Summer Reading
- When? 6.17.12 @ 12:58pm
- Where? The Coffee Grinder directions
- Type? Local Chapter Event
- Cost? Free to Attend (You'll be responsible for buying the books)
It’s time to catch up on those books you’ve been meaning to read!
Summer time while growing up was traditionally a chance to kick back and take a break from the grind known as school. Not too many of us still have the luxury of a summer vacation anymore, but at least we’ve still got the summer season to take advantage of some of our favorite leisure activities.
This Summer, for the first time, AIGA Jacksonville invites you to join us in this five week, casual book-club-inspired event, starting Sunday June 17th. For the first two weeks, we’ll be reading and discussing Debbie Millman’s Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits broken down into two halves. The following three sessions, we’ll be reading and discussing Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works.
Week 1 / 5
Join us for our first Sunday meet up to mix with other design readers, get to know each other a little bit, and have a discussion on the first half of interviews from Debbie Millman’s Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits over coffee and/or wine.
(We will be discussing the first 11 interviews, from Wally Olins to Joe Duffy’s. While reading prior to the meet up, highlight or mark your favorite lines, ideas, and insights to add to the discussion!)
The Fine Print
You’ll be responsible for purchasing the books (hard copy or digital). This is an event for Associate or Professional level members (Sorry, no students for this one!)
Inquiry
Please send an inquiry email to: if you’re interested in joining us, or have questions about this small group reading and discussion-based event. You can join in at any point during the five weekly sessions.
The Five Week Meeting Schedule
BOOK ONE: Sunday, June 17th / Sunday, June 24th
BOOK TWO: Sunday, July 1st / Sunday, July 8th / Sunday, July 15th
The Books
About Book One
Insights and provocations from world-renowned brand consultants, thought leaders, designers, and strategists.
We are now living in a world with over one hundred brands of bottled water. The United States alone is home to over 45,000 shopping malls. And there are more than 19 million customized beverage choices a barista can whip up at your local Starbucks. Whether it’s good or bad, the real question is why we behave this way in the first place. Why do we telegraph our affiliations or our beliefs with symbols, signs, and codes?
Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits contains twenty interviews with the world’s leading designers and thinkers in branding. The interviews contain spirited views on how and why humans have branded the world around us, and the ideas, inventions, and insight inherent in the search.
About the Author
Debbie Millman has worked in the design business for over 25 years. She is President of the design division at Sterling Brands. She has been there for 16 years and in that time she has worked on the redesign of over 200 global brands.
Debbie is President Emeritus of the AIGA, the largest professional association for design. She is a contributing editor at Print Magazine, a design writer at FastCompany.com and Chair of the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2005, she began hosting the first weekly radio talk show about design on the Internet. The show is titled “Design Matters with Debbie Millman” and it is now featured on DesignObserver.com.
In addition to “Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits,” Debbie is the author of “Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design,” (HOW Books, 2009, “How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer” (Allworth Press, 2007) and “The Essential Principles of Graphic Design” (Rotovision, 2008). In 2008 and 2009, Debbie was nominated for a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award.
About Book Two
Did you know that the most creative companies have centralized bathrooms? That brainstorming meetings are a terrible idea? That the color blue can help you double your creative output?
From the bestselling author of How We Decide comes a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity. Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative “types,” Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single “gift” possessed by the lucky few. It’s a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively. Lehrer reveals the importance of embracing the rut, thinking like a child, and daydreaming productively, then he takes us out of our own heads to show how we can make our neighborhoods more vibrant, our companies more productive, and our schools more effective. We’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing habits and the drug addiction of poets. We’ll meet a bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented an entirely new surfing move. We’ll see why Elizabethan England experienced a creative explosion, and how Pixar designed its office space to get the most out of its talent. Collapsing the layers separating the neuron from the finished symphony, Imagine reveals the deep inventiveness of the human mind, and its essential role in our increasingly complex world.
About the Author
Jonah Lehrer a Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide, Proust Was a Neuroscientist and Imagine. I’m also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and Radiolab and write the “Head Case” column for The Wall Street Journal.
