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5 Notable Design Books for Summer Reading: Maria Popova

By Maria Popova July 17, 2012

Guest blogger Maria Popova—creator of Brain Pickings, shares for summer reading pleasure her selection of five notable design titles published during 2012. — SK

Maria Popova

Guest blogger: Maria Popova: Brain Pickings (New York)

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Summer is a time of escapism, be it physical or intellectual and creative. Summer reading is thus an invitation to explore the whimsical and the esoteric, or to shine new light on previously unknown facets of the familiar. Here are five books that offer precisely that.

 

I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

Ramsingh Urveti

For the past 17 years, Indian publishing house Tara Books has been giving voice to marginalized art and literature through a commune of artists, writers, and designers collaborating on remarkable handmade books. This die-cut masterpiece two years in the making is based on a 17th-century British “trick” poem and illustrated in the signature Indian folk art style of the Gond tribe by Indian artist Ramsingh Urveti.

Each line of the “trick verse” builds upon the previous one, flowing into a kind of rhythmic redundancy embodied in the physical structure of the book as each repeating line is printed only once, but appears on two pages by peeking through exquisitely die-cut holes that play on the stark black-and-white illustrations. Thus, if read page by page the way one would read a traditional book, the poem sounds spellbindingly surreal—but if read through the die-cuts, a beautiful and crisp story comes together. Achieving this required a remarkable level of ingenuity in order to make the conceptual structure of the poem fit the physicality of the book as a storytelling artifact—a true feat by Japanese-Brazilian RISD designer Jonathan Yamakami.

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100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design

Steven Heller and Véronique Vienne

Steven Heller and Véronique Vienne bring us this thoughtfully curated inventory of abstract concepts that shaped the course of graphic design, each illustrated with exemplary images and historical context. Unlike in other design books, the ideas in this succinct tome aren't organized by chronology. From concepts like manifestos (#25), pictograms (#45), propaganda (#22), found typography (#38), and the Dieter-Rams-coined philosophy that “less is more” (#73) to iconic creators like Saul Bass, Alex Steinweiss, Paula Scher, and Stefan Sagmeister, the sum of these carefully constructed parts amounts to an astute lens not only on what design is and does, but also on what it should be and do.

The book comes from UK-based publisher Laurence King, who brought us last year's epic Saul Bass monograph.

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Abstract City

Christoph Niemann

Christoph Niemann is one of today's most masterful visual communicators, his illustrations at once endlessly refreshing and profoundly familiar in their ability to capture the universality of the human condition. Abstract City gathers 16 of his New York Times visual essays, infused with his signature blend of humor and thoughtfulness, exploring everything from his love-hate relationship with coffee to his obsession with maps to the fall of the Berlin Wall. An additional chapter on his creative process presents the ultimate cherry on top.

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Hippopposites

Janik Coat

In her children's book debut, French graphic designer Janik Coat teaches the progeny of the design-inclined about opposites and basic spatial, dimensional, and aesthetic vocabulary through a minimalist red hippo-hero, who remains charmingly catatonic throughout the book. With unexpected parallels and contrasts and a simple semiotic sensibility, Coat explores fundamental concepts in simple yet whimsical ways.

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Information Graphics

Sandra Rendgen; Julius Wiedemann, ed.

Information design books abound, but count on Taschen to take a common publishing trope and elevate it both in concept and in execution. Weighing in at 8 pounds, this lavish, ultra-large-format, 480-page tome by art historian Sandra Rendgen explores the four key aspects of visualizing data—Location, Time, Category, and Hierarchy—through exemplary work from more than 200 projects, alongside essays by information architect and TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, Guardian Datablog editor Simon Rogers, Density Design’s Paolo Ciuccarelli, and Rendgen herself.

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