Seven non-design books that might make you a better designer.
Or at least a better human being.
When you’re born into an introverted personality, like I was, it doesn’t take long before you realise the chances to be by yourself without looking like a loner, a loser or an asshole are few and far between. As a kid, I was quick to figure out that reading was one of those very rare occasions where I could simply sit idly by myself and still get to bask without judgment in the shared experience that is to be human and be alive. Reading was my first real passion, and it’s been with me for a lot longer than design has. In fact, reading is quite likely the thing that made me fall in love with design in the first place.
As a kid, I read obsessively. I would read books, newspapers and comic strips. I would read magazines, instruction manuals and the backs of shampoo bottles. Whenever my parents had to go to the bank or the post office, I would ask to go with them, just so I could bring home the free pamphlets they had in the lobby. I would come home grinning and sit on the floor reading about mortgages and savings accounts. Over time, I started looking beyond the words. I started comparing colours, layouts and paper stocks. I realised someone was thinking about these things for a living, and I decided I wanted to do that too.
As my passion for design grew stronger, my reading habits started to shift. I started buying a lot of design books, hoping they would make me a better designer. I stopped buying novels almost entirely — and when I did, it was mostly for the cover art. And it wasn’t until I left college that I realised just how negative of an impact that had on my work at the time. Because, here’s the thing: reading a lot of design books doesn’t make you a good designer. It only makes you feel like one. And that alone won’t make you great (or it didn’t for me, anyway). Your personality, your experience, the unique way you see and understand the world around you, those are the things that will help you stand out as a designer. And I guess that could be true for everything else in the world, but for design I know it’s like that.
So I forced myself to diversify my reading habits. I convinced myself that reading a 1000-page novel or a six-book autobiography isn’t time lost. That I wouldn’t be better off improving my design or coding skills. Because what use is it being a master at your craft, if you don’t know what to do with it? At the end of the day, the thing that makes you a great writer or a masterful painter is not how diverse your vocabulary is or how well you handle the brush — it’s whether or not you have something to say. Your experiences, your culture, your awareness of other people’s struggles, all of those will make you a more empathic person, and thus a better designer. And reading can help with all of them.
Sadly, I don’t read nearly as much as I would like to. As an adult, there’s only so much time you can spend bent over a book each day before your friends and relatives start to worry. So when I pick a new book to read, I always try to make sure it has something that appeals to me, or that I can translate into useful knowledge in my day-to-day life. A strategy I’ve tried in the past is searching for reading suggestions from other designers, hoping some of that shared interest might transpire onto our literary preferences as well. But if you try searching for “non-design books for designers” on Google, you’ll quickly find out that most suggestions are not that far away from the design universe. It’s usually a bland mix of books on art, architecture, entrepreneurship and business, with some sociology, philosophy and even self-help books thrown in there. If you’re trying to get away from your work for a bit, that’s not great. So I’ve compiled a small list of non-design books that I personally liked, and that I think would appeal to designers looking for a break:
Stoner
by John Williams
For a very long time, this book remained, much like its main character, largely unknown. Only after it was reissued in 2003, did it enjoy a second life as a widely critically acclaimed novel — and deservedly so. It brilliantly tells the story of an English professor who leads an unremarkable life, despite his ambition and exemplary work ethics. At a time when we seem to be obsessed with larger-than-life figures, it’s a refreshing book that shows that even the anonymous person with the most seemingly uneventful life can have an amazing story to tell, if you just listen.
He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers
I initially picked this book up for a pretty shallow reason: I knew Dave Eggers had worked as a graphic designer in the past, and was hoping his memoirs touched a lot on the subject. Luckily, the book turned out to be much more than that: a very candid description of the struggles the writer went through after both his parents passed away, and how he was left to raise his younger brother on his own — allegedly. I think the book is an amazing (and at times actually heartbreaking) piece of literature on its own, but designers might be particularly interested in its depiction of the design and publishing industry of the 1990s, a period when the digital revolution was starting to take shape.
I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it’s hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so — this has always been my dream — so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.
A Man in Love
by Karl Ove Knausgård
The second of Karl Ove Knausgård’s controversial six-book autobiography, A Man in Love hit me the hardest. It’s a candid exposé of the author’s life as a young writer trying to break through to literary relevance, while dealing with the hardships of love and parenthood. I read it at a time of my life when it was particularly relatable, and I think it will resonate with most young designers trying to kickstart their own careers.
What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.
Blindness
by José Saramago
There is something in José Saramago’s storytelling prowess that I’ve never found in any other writer. Most of his novels revolve around a very simple but ingenious idea — the sort that you find yourself wishing you had. It’s hard to describe, but it almost leaves you feeling, at times, like it’s a cheap gimmick. Like he’s using a deceptively simple premise that can be described in one sentence to trick you into reading a 400-page book that will eventually tire the concept out. The weird thing is: it never does. His books are always surprisingly addictive, and never seem to run out of ideas. If anything, you’re left feeling like the book has ended too soon. Blindness is especially good at doing all of that. It takes a seemingly insane yet surprisingly believable idea and uses it as a metaphor for real world events in a way that is obvious but elegant, and blunt but apolitical. And all this without derailing from the core narrative of the book. That’s something all designers could take a hint or two from.
If, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.
Understanding Comics
by Scott McCloud
I’m a bit of an exception among my designer friends, because I don’t geek out over comics nearly as much as they do. And frankly, this is the kind of book that I would normally not be particularly interested in. However, its deconstruction of comics as a communication medium is so earth-shattering that I think it breaks through to all other visual mediums. It’s an interesting read on its own, but it’s also surprisingly a very insightful and useful look at what it means to communicate through pictures.
Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.
The Implacable Order of Things
by José Luís Peixoto
If you’ve been through poverty, or have seen it up close, you know what it feels like to live with the relentless hum of impending tragedy. And you’re familiar with the sense of absolute impotence that usually comes with it. Like being inside of a car moving slowly towards the abyss. It’s a feeling that’s hard to empathize with unless you’ve been there. And it is, I think, where José Luís Peixoto’s prose shines: through carefully crafted narrative, that blurs the lines between the real and the surreal, he manages to depict the struggles of an entire population in a way that is as brutal as it is beautiful. It paints a very vivid picture of resignation in the face of never-ending hardships. And it resonated with me personally, because it offers a reflection on the fear of change, and on the act of giving up. It teaches you that, even if you’re not shackled by your environment, you’re still a product of it — and that, sometimes, is sort of the same thing.
I think: perhaps the sky is a huge sea of fresh water and we, instead of walking under it, walk on top of it; perhaps we see everything upside down and the earth is a kind of sky, so that when we die, when we die, we fall and sink into the sky.
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
I’m currently reading David Foster Wallace’s behemoth of a book, Infinite Jest. It’s the book I’ve wanted to read for over 10 years, but never felt ready to. I held it in my hands a few times at the bookstore, skimmed through the pages, gasped at the footnotes, re-read the back cover synopsis, but always ended up putting it back down — until this year. I can’t quite recommend it just yet, of course, but I can explain why I’ve decided to read it. If you watch any of David Foster Wallace’s interviews, one of the first things that you might notice — once you look past his apparent uneasiness — is that he was outrageously literate. Yet you hear his replies, or read some of his writings, or listen to his remarkable commencement speech to the Kenyon College’s class of 2005, and you’re dumbfounded by how straightforward and approachable his thoughts really are. Here’s a man whose capacity for critical thinking is well above average and who has a seemingly encyclopedic mind, and yet he’s capable of putting his ideas together in a way that is deceivingly simple. Without being judgemental, or cynical or riddled with elitism. That is the work of a man who is concerned with getting his ideas, more than his name, across. And that is both remarkable and rare.
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
Have any other recommendations? I’d love to hear them! Drop them on the comments down there 👇
Eduardo Nunes is Head of Design and Partner at Kollegorna, a team of designers, developers and strategists building first-rate digital products and services.
