Doomsday Book is my favourite.

If you're at all interested in high fantasy, I'd recommend either Tigana or The Fionovar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay. You either love his prose style or hate it, but if you love it, it will definitely take you away.

If you like SF and haven't read them, I'd try either Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos, or David Brin's Uplift Series (I'd skip Sundiver until later, and start with Startide Rising.)

If you're looking for more light-hearted/quirky, I'd try Christopher Moore- either Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal , or The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror. If you're into a mix of horror/sf/comedy, try John Dies at the End. They're not deep, but they're fun.

Non-fiction- if you haven't read it yet, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air is very difficult to put down. If you're travelling with someone who doesn't mind you looking up every few pages and saying "did you know this, this is awesome, wow-how interesting", I'd go for Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants or Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life. They're all very informative, fun, interesting books, but they're even better if you can share them while you're reading them.

Look for Beginner OpenGL or DirectX11 tutorials, Follow them to a t, work from there.

I learned a little GL from some random tutorials and then by watching this series.

I first jumped into Graphics and got a real understanding of what was happeneing form this book Learning from a book is a really good idea, Video tutorials can have a number of bad practices.

Once you understand the basics then ask questions about Ambient Oclusion, LightMaps, Cubemaps, Reflection.... all maps, baking(map thing) and other stuff. I would say knowing C++ is a good idea however you can do this stuff in C# and Java as well asa number of other languages. Also, have a look at Makin Stuff Look Good In Unity to get a good intro to shaders without having to write a renderer from scratch.

I am currently reading this book and am loving it so far.

Understanding Wood Finishing - Bob Flexner

I also found a pretty sweet source for furniture related books on amazon as well. Search this persons used books. I ordered about 6 books from them the other night.

> Sacramentans don't have a huge history of dealing with limited parking

In general, parking, especially free parking, in cities is seen as a something that is extremely harmful to the City success. So a lot of us can get pretty defensive about it because of the way that too much parking hurt Sacramento's development. UCLA Professor Donald Shoup has a good book on the idea.

Along with improving non-auto infrastructure, we will have to adapt to non-auto modes. It will take time, but will make Sacramento a much more prosperous City, and a better place to live.

The internet is a very good place to go for people who are very worried about what other people believe. It's not so good at changing anyone's behavior, since you can't observe others' behavior through a computer. But you sure can tell people they are wrong and demand that they agree.

That means that the vegans you're encountering online aren't representative of all vegans. They're just the vegans who are very worried about what they and other people believe. By definition, that's not going to be a very humble subset of vegans.

Most vegans change other people's minds far away from the internet. They do it by simply purchasing, preparing, and eating vegan food, and when asked why they eat that way, explaining their position simply and without judgement.

> I also can't mention to anyone I know that I'm eating vegan because of the obvious social consequences.

I don't know if that's true. I don't think many people experience social consequences for their diet alone. Here's what I do if I don't want to talk about my reasons for being vegetarian, but someone asks me. I say, "Oh, you know--the usual reasons." If they press, I say, "Animal rights, environmental impact, that kind of thing." And I always go out of my way to explain that I "just ate less meat" for a while before becoming a full vegetarian. And also make sure I compliment others' omnivorous meals so people know I'm not judging anything as personal as their diet.

There's a wonderful book called Eating Animals whose author, I think, takes a very reasonable and humble approach to the ethics of eating meat.

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Do-It-Yourself-Manual-Completely-Revised/dp/0762105798/ref=pd_sim_b_1
A book like this is a great starting point. it will give you a good idea of what you would be getting into before you start a project. I would suggest a book like this then if you decided you wanted tile a bathroom get book specific for laying tile, then look at videos on you tube and try and learn as much as you can. this next part is important, just go for it. decide what you want to do and do it. best way to learn things is to actually do them.

1: more intended as commentary attacking the underlying comment’s sense of “this is my neighborhood because I’m Dutch and so were the people there hundreds of years ago”. Everyone is welcome, but that attitude is kind of nativist and off putting in addition to entitled.

2: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X - The people in the community make it great again which makes it attractive for gentrification.

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

I've probably read this book half a dozen times. A great summary of the problems with our car-centric built environment and how they came to be. Urban Planing and Development is a dry subject, but JHK has a good sense of humor in his writing and the book is an easy read.


( http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-Landscape/dp/0671888250/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373057700&sr=1-1 - amazon link)

I love Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.

As for cookbooks, this cookbook.

If you have an ice cream maker/plenty of free time, I love this for vegan ice cream

There aren't really any places where lots could be built for cities. The best solution is to keep them off the roads and put them underneath the hospital buildings, even though that'll cost even more money to build.

In any case parking isn't a thing the city should be encouraging. This book makes a great case, but building parking is really expensive and already massively subsidized. It also encourages people to drive, and surface parking isn't just a blight on urban areas (inhospitable for people), but contributes significant to Urban Heat Island Effect).

Yes!!! I read about this in Jeff Speck's "Walkable City," and it instantly turned me into the kind of person who spouts off lectures about the importance of trees in cities whenever it comes up in conversation. I'd always been in favor of them, because they're beautiful and they provide shade and create and environment that's generally pleasant to be in, but there are SO MANY more tangible, measurable benefits. It's beyond frustrating to me that it's not prioritized more.

EDIT: For those interested, Jeff Speck's TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_the_walkable_city

I know you're young and early in your career as a designer, but please, please, PLEASE don't create logos for $35. That tiny amount of money wouldn't even cover an hour of research, let alone the hours, days, and weeks it should take to create a proper brand.

Don't undersell yourself, and certainly don't undersell the work of other designers. If you're interested in pursuing a career as a designer, read this, get this, and keep up the good work.

Sure. I'm an architect and when we get inquiries or RFPs the first thing we do is look at parking. I've worked on several large housing projects where the cost of underground parking has limited the size of the project because it stopped penciling out. Large complexes continue because demand is still high, but the cost is passed on directly to the tenant, which is why people complain that all new housing is expensive. Or maybe the developer wants a rooftop restaurant - those require 1 spot per 100 sf - that's huge!

In my experience, most planners agree that the market should dictate how much parking developers supply (see Donald Shoup) - if the developer doesn't think she can attract tenants without providing parking, then she's free to build as much as she wants, but others are free to try their hands renting units without a spot. I get it, parking in my neighborhood sucks too. There's an empty lot down the street from me; let's pretend I had enough money to buy it and pay the taxes on it (lol). It's a typical 50x100 RD1.5 lot, so take 5' off either side, 15' off the back and 15' off the front, leaving me with 2800sf buildable, which is a nice triplex, maybe two one-beds and a two-bed. But to do that I'd need at least five parking spaces... that eats into my ground floor space and net rentable area, pushes the project up on stilts, increases the amount of steel you need, or pushes the parking underground, adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to construction costs... it very quickly becomes not worth it.

I really love the book At Home by Bill Bryson and that’s basically all digressions...so when I read there were tons of digressions about the Paris sewer system, argot, the battle of Waterloo and so on, I said to myself, “this sounds like a beautiful literary marriage of my favorite things! Sign me up!”

I was in a similar boat. I'm still not quite 'good' at design but I'm making progress.
Check out this https://medium.com/@karenxcheng/how-to-get-a-job-as-a-designer-without-going-to-design-school-bad8cdb67068

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956

This is assuming that you know HTML + CSS. If not, learn those too. This is a pretty useful guide for writing CSS https://smacss.com/

A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building



The Designer Eye


How Buildings Learn


Thermal Delight In Architecture


These last ones may not exactly be what you are looking for but they go into the architectural aspects of specific types of architecture, japanese, malaysia and so I think are pretty interesting in that they show how specific types of houses work.

The Malay House


Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings


A Place of My Own

For Christmas last year my partner bought me 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School.

She was worried that the title was a little condescending, but I'd actually already been considering getting it for myself anyway. It's cute and fun, yet it still has useful tips and information.

BENDER 63.4% 1st CHOICE

It was kind of worrying to see all of the Saralyn Romanishan signs in front of mansions in the Wedge. I'm glad the bulk of the ward stayed sane, and I hope Bender now realizes that the NIMBY vote is a lost cause, even if you court them by downzoning the neighborhood interior.

Congrats to /u/CMAndrewJohnson for winning 87% of the first choice votes in his ward.

Edit: Looks like the socialist might win in ward 3. Someone please send her a copy of Walkable City by Jeff Speck (or at least his TED talk).

Not OP but you should totally read Robert Caro's The Power Broker. It's a ~1,500 page tome but it's a fantastic breakdown of the history of Moses specifically, and Jacobs as well.

Then follow it up with Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities for the counter argument. After that you can decide if you want to get into City Planning as a career. Lots of politics unfortunately...

Off the top of my head here are some interesting books I've read (or reread) lately that I think you might enjoy and fall nicely into the young-adult-expanding-their-mind category.

The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women by Jessica Valenti

Really interesting look at what the implications of the American obsession with virginity/purity are.

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The Communist Manifesto (edited/annotated by Phil Gasper)

Everybody should read the Communist Manifesto. It's too big of a part of history (and of America's history of opposition to communism) to not read. Gasper's heavy annotations make this an absolutely top-notch edition to read.

---

At Home by Bill Bryson

Really enjoyable overview of the history of domestic life and it's myriad of quirks and traditions.

---

Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old by Joseph Allen

Very interesting look at the current trend in America of lengthening adolescence and how our extension of what we consider adolescence well into the 20s is harming young adults.

I recommend reading 'At Home' by Bill Bryson. He goes through this in detail.
From what I recall, houses used to be just one big room, animals, people, servants all in the one place. Over the centuries, people got bette at building walls, so they built these buildings higher - this showed your wealth and was much less smokey. As there was all that extra room above head height, primitive first-floors came about, pretty much just elevated sleeping areas for the main family in the home. That's when people began sleeping upstairs, hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
Kitchens were at the back of the house so that visitors didn't need to see them. Dining rooms were adjacent to kitchens for ease of service.

I didn't include dates here as I'm sleepy can't can't remember, but the book is a great read http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0767919394

Actually, many transit agencies do charge pass holders for parking. Just like hospitals do.

If you want to learn more about why that's a good thing, feel free to read The High Cost of Free Parking

This is not a new problem to solve.

https://www.amazon.ca/High-Cost-Free-Parking/dp/193236496X

I'd like to see Tesla move to a dynamic pricing model that takes occupancy into consideration in real time. The pricing model should optimize for a certain vacancy of stalls at any time, say 10-20%.

Using pricing projections, you could set your trip planner to optimize on shortest trip time or lowest cost.

The Art of Game Design - Jesse Schell is very very good.

Game AI (Millington and Funge new edition iirc) is very very good.

Some non-game-design books that are very useful for those doing game design:

Scott McLoud: Making Comics (the other two in the series are good but the section on plot, characterization, and development in this one is great)

Donald Norman: The Design of Everyday Things. (How design works and how people interact with technology and...)

Christopher Alexander et al A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, and Construction (Thinking about scale and design elements and modularity and...)

Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City (How do urban spaces work - essential if your game is set in a city - how do people actually navigate)

Polti: The 36 Dramatic Situations (old, quirky, examines how there are really only a few human plots)

Matt Frederick: 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (how to think about and execute simple art, improve your design sense, ...)

A good wikipedia page on the square-cube law to start digging for various sources. It's such a solid part of maths and materials that most papers on it are probably filled with 'thou art' and so forth.

Again a wikipedia page, this time on fracture mechanics and, specifically the 'griffiths crack length'. This stuff was worked out after WW1 boats started splitting in half unexpectedly due to square portholes and access hatches rather than ones with rounded edges. This subject is so demonstrated we cover it in first-year engineering at uni.

A great pair of books on the subject that are both very informative AND fun to read rather than just dry academia are Structures; or why things don't fall down and The new science of strong materials; or why we don't fall through the flaw. I know those links are for amazon but hopefully you can find a copy in a library or something.

Portland (and Oregon as a whole) has a long history of nativism and resentment of outsiders.

Really

Long

Honestly, I'm glad I left after college. I've seen more of the country, I know about what other towns are going through. Most cities would KILL to be in the position Portland is in. Portlanders: you should be welcoming all these smart, ambitious people with open arms. You should applaud when 1 of the 500,000 bungalows in SE gets torn down to make room for more dense housing. You should tell NIMBYs who try to shut down apartment construction in transit corridors to shove it.

It really saddens me to see so many people from my homeland throw away the enormous potential their city has because they want a relatively larger slice of the pie. Please, everyone, get over your aversion to immigrants and high density housing. Portland has a once-in-a-century opportunity to transform itself in to a Great American City. And we have the resources to do it. Now we just need the grit.

My main reason for going vegetarian was that I was appalled by the conditions today's farm animals endure in order to become food as I learned more and more about them. If you'd like a good primer on that topic, I'd wholeheartedly recommend Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals; it's incredibly well written and goes into good depth on factory farm conditions as well as other topics related to animal agriculture.

And if it feels like too much to switch entirely all at once, you're allowed to do it in steps. Some people can cut it out all at once, but some need more time, and that's totally okay; your goal should be to transition in a way that will help you stick with it for the long term.

If you're really serious about getting into 3D-programming with DirectX I recommend getting a good book. A quick search on Amazon will get you the most common ones.
As for online resources my favorite is braynzarsoft.

EDIT:
My favorite books on DirectX:

Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 11

Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11

Real-Time Rendering

Malcolm Gladwell or Bill Bryson spring to mind. Entertaining, engaging and light hearted, yet still packed with good content.

If you were looking for fiction recommendations, have you thought of short stories? Gabriel Garcia Marquez has quite a collection - I'd recommend Strange Pilgrims.

Edit: Added links.

I'm almost finished with the book, and boy, it's great.

While we're making book suggestions, I also highly highly recommend picking up a copy of Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. It's important to remember, when delving into design, that it's not just about making things pretty - you need to make them functional, too.

Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language isn't just the best book on architecture I've ever read, but one of the best books I've read on any subject. It talks about architecture on both its highest and most basic levels—from the design of cities to the location of window seats—and it's remarkably wise, lucid, and insightful. It reflects a very particular philosophy of architecture and urban planning, but it influenced my views on countless topics, and I think about it almost every day.

Not along the lines of Electrical but I think Structures: Or why things don't fall down by JE Gordon is without a doubt the best book I've ever read on the Materials side of engineering. Technical in nature but so well written it reads like a novel. Written in the 60's but still just as relevant today. Got a recommendation by Bill Gates. Elon Musk read it when he wanted to understand more about materials science and loved it. Should be required reading for all freshman

Meggs' History of Graphic Design details the evolution of visual communication through the ages, starting with the birth of written language. An understanding and knowledge of the eras of graphic design and the forces/politics/people/movements that shaped it is a valuable asset. This makes a great reference book as well.

edit: typo

The source for that stat appears to be this book . It sounds interesting but it's a bit pricey for something I'm only mildly curious about. Looks like Houston Public Library doesn't have it but there's a copy in the UH architecture library if anyone's interested.

A great book on the subject [The High Cost Of Free Parking] ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/193236496X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_tQ5czbK5B2K1P) shows how parking requirements in development make us all blindly legally subsidize a high-pollution way of life (to the tune of $127B in 2002 dollars) rather than allowing a market to determine the true costs of parking. It's required reading for Urban Designers.

Frank Ching's Architecture: Form, Space & Order is a good primer for architectural principles. It might be a little mature for an 11 year old, but it's got a lot of interesting drawings that explain design concepts.

EDIT: it's a bit old: the back cover on the "Look Inside!" preview says "Now with a CD-ROM", haha

Some books to help with that, depending on what you need.

Architecture Reference - A good introduction that also goes into specifics.

Building Construction Illustrated - A broad overview of most parts of putting a building together (technical).

The Function of Ornament - A more theoretical view of architecture in a modern cultural context; you might find it interesting in regards to your job as a social scientist (not cheap, though).

Hope this helps!

The New Science of Strong Materials or Why You Don't Fall through the Floor
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Materials-through-Princeton-Library/dp/0691125481

Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

http://www.amazon.com/Structures-Things-Dont-Fall-Down/dp/0306812835/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_y

Great real world overview of lots of mechanical engineering concepts like stress/strain, how I beams work, how cracks form etc.
Not too theory/equation heavy, very well written. 1960s Era but still pretty relevant.