Thinking with type gives you an in-depth view into what are the roots of modern typesetting. At first I was pretty amazed in finding out that Italy (which also happens to be the country where I am from) gave a strong contribution to type design during Renaissance. However my purpose of reading wasn't about history. It was about going less random when having to choose a font from a set for a presentation or a website. At least having in mind what are the basic rules to follow when mixing type and setting paragraphs. This is what the second and third part of the book deal with and I would say that the book helped me to get acquainted with that altought much of the experience comes with practice and further reading.

For what concerns the book about color the main reasons for reading it were that I wanted to know what color fit well together and even though I am at 75% of the book I would say that I am still not 100% satisfied with the book because it lacks a bit of exercises for the reader. So far I particularly appreciate the highlights at the end of each chapter and the part of the book dedicated to light

Since Illustrator is a great playground for color and type I thought to give it a try. As it appears a bit complicated at first sight I decided to If you already have some web design technical background this book flows very fast and I would recommend it together with vector tuts for getting your hands on illustrator in a fast way.

I have been eating a lot of information since I got online. I have 1000+ RSS feeds, 1000+ facebook pages and 500+ followed people on twitter, 1000+ subscription to newsletter which crowd my inbox. But what is really important to me? The Information Diet gives a framework for healthy information consumption by comparing information consumption to food consumption. The gist is that you should consume more information from the source and less from re-posting content factories which chase the synonyms just to get better SEO ranking. What I particularly didn't like about the book is that the author has been writing too much about American politics as an example. As a non-american I would have preferred more international topics. But I must admit that politics is a good example to get concept like self reinforcement of your own truth across.

In Gamification by Design I got some best practices for design patterns that make websites more stimulating for the user to participate. The best concept I got were: walk the user throught all the steps from beginner to master, useful stuff to do this are leaderboards and badges. The book however is a bit of advertisement for ruby on rails and badgeville.

Last but not least Enterprise Games: Using Game Mechanics to Build a Better Business has a lot of concepts which are probably already known to a web designer but not to a manager in a manufacturing enterprise but is still a good way to get started with gamification for people who don't have an extensive experience with online tools.

Hope you will find my comments useful. I'm now thinking of editing the post....