Most of these books are on my bookshelf and I have read through almost all of them. I use some of them everyday and others are referenced to when tackling some gritty problems. Some I have had since I entered into designing for interactive media in 1994 and may seem a bit dated, but the principle ideas are sound and applicable as the media changes. Others are just interesting reading. General Design | Design History | Interaction/Information Design | Digital Media Theory | Design Theory, Criticism & Analysis | Usability | Community & Social Media
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
Interaction/Interface Design
- UX for Lean Startups
Laura Klein - Lean UX
Jeff Gothelf - Mobile Design Pattern Gallery
Theresa Neil - Designing Web Interfaces
Bill Scott and Theresa Neil - Designing Interfaces
Jenifer Tidwell - 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
I have spun out a whole Social Experience reading list over here based on the references I read for writing Designing Social Interfaces.
- Designing Social Interfaces or you could pre-order v2.
Erin Malone and Christian Crumlish - Designing 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