Design Reading List

General Design Books & Other Books that All Designers should read

• Universal Principles of Design
  by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler

• Language of Vision
  by Gyorgy Kepes

• Web Style Guide – Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites
  by Patrick J. Lynch, Sarah Horton

• The Design of Everyday Things
  by Donald Norman

• The Elements of Typographic Style  
  by Robert Bringhurst

• Stop Stealing Sheep
  by Erik Spiekermann & E. M. Ginger

• The New Typography
  by Jan Tschichold

• Visual Thinking
  by Rudolf Arnheim

• Six Essays (+2) on Design and New Media
  by Jessica Helfand

• Man and His Symbols
  by Carl Gustav Jung

• The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.9 Part 1)
  by Carl Gustav Jung, et al

• Hero with a Thousand Faces
  by Joseph Campbell

Design History & Selected Monographs

• A History of Graphic Design
  by Philip Meggs

• Graphic Design – A Concise History
  Richard Hollis

• Graphic Design in Germany 1890 – 1945 (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)
  by Jeremy Aynsley

• Graphic Design Timeline – A Century of Design Milestones
  by Steven Heller, Elinor Pettit

• Paul Rand
  by Steven Heller

• 6 Chapters in Design – Saul Bass, Ivan Chermayoff, Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, Ikko Tanaka, Henryk Tomaszewski
  by Philip Meggs (ed)

• The Struggle for Utopia – Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy : 1917-1946
  by Victor Margolin

• Herbert Bayer -The Complete Work
  by Arthur Allen Cohen

• Alexey Brodovitch
  by Alexey Brodovitch, Gabriel Bauret

• Cipe Pineles – A Life of Design
  by Martha Scotford, Cipe Pineles Golden

• Nine Pioneers of Graphic Design (out of print)
  by R. Roger Remington, Barbara J. Hodik

Design Theory, Criticism & Analysis

• Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture
  by Jessica Helfand

• Design Literacy – Understanding Graphic Design
  by Steven Heller, Karen Pomeroy

• Design Literacy Continued
  By Steven Heller

• Looking Closer - Critical Writings on Design
  Looking Closer 2
  Looking Closer 3
  by Michael Beirut (ed)

• Design Writing Research
  by Ellen Lupton, J. Abbot Miller

• Graphic Design & Reading – Explorations of an Uneasy Relationship
  by Gunnar Swanson (ed)

• Understanding Media – The Extensions of Man
  by Marshall McLuhan

• Design After Modernism – Beyond the Object
  by John Thackara (ed)

• Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
  by Reyner Banham

Digital Media / Hypertext Theory & Discussion

• Understanding Hypermedia 2.000
  by Richard Oliver, Bob Understanding Hypermedia Cotton

• Hypertext 2.0 – The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology
  by George P. Landow

• Hypertext – The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology
  by George P. Landow

• Interface Culture – How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
  by Steven Johnson

• Invisible Computer – Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex and Information Applicances Are the Solution
  by Donald Norman

• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum – Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore The Sanity
  by Alan Cooper, Paul Saffo

• NetSlaves – True Tales of Working the Web
  by Bill Lessard, Steve Baldwin

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Interaction/Interface Design

• Designing Gestural Interfaces
  by Dan Saffer

• Designing Visual Interface – Communication Oriented Techniques
  by Kevin Mullet

• Mind Over Media – Creative Thinking Skills for Electronic Media (out of print)
  by Mark von Wodtke

• Web Navigation – Designing the User Experience
  by Jennifer Fleming

• Hot Wired Style
  by Jeffrey Veen

• The Art & Science of Web Design
  by Jeffrey Veen

• About Face – The Essentials of User Interface Design
  Alan Cooper

• The Art of Human Computer Interface Design
  Brenda Laurel (ed)

• Interactivity by Design
  by Ray Kristof, Amy Satran

• Graphic Design for Electronic Documents and User Interfaces
  by Aaron Marcus

Information Architecture/Design

• Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (2nd Edition
  by Christina Wodtke and Austin Govella, with lots of chapter intro photographs by me (Erin Malone)

• Information Graphics
  by Peter Wildbur & Michael Burke

• Information Design
  by Robert E. Jacobsen (ed)

• Practical Information Architecture – A Hands on Approach to Structuring Successful Websites
  by Eric Reiss

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
  by Lou Rosenfeld, Peter Morville

• Envisioning Information
  by Edward Tufte

• Information Architects
  Richard Saul Wurman

• Information Anxiety - What to Do When Information Doesn’t Tell You What You Need to Know (out of print)
  Richard Saul Wurman

• Information Anxiety 2
  Richard Saul Wurman

• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things – What Categories Reveal About the Mind
  by George Lakoff

• Contextual Design – A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs
  by Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt

 



Usability for Designers

• Don’t Make Me Think! – A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
  Steve Krug

• Designing Web Usability
  by Jakob Nielsen

• Usability Engineering
  by Jakob Nielsen

• Web Site Usability
  Jared Spool

 



Community / Social Networks

• Desinging for the Social Web
  by Joshua Porter

• Groundswell
  by Charline Li and Josh Bernoff

• The Virtual Community – Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
  by Howard Rheingold

• Online Communities – Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability
  by Jenny Preece

• Community Building on the Web – Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities by Amy Jo Kim

• Communities in Cyberspace
  by Marc A. Smith, Peter Kollock (eds)

• Cyborgs@cyberspace? An Ethnographer Looks to the Future
  David Hakken

• Emergence – The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
  by Steven Johnson