Gerry McGovern

There's so much more to car design than simply looking good. Speed Read: Car Design beaks down every element a team accounts for when designing vehicles. People have never been more broadly aware of design as a concept and how it fits into their everyday lives. Even the simplest of consumer products compete to offer something that will better catch the public's eye and reflect the taste and perceived lifestyle of each individual. Like all design, car design is complex subject. It's one in which many people have an interest--and not just gearheads. Every part of a car represents myriad decisions by the design team ruled by engineering, aesthetics, human interface, and emotion. Speed Read: Car Design helps the reader understand the hows and whys of that design process, offering an engaging review of history, theory, key concepts, and key designers. It's a book for car enthusiasts, design fans, and anyone with a desire to better understand why our wheeled world looks the way it does.

Speaking out when it's unpopular. Back in the day, Henry David Thoreau raged at the robber barons-the big shots of their age, despoiling the environment in the name of progress. Deep in the throes of the seemingly unstoppable growth of tech, a modern-day Thoreau has emerged in the guise of Gerry McGovern-decrying the massive, hidden negative impacts of tech on the environment. McGovern has thoroughly documented in World Wide Waste how tech damages the Earth-and what we should be doing about it. It is not just the acres of discarded computer hardware conveniently dumped in Third World countries. Every time an email is downloaded it contributes to global warming. Every tweet, search, check of a webpage creates pollution. Digital is physical. Those data centers are not in the Cloud. They're on land in massive physical buildings packed full of computers hungry for energy. It seems invisible. It seems cheap and free. It's not. Digital costs the Earth.

The Stranger's Long Neck is a practical guide for any manager wishing to improve their organisation's online performance. Web content specialist, Gerry McGovern, explains that all websites have a small set of tasks, or 'long necks', that are important to its customers and that must be easy to complete or customers will go elsewhere. The Stranger's Long Neck shows how to tune in effectively to what your customers want - and then deliver it with aplomb. Understanding customer needs can be a difficult task when customers are 'strangers', in that he or she is always 'on the outside', particularly so in an online environment. Using case studies including Tetra Pak, Microsoft and the NHS, and illustrated with web shots throughout, The Stranger's Long Neck shows how organisations can use the 'long neck' theory to create and manage efficient and user-friendly websites.