What’s on a designer’s bookshelf? Eight books to inspire creatives
The eternal design battle is to avoid the creative rut. If you’re looking for inspiration or seeking to build your design vocabulary, add these eight books to your designer bookshelf. Spanning a broad scope of design topics — from typography to data visualization to product design — these books harness the creative in you.
Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton
Thinking with Type is a handbook on everything typography. Ellen Lupton, graphic designer and curator of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, covers typographic terminology, principles for pairing typefaces, and tips for establishing typographic hierarchy. Lupton interjects type “primes” with type crimes (do not distort letterforms, do not vertically stack lowercase letters). For those seeking a quick typography fix, an abridged version of the full read is posted online.
Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield
Another typography book, Just My Type is part type history, part personality analysis of common typefaces. Garfield takes readers from the earliest use of movable type in the Gutenberg Bible to Helvetica’s reign of the printed world; from the hate crusade against Comic Sans to the typeface that propelled Obama to presidential success (answer: Gotham). Garfield’s clever prose will resonate with both the typophile and font illiterate; it’s pragmatic for all, as the growing choice of fonts in word processors makes even the Everyman a typographer of sorts.
Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang
A picture is worth a thousand words. Picture This distills the story of The Little Red Riding Hood to geometric forms, and illustrates how shape, color, and composition can serve as powerful tools of visual communication. What forms instill fear? What colors convey comfort? How can static pages evoke dynamism and dimension? A graphic design guidebook under guise of a fairy tale, Picture This teaches fundamentals of the visual language.
Interaction of Color by Josef Albers
A guidebook on color theory, Interaction of Color investigates how color, like music, can harmonize, transform or discord with the orchestra of colors around it. Albers, famous for his Homage to Square paintings, presents challenges in working with color — the idiosyncrasies in perception, the unintended optical illusions, the limited vocabulary to describe an infinite spectrum — as well as exercises to develop an astute eye to navigate these challenges. The book is also available as an interactive mobile app.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte
The most academic of the bunch, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information celebrates the science and art of data visualization. Tufte, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics and Computer Science at Yale University, teaches how to clearly, precisely, and effectively communicate quantitative data through visual graphics. The book mixes written theory with illustrated examples of what works (and what doesn’t), from John Snow’s iconic plot of cholera deaths in the 19th century to more recent visualizations of census and DNA data.
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
Have you ever pushed a door meant to be pulled? Unintentionally bumped a light switch from on to off? These errs, Norman argues, put bad design, not foolish users, to blame. Rich in cognitive science and psychology underpinnings, the book (originally titled Psychology of Everyday Things) showcases how human behavior guides design and how design guides human behavior. Although focused on physical designs — kitchen stoves, watches, thermostats — the book and its principles on human centered design ring true for the digital, too.
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Psychologist and Economics Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, proposes a duo track model of mental processing: a reflex-like, emotion-driven unconscious (System 1) and a slow, methodical conscious (System 2). Although not technically a design book, Thinking Fast and Slow elucidates biases in our cognition and perception that can be utilized to design effective campaigns and delightful products. A 90% surgery survival rate, for instance, is more enticing than its statistical equivalent — a 10% mortality rate. Personally, as a psychology graduate turned designer, Kahneman’s insights on the fallacies of our minds and lapses in our logic are particularly striking.
“The Sketchbook” by You
Last but not least, the sketchbook. Whether store bought or handmade (I’ve both purchased Moleskines and saddle stitched my own), the sketchbook is an indispensable tool for designers. Don’t be dismayed if you ‘can’t draw’; the sketchbook isn’t about pixel perfection. A canvas for rapid ideating, doodling and brainstorming, the sketchbook (or at rhubarb, the sketch office, with wall-to-wall whiteboard paint) is about conceptualizing the big idea.
