I had the fine folks over at HarperCollins Publishing send me a copy of Karim Rashid's latest outing as an author, Design Yourself, for a crit.
In all honesty when I heard the books subject, I had already passed judgement. Plus the scathing review from 'Home and Garden' that I came accross on Core77 seemed to back my predetermined train of thought.
But I figured I should at least give it the benefit of the doubt.
It wasn't a promising start. Infact the first few pages I got through drove me to the point of tossing it in the recycle bin and leaving it at that. But a funny thing happened after my bitch fit was that I began talking with my wife about the books contents and as we talked about it the more we dove further into it and talked some more.
Albeit alot of his advice is pretty silly, but what got me was how it made us stop and think about some of our daily routines and how we can adjust to add a little more happiness in our 9-5 days. His 'less is more' theme made sense, I mean really how much shit do we need on our bookshelves ?
So whether you hate the guy or worship every move he makes, at least it's a book that will make you talk (both negative and positive) and more importantly think about what you can do to upgrade the little things in life. KR is the type of persona that makes peoples blood boil with hatred but at the same time brings out the passion those people have for design whereas his new book will do the same about our everday routine.
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