Five Books Every Designer Should Own

At my home we have begun installing hard wood floors in our liv­ing room. The first part of this project, or any project for that mat­ter, is the prep work. For this par­tic­u­lar project we have to move things, tear out car­pet and so on. Dur­ing this process,we’ve boxed up most of the sundry flot­sam and jet­sam of mod­ern life, i.e. fur­ni­ture, elec­tron­ics, books and Tiki mugs. The biggest prob­lem has been the box­ing and stor­ing of our books, not because it is hard, but because every time I pull a book off the shelf I want to start read­ing it.

I real­ized there were some books that I just couldn’t store, even for a few weeks. These books I ref­er­ence fre­quently, and it just doesn’t seem right to hide them away like an embar­rass­ing rel­a­tive. The fol­low­ing books I have found immensely help­ful, inter­est­ing and thought pro­vok­ing; they are books that every designer should have in their libraries.

1. A His­tory of Graphic Design by Philip B. Meggs

It is often said that if you don’t know where you’ve come from you don’t know were you are going. There is no finer book on the his­tory of graphic design than late Philip B. Meggs’ mag­num opus A His­tory of Graphic Design. It is exhaus­tive and author­i­ta­tively details the his­tory of Graphic Design from the scratch­ings of pre­his­toric petraglyps to the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion. The book is curently in it’s fourth edi­tion and was recently revamped and updated by the capa­ble hands of Alston Purvis. The New York Times is right on the money when they called it, “A sig­nif­i­cant attempt at a com­pre­hen­sive his­tory of graphic design…it will be an eye-opener not only for gen­eral read­ers, but for design­ers who have been unaware of their legacy.”

2. The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style by Robert Bringhurst

As much a man­i­festo for beau­ti­ful typog­ra­phy as a hand­book of best prac­tices; Bringhurst’s book is arguably the most influ­en­tial book on typog­ra­phy in the last 30 years. It is exhaus­tive, dense and a must read for any­one with an inter­est in typog­ra­phy and graphic design.

3. Becom­ing a Graphic Designer: A Guide to Careers in Design by Steven Heller and Teresa Fer­nades
It is really hard to pick only one book for this list from Steven Heller, the supreme liv­ing critic, pro­po­nent and cat­a­loger of Graphic Design. This entire list could just as eas­ily been noth­ing but his books. But proper deco­rum must pre­vail so I’ll include this book because it is def­i­nitely a must read for any level of designer. It is sim­ply the best road map for nav­i­gat­ing of the numer­ous career paths in the Graphic Design business.

4. Design Basic Index by Jim Krause
Can’t afford art school? Need a refresher course on the basics of design? Need to explain to your mother what Graphic Design­ers do?

Look no fur­ther than Jim Krause’s great book. This beau­ti­ful book copi­ously explains the prin­ci­ples and best prac­tices of design. As an added bonus the book is full of exer­cises that give read­ers hands on expe­ri­ence in the basics of design.

5. The Cheese Mon­keys: A Novel in Two Semes­ters by Chip Kidd
A funny and thought pro­vok­ing fic­tional look into the world of art school in the late 1950’s. Chip Kidd is a mas­ter­ful book jacket designer who is respon­si­ble for some of the most iconic book jack­ets in the last 20 years. In The Cheese Mon­keys, his first novel, he proves in he can fill a book with as mem­o­rable lit­er­ary images as mem­o­rable graphic images on the cov­ers. For design­ers, the book is  a  must read if for noth­ing else than the lec­tures in design by Win­ter Sor­beck, who inspires and ter­ror­izes his acolytes with his phi­los­o­phy of Graphic Design. My favorite lit­tle design nugget (of which there are tons in the book):

A bazil­lion years ago, some poor son of a bitch Cro-Magnon scratched a draw­ing of a buf­falo on to the wall of his cave. He didn’t do it because his muse had called to him, or to explore the tex­ture of baux­ite, or to start the neoprimitive-expressionist mov­ment. He did it because he killed a god­damn buf­falo and he wanted some­one else to know about it, after he was gone. He had a spe­cific, defin­able pur­pose for mak­ing a piece of visual infor­ma­tion. The first one.”

This is in no way a defin­i­tive list of course. What are some design books you’d rec­om­mend to clut­ter up fel­low designer’s night stands?

Chip Kidd Interviews Neil Gaiman!

Be still my beat­ing geeky heart! Look what I found! One of my favorite graphic design­ers inter­view­ing one of my favorite authors! Don’t call me for about an hour and a half, I’ll be busy!

More Cool Chip Kidd Videos

Another cool video from Chip Kidd wax­ing on design and his life.

A Funny Chip Kidd Video

I knew Chip Kidd was a great designer and writer, how­ever I was pleas­antly amused to find out that he is also a very accom­plished, if sur­real impres­sion­ist. This is a really funny take on the dif­fer­ence between form and con­tent, and how play­ing with one effects the other. Which is an impor­tant theme of his sec­ond novel The Learn­ers.

More about Chip Kidd

Design Something Everyday 15/365

I found a great arti­cle in Esquire wherein book jacket designer extra­or­di­naire Chip Kidd dis­cusses the think­ing and meth­ods that under­lie some of his recent work. One typog­ra­phy trick  that is par­tic­u­larly use­ful is how he cre­ated the dis­tressed text for his cover of Cor­mack McCarthy’s The Road:

The font is one of the old­est tricks in the book. You type­set text in a reg­u­lar font, I think this was Rotis, and then you blow it up really big on a Xerox machine and then you shrink it down really small. The trick is to see just how much you can dis­tress it and keep it read­able. It’s got­ten harder to do because Xerox machines are so much bet­ter, but if you’ve got a won­der­fully shitty machine it will look all cor­roded and gummy and yucky. It takes a bit of play­ing around, but it’s really not that hard.

With that tip as inspi­ra­tion I used the same tech­nique to make these lit­tle design posters. The type­face is Rock­well Bold and each let­ter was blown up 1600% on a Toshiba pho­to­copier, before being dig­i­tally reduced. The Toshiba was too new to give the type a truly won­der­fully gummy yucky look, but it was a good exer­cise. Even with all of our dig­i­tal tricks, it is pretty fun to get in there with some old school techniques.

Design Something Everyday 13/365

I was at the park with my kids play­ing in the sand box and I recalled this quote from Chip Kidd’s won­der­ful novel The Cheese Mon­keys: A Novel in Two Semes­ters: “Design is pur­pose­ful plan­ning… Graphic design is the form those plans will take.” Between the juice boxes and push­ing kids on the swing I tried to rep­re­sent that with sand, sticks and pebbles.

Any­one who is inter­ested in lit­er­a­ture or good sto­ry­telling would like The Cheese Monkey’s, but for design­ers, I highly rec­om­mend Kidd’s book for many rea­sons, first it is a grip­ping tale of Happy (the pro­tag­o­nist) dis­cov­er­ing him­self and the world he inhab­its. Sec­ond, the host of char­ac­ters that Kidd cre­ates are unfor­get­table, espe­cially Himillsy Dodd and Win­ter Sor­beck. Finally, the book is full of great nuggets about graphic design. That last point is some­thing design­ers should enjoy, or at least pro­voke some food for thought. It isn’t often that graphic design gets so elo­quently dis­cussed, defended and crit­i­cized in any form, let alone a novel. Hav­ing the his­tory, pur­pose and prac­tice of graphic design exam­ined in fic­tion is refreshing.

Links:

• The Cheese Mon­keys by Chip Kidd
• The Learn­ers by Chip Kidd (his fol­low up novel, con­tin­u­ing the adven­tures of Happy)
• Good is Dead, Chip Kidd’s Blog

Here are some great interviews/talks by and with Chip Kidd: