Great Graphic Design in Half the Time

Great Graphic Design in Half the Time

Author: Stephen Beale

Publisher: Herbert Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781408154984

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This is the definitive one-stop technical answer shop for graphic designers at all levels, whether just starting out or with years of experience. It combines best-practice methods with common and lesser-known shortcuts all designed to help find those precious extra minutes when working to a deadline. Screengrabs, diagrams, icons, and color coding all enable quick and easy navigation through the book, so that these crucial time saving tips are always at your fingertips.Knowing exactly where to find things saves any designer precious hours, too often spent scrolling through menu bars and palettes. The book begins with keyboard shortcuts, widgets, and batch actions that are guaranteed to spare a few seconds each time they're used. The next section moves on to outline the quickest ways to navigate software, desktops, and scripts and plugins, all of which will save about a minute each. The third section shows the reader how customized settings that suit their particular working practices can save anything from a few minutes to an hour of a design process. Also included here are a host of online resources for matching and identifying colors, fonts, and print specs, ideal answers to save a designer valuable time spent in online searches for the most authoritative advice. The final section of this book provides a range of best-practice advice such as setting up style-sheets, files, and print presets, all of which can save designers hours, if not days otherwise spent cleaning up files before they go to print.


The Art of Gathering

The Art of Gathering

Author: Priya Parker

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1594634939

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"Hosts of all kinds, this is a must-read!" --Chris Anderson, owner and curator of TED From the host of the New York Times podcast Together Apart, an exciting new approach to how we gather that will transform the ways we spend our time together—at home, at work, in our communities, and beyond. In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker argues that the gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive--which they don't have to be. We rely too much on routine and the conventions of gatherings when we should focus on distinctiveness and the people involved. At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play. Drawing on her expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn't, and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings--conferences, meetings, a courtroom, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp--and explains how simple, specific changes can invigorate any group experience. The result is a book that's both journey and guide, full of exciting ideas with real-world applications. The Art of Gathering will forever alter the way you look at your next meeting, industry conference, dinner party, and backyard barbecue--and how you host and attend them.


Refactoring

Refactoring

Author: Martin Fowler

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 0201485672

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Refactoring is gaining momentum amongst the object oriented programming community. It can transform the internal dynamics of applications and has the capacity to transform bad code into good code. This book offers an introduction to refactoring.


Scrum

Scrum

Author: Jeff Sutherland

Publisher: Crown Currency

Published: 2014-09-30

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0385346468

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The revolutionary “Red Book” that helped a generation work smarter, better, and faster—now expanded and updated with new stories, new ideas, and new methods to radically improve the way you and your company deliver results If you’ve ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, the Scrum framework is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains in workflow of as much as 1,200 percent have been recorded, and there’s no more lucid—or compelling—explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland. The thorny problem that Sutherland began tackling back then boils down to this: People are spectacularly bad at doing things with agility and efficiency. Best-laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross-purposes to one another. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars. Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and Sutherland’s experience as a West Point–educated fighter pilot, a biometrics expert, a medical researcher, an early innovator of ATM technology, and a C-level executive at eleven different technology companies, this book will take you to Scrum’s front lines, where Sutherland’s system has brought the FBI into the twenty-first century, helped support John Deere’s supply chain amid a global pandemic and supply chain shortage, reduced poverty in the Third World, and even planned weddings and accomplished weekend chores. The way we work has changed dramatically since Sutherland first introduced Scrum a decade ago. This urgent update shares new insights and provides new tools to take advantage of the radical productivity that Scrum delivers. Sutherland will show you how to optimize working with artificial intelligence and share the latest cognitive science research on culture, psychological safety, diversity, and happiness, and how these factors drive performance, innovation, and overall organizational health. This new edition contains a decade of lessons learned. Whether it’s ten years ago, now, or ten years into the future, the Scrum framework is guaranteed to help you deliver results. But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable.


The Elements of Choice

The Elements of Choice

Author: Eric J. Johnson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0593084438

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A leader in decision-making research reveals how choices are designed—and why it’s so important to understand their inner workings Every time we make a choice, our minds go through an elaborate process most of us never even notice. We’re influenced by subtle aspects of the way the choice is presented that often make the difference between a good decision and a bad one. How do we overcome the common faults in our decision-making and enable better choices in any situation? The answer lies in more conscious and intentional decision design. Going well beyond the familiar concepts of nudges and defaults, The Elements of Choice offers a comprehensive, systematic guide to creating effective choice architectures, the environments in which we make decisions. The designers of decisions need to consider all the elements involved in presenting a choice: how many options to offer, how to present those options, how to account for our natural cognitive shortcuts, and much more. These levers are unappreciated and we’re often unaware of just how much they influence our reasoning every day. Eric J. Johnson is the lead researcher behind some of the most well-known and cited research on decision-making. He draws on his original studies and extensive work in business and public policy and synthesizes the latest research in the field to reveal how the structure of choices affects outcomes. We are all choice architects, for ourselves and for others. Whether you’re helping students choose the right school, helping patients pick the best health insurance plan, or deciding how to invest for your own retirement, this book provides the tools you need to guide anyone to the decision that’s right for them.


The Three and a Half Minute Transaction

The Three and a Half Minute Transaction

Author: Mitu Gulati

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0226924386

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"Boilerplate language in contracts tends to stick around long after its origins and purpose have been forgotten. Usually there are no serious repercussions, but sometimes it can cause unexpected problems. Such was the case with the obscure pari passu clause in cross-border sovereign debt contracts, when a Belgian court's novel judicial interpretation in Elliott Associates v. Peru rattled international finance by forcing a defaulting sovereign - for one of the first times in the market's centuries-long history - to repay its foreign creditors despite their refusal to enter into a restructuring agreement. Though neither party wanted this outcome, the vast majority of contracts subsequently issued demonstrate virtually no attempt to clarify the imprecise language of the clause. Using this case as a launching pad to explore the broader issue of 'stickiness' of contract boilerplate, Mitu Gulati and Robert E. Scott have sifted through more than one thousand sovereign debt contracts - dating back to the nineteenth century - and interviewed hundreds of practitioners to show that the problem actually lies in the nature of the modern corporate law firm. The financial pressure on large firms to maintain a high volume of transactions contributes to an array of problems that deter innovation and that are largely hidden from the individual lawyer tasked with drafting contracts. With the near certainty of massive sovereign debt structuring in Europe, The Three and a Half Minute Transaction speaks to critical issues facing the industry and has broader implications for contract design that will ensure it remains relevant to our understanding of legal practice long after the debt crisis has subsided"--Unedited summary from book jacket.


Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Author: Michael Feathers

Publisher: Prentice Hall Professional

Published: 2004-09-22

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0132931753

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Get more out of your legacy systems: more performance, functionality, reliability, and manageability Is your code easy to change? Can you get nearly instantaneous feedback when you do change it? Do you understand it? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you have legacy code, and it is draining time and money away from your development efforts. In this book, Michael Feathers offers start-to-finish strategies for working more effectively with large, untested legacy code bases. This book draws on material Michael created for his renowned Object Mentor seminars: techniques Michael has used in mentoring to help hundreds of developers, technical managers, and testers bring their legacy systems under control. The topics covered include Understanding the mechanics of software change: adding features, fixing bugs, improving design, optimizing performance Getting legacy code into a test harness Writing tests that protect you against introducing new problems Techniques that can be used with any language or platform—with examples in Java, C++, C, and C# Accurately identifying where code changes need to be made Coping with legacy systems that aren't object-oriented Handling applications that don't seem to have any structure This book also includes a catalog of twenty-four dependency-breaking techniques that help you work with program elements in isolation and make safer changes.


Rework

Rework

Author: Jason Fried

Publisher: Crown Currency

Published: 2010-03-09

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0307463761

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Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don't need to be a workaholic. You don't need to staff up. You don't need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don't even need an office. Those are all just excuses. What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You'll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you. With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of "downsizing," and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.