Ah, summer reading. It's the stuff of easy-breezy romantic novels, murder mysteries, and self-help manifestos. But it can (and we argue, should!) be more than that. Good news for the design-minded among us: You're about to get a summer-reading upgrade. We asked a dozen of the best designers around which books they think are worth bringing to the beach. (Click on the above image to see all the book covers.) Taken together, the recommendations are also a master class in design.
Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA
Hello World by Alice Rawsthorn
Design is still stereotyped and often identified with cute chairs, over-stylized products, and decoration. I cherish the way in which Alice embraces design across disciplines and across time. Indeed, she famously lists the 18th-century pirates' skull-and-bones icon as one of the first examples of successful brand design ever. She highlights design's breadth, scope, importance, and vibrance. Moreover, Alice is a fine writer, so the book is also a great read.
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
By its most commonplace descriptions, design should solve problems and match form with function. Through their studio projects and their work as educators in the Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions department, Dunne and Raby have formalized a new field of practice. Critical Design focuses on studying the impact and possible consequences of new technologies and policies, and of worldwide social and environmental trends, as well as on outlining new goals and areas of interest for designers. This speculative process does not immediately lead to useful objects, but rather to food for thought, whose usefulness is revealed by its ability to help others prevent and direct future outcomes.
Tobias Frere-Jones, founder and typographer at Frere-Jones Type
Ounce Dice Trice by Alastair Reid
Every aspect of this book—the joyfully subversive text, the classical straight-man typography, the haunting Ben Shahn illustrations—has left a mark on me. It encourages children to bend, break and remake words, reassign their definitions at will, or just discard the meaning and play with the sound. Kurt Schwitters would have been delighted, Ferdinand de Saussure would have been appalled. Can children's books ever again be as sly and potent as this? I don't know, but I can't imagine my childhood without this book.
Entropy and Art by Rudolf Arnheim
I no longer remember how many times I've read this, either as a painter or a designer. It mulls over a persistent contradiction in the universe: the urge to create balance, and its inevitable decay—and how, from some perspectives, they lead to the same result. Weighty stuff, but it's beautifully written, and the clarity itself is inspiring.
Natasha Jen, partner at Pentagram
The Vignelli Canon by Massimo Vignelli
It's a concise—yet highly biased—introductory book on design that I think can be enjoyed by non-designers and designers, especially for those who are interested in modern design. I resisted Mr. Vignelli’s thoughts throughout my entire design career, because I found them, well, limited in terms of thinking about the complexity of life. But now that I’m a little older, I can actually appreciate his dogma without agreeing with it.
John Maeda, design partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers
Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton
This is a deceptively simple book that at first appears like a how-to for would-be beginning designers but is actually a primer on the nature of visual communication and its profound (possible) impacts.
Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
The early, missing connection between Don Norman’s work and the UX world that we know today. It’s Erika’s early view of the then emerging technology industry and its growing and grating friction on regular everyday people (instead of just nerds).
Milton Glaser, graphic designer
The Success and Failure of Picasso by John Berger
Although this book is not specifically about design, it is an astonishing insight into Picasso. Berger proposes that after the invention of Cubism, and specifically the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso became famous and for the first time developed an awareness of an audience. After that realization, he never again produced anything equal in quality or invention. If that's what responding to an audience's interest represents, professional life is probably impossible.
Jeanne Gang, architect
An Engineer Imagines by Peter Rice
The joy of design comes through in Peter Rice’s personal account of his most famous structural engineering projects. Beyond the technical feats—of which there are many, including his solution for defining the shells of the Sydney Opera House—there is his endless enthusiasm for creative problem-solving, making the book fun to read, interesting, and accessible.
Gadi Amit, founder of NewDealDesign
Mod to Memphis: Design in Colour, 1960s-80s by Anne Watson and Dennis Eggington
It covers a very important period in design that is often forgotten compared with the 1920-30s or 1950s. Color is such a force in design and yet nearly always treated as a secondary element.
New British Design by John Thakara
I was floored by the deconstruction of the object, the rediscovery of the forms inside, and the new materials for electronic design.
Steven Heller, design critic
The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn
A series of lectures given at Harvard about the process of making art is one that I suggest to students at every chance. Notable is the essay titled "Biography of a Painting," which traces a symbolic work that received a certain amount of criticism for being on the news.
Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
It is not the novel but a collection of essays about how media manipulates modern existence. I've drawn many significant quotes from this sadly prescient book.
Ellen Lupton, typographer and curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Synesthetic Design: Handbook for a Multisensory Approach by Michael Haverkamp
This amazing book explores the implications of design across the senses. Explore how vision interacts with sound, touch, smell, and taste. Haverkamp is a designer and researcher for Ford Motor Company in Germany. He is especially interested in the multisensory aspects of car design, but his book touches on nearly every discipline, from graphic design and architecture to products and interaction. The book is both scholarly and readable, with gorgeous diagrams by Andreas Hidber. There's a CD in the back with amazing sound clips—you can compare the sounds of a pen and pencil, for example, or hear the way different car doors sound when they shut.
David Rockwell, architect
Barragán Guide byLuis Barragán, Ilaria Valente, Federica Zanco
I think our childhood experiences are very influential in terms of shaping how creatively we think about the world. Having spent much of my adolescence in Guadalajara, Mexico, the work of Luis Barragán has been a great source of inspiration. Moving to Guadalajara from New Jersey opened my eyes to the emotional power of architecture. Barragán’s buildings brilliantly capture the vibrant colors, beautiful quality of light, and vitality of Mexico’s open public spaces.
Chester Jenkins, typographer and founder of Village
Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage by David Foster Wallace
It may seem odd, but the one piece of writing which has stuck with the design part of my brain—if there is such a thing—is an epic book review/essay written by David Foster Wallace for Harper's Magazine's April 2001 issue: "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage." Twenty brilliant, insightful, often hilarious pages about the rift between two schools of lexicography: descriptive versus prescriptive. What is versus what should be. Every designer walks this line between working in established forms and creating new forms.
Jake Barton, founder of Local Projects
Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell and Backwards and Forwards by David Ball
These books are, in theory, anthropology and filmmaking books, respectively, but are actually the foundation for understanding storytelling, which is critical if you are going to try for reinvention. First, you need to understand the rules, before you bend, stretch, and break them.
Jessica Walsh, partner at Sagmeister & Walsh
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
This book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a psychology book that gives great insight into how our mind and motivation levels and how it relates to the creative processes.
