The Missing Masterpiece

About five years ago, I was thumbing through my local Chapters bookstore shelves and picked up a copy of Driving Ambition by Doug Nye which documented the design and birth of the Mclaren F1. An amazing book, it contained design sketches, notes and drawings from Gordon Murray – the car’s designer, along with beautiful photography. The story of the car’s design along with the sketches and handwritten notes elevated this book significantly above any other I have read before or since. It was brand new and priced at an amazingly low $40.00 at the time.

Alas, about a year ago, I had proudly lent this book to a co-worker and then to a nephew… Didn’t pay much attention to who had it or in which order. Anyway, it is safe to say that I don’t have the book now and can’t seem to track down who does.  So I decided to bite the bullet and re-purchase it…

The Chapter’s site lists it as “Temporarily Unavailable To Order”. So I decided to pull out the big guns and head on over to Amazon.ca …

Turns out that Amazon doesn’t have it either. But they do know 3 re-sellers that do. And better yet they want $539 for it. [cue record needle ripping sound]. WHAT ??!!?? Five Hundred and Thirty Nine dineros? Okay, it was a good book, no, actually it was a great book. But Five Hundred? Sorry sirs… er.. thieving Bastards… No takers here.

Instead I’m thinking of spending $300.00 bucks hiring some thug to threaten my co-worker and nephew into finding the missing masterpiece.

😉

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My Graphic Love Affair with Design

For quite a while now I’ve been harbouring a lusty affair with design. Mostly of the graphic type. 😉 My notebooks and Inkscape are an outlet for that (I’m due up for a new screencast big-time btw). 

A few months back I picked up Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton. A great book if you’re interested in typography and text related design. Another great find was the September/October issue of Good magazine which focused on design (a very interesting magazine on the whole by the way). And just to round out the package, I recently subscribed to the I Love Typography blog which seems to have lots of interesting posts as well. They’ve got a presentation posted there with Ellen Lupton which I’ll definitely watch when I get the chance.

So while there’s not a lot of meat to this post, I just thought I’d share a few things in case any of you harbour the same illicit affair with design that I do. 😉

Do you harbour a love affair with something unrelated to what it is you do everyday for money?

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