Books for Designers

Curated list of must-read books for designers.

General Visual Design

The Non-Designers Design Book — Robin Williams

The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain — Betty Edwards

Sketching User Experiences — Bill Buxton

Color — Betty Edwards

Universal Principles of Design — Betty Edwards

D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself — Ellen Lupton

Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty — David Kadavy

Boostrapping Design — Jarrod Drysdale

Elements of Design — Gail Greet Hannah

Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture — Casey Reas

Geometry of Design — Kimberly Elam

Paul Rand: A Designer`s Art — Paul Rand

Graphic Design

How to be a Graphic Designer, Without Losing Your Soul — Adrian Shaughnessy

Paul Rand — Steven Heller

Graphic Design Manual — Armin Hofmann

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School — Matthew Frederick

Designing For Social Change — Andrew Shea

Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field — Helen Armstrong

Graphic Design Thinking — Ellen Lupton

The Elements of Graphic Design — Alex W. White

Design Principles

Universal Principles of Design — William Lidwell

The Laws of Simplicity — John Making-Breaking-Grid-Graphic-Workshop

Things That Make Us Smart — Donald A. Norman

Emotional Design — Donald A. Norman

Visual and Statistical Thinking — Edward R. Tufte

The Art of Color — Johannes Itten

Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams — Klaus Klemp

Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible — Sophie Lovell

Typography

The Elements of Typographic Style — Robert Bringhurst

Thinking with Type — Ellen Lupton

Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works — Erik Spiekermann

Inside Paragraphs — Cyrus Highsmith

My Way to Typography — Wolfgang Weingart

A Type Primer — John Kane

Typographie — Emil Ruder

Lettering & Type — Bruce Willen

The Complete Manual of Typography — Jim Felici

Grids / Layouts

Making and Breaking the Grid — Timothy Samara

Grid Systems — Josef Muller-Brockmann

Visual Grammar — Christian Leborg

Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type — Kimberly Elam

Interaction Design

About Face — Alan Cooper

User Interfaces for All — Constantine Stephanidis

Handbook of Human Factors in Web Design — Kim-Phuong L. Vu

Advertising

Ogilvy on Advertising — David Ogilvy

Confessions of an Advertising Man — David Ogilvy

The Copywriter’s Handbook — Robert W. Bly

Advertising Concept Book — Pete Barry

Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This — Luke Sullivan

Web Design

Designing for the Web — Mark Boulton

HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites — Jon Duckett

Ordering Disorder — Khoi Vinh

Print

Indie Publishing: How to Design and Publish Your Own Book — Ellen Lupton

Book Design — Andrew Haslam

How to Make Books: Fold, Cut & Stitch Your Way to a One-of-a-Kind Book — Esther K. Smith

UX/UI

The Design of Everyday Things — Donald A. Norman

Don’t Make Me Think — Steve Krug

Step by Step UI Design — Sacha Greif

The Humane Interface — Jef Raskin

Contextual Design — Hugh Beyer

Designing Interfaces — Jenifer Tidwell

Rocket Surgery Made Easy — Steve Krug

Apps

App Design Handbook — Nathan Barry

Designing Web Applications — Nathan Barry

Information Visualization

Information Graphics — Sandra Rendgen

Envisioning Information — Edward R. Tufte

Visual Explanations — Edward R. Tufte

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — Edward R. Tufte

Information Visualization — Colin Ware

Inspiration

The Art of Looking Sideways — Alan Fletcher

100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design — Steven Heller

Beware Wet Paint — Alan Fletcher

Marketing

Start with Why — Simon Sinek

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us — Seth Godin

Purple Cow — Seth Godin

Made to Stick — Chip Heath

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion — Robert B., PhD Cialdini