15 Books on Love, Design, and Designers

From the Publisher. For 28 years the world-renowned interior designer Bunny Williams has been involved in a passionate love affair with an 18th-century New England manor house that she found in sad repair. From the moment she walked up the driveway and her palms began to perspire, Williams knew she wanted the affair to last forever. In her sumptuous new book, An Affair with a House, the venerable decorator describes in detail how she and her husband, antiques dealer John Rosselli, rescued, nurtured, renovated, and decorated the well-worn house, giving it new life as they restored each room, resurrected the abandoned gardens, and filled this weekend home with family and friends. Through photographs, anecdotes, how-tos, and recipes, Williams provides a rare inside look at a top decorator’s retreat and explains how she approached the joys, pleasures, challenges, obstacles, and day-to-day realities of creating a beautiful, comfortable country home. An Affair with a House provides a wealth of advice on interior decor and such topics as mixing design styles, but it also addresses such practical matters as stocking the pantry and outfitting the linen closet. Beautiful photographs of the house, the gardens, and the property’s rustic structures provide an intimate glimpse of the couple’s lifestyle and illustrate a way of life we can all appreciate and learn from.

From the Publisher. Make your users fall in love with your site via the precepts packed into this brief, charming book by MailChimp user experience design lead Aarron Walter. From classic psychology to case studies, highbrow concepts to common sense, Designing for Emotion demonstrates accessible strategies and memorable methods to help you make a human connection through design.

— Product designer Karim Rashid comments on Design Your Self:

“I wrote my philosophy and view of life in airplanes over a four-year period and hope it inspires you to embrace and shape your destiny, or at least makes you see some nuances of life differently.”

From the Publisher. The concept of fetishism has recently assumed a growing importance in critical thinking about the cultural construction of sexuality. Yet until now no scholar with an in-depth knowledge of fashion history has studied the actual clothing fetishes themselves. Nor has there been a serious exploration of the historical relationship between fashion and fetishism, although erotic styles have changed significantly and “sexual chic” has become increasingly conspicuous. Marshalling a dazzling array of evidence from pornography, psychology, and history, as well as interviews with individuals involved in sexual fetishism, sadomasochism, and cross-dressing, Steele illuminates the complex relationship between appearance and identity.

From the Publisher. When New York–based graphic designers and long-time friends Timothy Goodman and Jessica Walsh found themselves single at the same time, they decided to try an experiment. The old adage says that it takes 40 days to change a habit—could the same be said for love? So they agreed to date each other for 40 days, record their experiences in questionnaires, photographs, videos, texts, and artworks, and post the material on a website they would create for this purpose. What began as a small experiment between two friends became an Internet sensation, drawing 5 million unique (and obsessed) visitors from around the globe to their site and their story since it was launched in July 2013. 40 Days of Dating: An Experiment is a beautifully designed, expanded look at the experiment and the results, including a great deal of material that never made it onto the site, such as who they were as friends and individuals before the 40 days and who they have become since.

From the Publisher. I Heart Design is a collection of “favorite” designs as selected by 80 prominent graphic designers, typographers, teachers, scholars, writers and design impresarios. Designs featured include the iconic CBS eye, the stark Kodak identity, the Coca-Cola bottle, and, of course, The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album cover. Includes contributions from Alissa Walker and others.

From the Publisher. Kissing Architecture explores the mutual attraction between architecture and other forms of contemporary art. In this fresh, insightful, and beautifully illustrated book, renowned architectural critic and scholar Sylvia Lavin develops the concept of "kissing" to describe the growing intimacy between architecture and new types of art—particularly multimedia installations that take place in and on the surfaces of buildings—and to capture the sensual charge that is being designed and built into architectural surfaces and interior spaces today. Initiating readers into the guilty pleasures of architecture that abandons the narrow focus on function, Lavin looks at recent work by Pipilotti Rist, Doug Aitken, the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and others who choose instead to embrace the viewer in powerful affects and visual and sensory atmospheres. Kissing Architecture is the first book in a cutting-edge new series of short, focused arguments written by leading critics, historians, theorists, and practitioners from the world of urban development and contemporary architecture and design. These books are intended to spark vigorous debate. They stake out the positions that will help shape the architecture and urbanism of tomorrow. Addressing one of the most spectacular and significant developments in the current cultural scene, Kissing Architecture is an entertainingly irreverent and disarmingly incisive book that offers an entirely new way of seeing—and experiencing—architecture in the age after representation.

From the Publisher. Stretched across city walls and along rooftops, Stephen Powers's colorful large-scale murals sneak up on you. "Open your eyes / I see the sunrise," "If you were here I'd be home," "Forever begins when you say yes." What at first looks like nothing as much as an advertisement suddenly becomes something grander and more mysterious, a hand-painted love letter at billboard size. Combining community activism and public art, Powers and his team of sign mechanics collaborate with a neighborhood's residents to create visual jingles, sincere and often poignant affirmations and confessions that reflect the collective hopes and dreams of the host community. A Love Letter to the City gathers the artist's powerful public art project for the first time, including murals on the walls and rooftops of Brooklyn and Syracuse, New York; Philadelphia; Dublin and Belfast, Ireland; São Paolo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa.

From the Publisher. The sans-serif typeface Franklin Gothic was designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1902 and continues to be widely used in newspapers, books, billboards, and advertisements. Named in honor of iconic American printer Benjamin Franklin, the impactful, bold typeface has been spun off into a variety of related faces (Condensed, Wide, etc.) throughout the past century. Today, the New York Times uses Franklin Gothic for many of its headlines and the Museum of Modern Art in New York embraces it as the museums official typeface. It can also be spotted on movie posters for Rocky, in the Bank of America logo, on NYU materials, in the opening text crawl for all of the Star Wars films, in the Showtime network logo, and on album art for musical artists ranging from Lady Gaga to Van Morrison. In I Love Type 06: Franklin Gothic, internationally acclaimed designers including Akatre, Cypher13, Eat Sleep Work / Play, Founded, G Design Studio, Idealismo, Make Studio, Stiletto nyc, and Studio Blanco show off their finest creations incorporating the grace and style of Franklin Gothic.

This title is inspired by the monologues Millman prepares for each episode of the popular design podcast "Design Matters" and features illustrated essays that explore the many intersections of design and life. It covers topics ranging from design, brands, and behavior to rituals, love, music, and even physics.

From the Publisher. Tells the story of a passion and a twisting plot to put the particular bouquet of freshly printed books in a bottle. Gerhard Steidl was first alerted to the importance of the smell of a book by Karl Lagerfeld, prompting a passion for paper and the composition of a scent on the pages of a book. To Wallpaper* magazine the pairing of the publisher with the perfumer seemed a natural partnership and so the idea for

Paper Passion was born. Wallpaper* magazine commissioned master perfumer Geza Schoen to create a fragrance based on the smell of books to be part of the Wallpaper* magazine Handmade exhibition in Milan.

This is an opportunity to celebrate all the glorious sensuality of books, at a time when many in the industry are turning against them. The idea is that is should relax you, like when you read a book, to a level of meditation and concentration. Paper Passion has evolved into something quite beautiful and unique. To wear the smell of a book is something very chic. Books are players in the intellectual world, but also in the world of luxury.

Hidden inside the pages of a book, Paper Passion is accompanied by texts from Karl Lagerfeld, Günter Grass, Geza Schoen, and Tony Chambers.

“You have a book, you open it, there’s a bottle inside and it smells of a book. It might be quirky, but the idea has a simplicity, a linearity.” Geza Schoen

Brain Pickings founder Maria Popova comments:

Artist Lauren Redniss tells the story of  Marie Curie through the two invisible but immensely powerful forces that guided her life: radioactivity and romance. It’s a turbulent story—a passionate romance with Pierre Curie (honeymoon on bicycles!), the epic discovery of radium and polonium, Pierre’s sudden death in a freak accident in 1906, Marie’s affair with physicist Paul Langevin, her coveted second Noble Prize—under which lie poignant reflections on the implications of Curie’s work more than a century later as we face ethically polarized issues like nuclear energy, radiation therapy in medicine, nuclear weapons, and more.

It's also a remarkable feat of thoughtful design and creative vision. To honor Curie’s spirit and legacy, Redniss rendered her poetic artwork in cyanotype, an early-20th-century image printing process called critical to the discovery of both X-rays and radioactivity itself—a cameraless photographic technique in which paper is coated with light-sensitive chemicals. Once exposed to the sun’s UV rays, this chemically-treated paper turns a deep shade of blue. The text in the book is a unique typeface Redniss designed using the title pages of 18th- and 19th-century manuscripts from the New York Public Library archive. She named it Eusapia LR, for the croquet-playing, sexually ravenous Italian Spiritualist medium whose séances the Curies used to attend. The book’s cover is printed in glow-in-the-dark ink.

From the Publisher. David Smith is giving his life for his art—literally. Thanks to a deal with Death, the young sculptor gets his childhood wish: to sculpt anything he can imagine with his bare hands. But now that he only has 200 days to live, deciding what to create is harder than he thought, and discovering the love of his life at the 11th hour isn't making it any easier!

This is a story of desire taken to the edge of reason and beyond; of the frantic, clumsy dance steps of young love; and a gorgeous, street-level portrait of the world's greatest city. It's about the small, warm, human moments of everyday life…and the great surging forces that lie just under the surface. Scott McCloud wrote the book on how comics work; now he vaults into great fiction with a breathtaking, funny, and unforgettable new graphic novel.

From the Publisher. Massive modern skyscrapers, obelisks, towers—all are structures that, thanks to their phallic shape, are often associated with sex. But other buildings are more subtly connected, as they provide the frameworks for our sexual lives and act as reminders of our sexual memories. This relationship between sex and buildings mattered more than ever in the United States and Europe during the turbulent twentieth century, when a culture of unprecedented sexual frankness and tolerance emerged and came to dominate many aspects of public life.

Part architectural history, part cultural history, and part travelogue, Sex and Buildings explores how progressive sexual attitudes manifest themselves in architecture, asking what progressive sexuality might look like architecturally and exploring the successes and failures of buildings' attempts to reflect it. In search of structures that reflect the sexual mores of their inhabitants, Richard J. Williams visits modernist buildings in Southern California, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, the Playboy Mansion in Chicago, the Seagram in New York, communes from the 1960s, and more. A fascinating and often funny look at a period of extraordinary social change coupled with aesthetic invention, Sex and Buildings will change the way we look at the buildings around us.

From the Publisher. In late 2007, Dominique Browning, the editor-in-chief of Conde Nast’s House & Garden, was informed that the magazine had folded-and she was out of a job. Suddenly divested of the income and sense of purpose that had driven her for most of her adult life, Browning panicked. But freed of the incessant pressure to multi-task and perform, she unexpectedly discovered a more meaningful way to live. Browning’s witty and thoughtful memoir has already touched a chord with reviewers and readers alike. While untold millions are feeling the stress of modern life, Slow Love eloquently reminds us to appreciate what we have—a timely message that we all need to hear.