Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

The books I’ve been reading this year, and some thoughts on them:

• America’s Women – Gail Collins: I love Collins’s columns in the New York Times and hoped this book would have a similar mix of historical detail with genuinely entertaining writing, and I was not disappointed. This is a great take on American history focused on women’s roles. Collins does a great job of weaving stories about particularly noteworthy and accomplished women with painstaking research on daily life and the experiences of average women at different periods of history. Highly recommended!
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design – Jason Beaird: A good overview of some of the basic aspects of design for the web. The most useful part of this book for me was Beaird’s explanations of the importance of texture and detailed tutorials and examples of how to use appropriate texture on a site – they definitely helped me add depth to my designs.
• Blink – Malcolm Gladwell: I bought this in an airport bookstore and blew through it on the plane. It’s a quick, fun read about the ways in which humans make decisions unconsciously (and often rationalize them later!).
• The Stone Raft – Jose Saramago: Some friends started a book club, and this was the first selection. It was pretty fun to read, if a little slow — a story of magical realism that became a lot more interesting when we looked up its geopolitical context (Portugal in the 1980s) and were able to put together some of the themes with the social and political state of the setting.
• The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon: I’d already read this book more than once (it’s one of my all-time favorites), but I re-read it after I chose it for the book club’s second meeting.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz: Another book club selection! I’d heard a lot of praise for this book, and it did not disappoint; it’s a dizzying pastiche of Dominican history, science-fiction and comic book references, mythology, Spanish slang, and compelling characters woven into an intriguing story. Highly recommended!
• A History of U.S. Feminisms – Rory Dicker: With a chapter for each of the three “waves”, this book is a straightforward summary of feminism’s ideas, conflicts, and accomplishments over the past century and a half. I’m still looking for something more theoretical/practical and less historical to recommend as a feminism primer, but for now, this is the best book I’ve found for the general newcomer to feminism.
• Feminism Is For Everybody – bell hooks: This book is really intelligent. hooks clearly explains what she believes should be the core tenets of feminism, and lays out a proposal for a new version of feminism that won’t have the heterosexist and white-centered connotations sometimes associated with the second wave, but instead will be inclusive and useful to all people. Possibly a little dense for people new to feminist thought, but highly recommended.
• Full Frontal Feminism - Jessica Valenti: By the founder of the excellent blog feministing.com. The subtitle is “A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters”, and that’s exactly what it is. I was hoping for a more seriously written introduction for a broader audience; Valenti’s slangy tone put me off a little (I could tell she was trying to be deliberately casual, but it made it seem like she wasn’t forming her thoughts carefully — even though she was). However, this would be a good introduction for the “I’m POST-feminist!” high-school/college crowd. I’ve also heard that Valenti’s later books (He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut and The Purity Myth) are less slangy and more in-depth, so I’ll probably try to pick them up.
• Better - Atul Gawande: Another book club selection. This was interesting to read since I knew almost nothing about the medical system. Gawande mixes personal anecdotes about his experiences as a surgeon with analysis on why things go wrong and what doctors can do to make improvements. A fast read that raises some interesting issues.

Here’s a few inspiring websites (and other things) I’ve encountered recently:

1. Subtraction: monochrome, gridded, super-clean site. I keep coming back to this one when I’m thinking about a new design.
2. Verbalized: perfect use of graphic elements and typography to create a visually appealing design without ever distracting the user from the content
3. DJ:nod: a great combination of organic illustration and clean, usable grid design, with a subtle use of Flash
4. The Intelligent Labor website isn’t anything special, but I’ve noticed their trucks driving around Cambridge and admired the bold, steampunky-yet-current style on the vehicles.
5. Winter in Boston — Jesse and I have been enjoying going on some photo-taking walks. Winter scenes make me want to do monochrome design!

This blog — and my main site — have a new look! I’ve been working on this design for what seems like forever (actually it’s a few months, but that’s still quite some time) and I’m very excited to finally launch it — let me know what you think!

A few sites I’ve launched recently:

• MyIGEA is a restaurant review site aimed at food-allergy sufferers; when you sign up, you list the allergies that you (or a friend/family member) have, and the site generates a list of restaurants that other users with the same allergy rated highly. I did all the back-end coding for this (it’s another Tensegrity project and I worked with one of their designers).
  Once I started working on this site I became more attuned to food allergies, and I realized how many people there are that could benefit from a resource like this — so I’m pretty psyched about launching this. It’s still in “alpha”, which means that the features aren’t finalized and there will be some more development, but it’s open to the public and available for you to sign up and start reviewing!
• Pianofarm.net is the new site that I designed for my mom’s piano studio; this is the first static site that I built since discovering the CushyCMS system of updating content, and I’m really impressed with how it was wicked easy both for me to set up and for my mom to use. (Anyone who doesn’t already have a CMS might want to check this out — I can set it up in less than an hour, and you can then easily update your own content, which should save you some time/money.)
• I posted about the initial launch of espressy a few months ago, but in December we launched the second version of the site, with a revised design and category system.