Designers & Books Blog

 

856 blog entries
Daily Features
By Chappell Ellison, Superscript August 2, 2013

Maurice Sendak’s career extends far beyond Where the Wild Things Are to include over 80 illustrated books, numerous posters, performances, and projects. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter April 9, 2013

Product/industrial designer Jens Martin Skibsted: KiBiSi and Biomega (Copenhagen)
Profile     Book List
Jens Martin Skibsted designs ahead-of-the curve bicycles for Biomega, a company he founded, and electronics, household products, and furnishings for the top Scandinavian industrial design studio KiBiSi, another firm he founded—along with Bjarke Ingels (BIG) and Lars Larsen (Kilo Design). He has been named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader for his design thinking and runs Skibsted Ideation, a design and branding agency. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter June 12, 2012

Graphic designer Rudy VanderLans: Emigre (Berkeley, California)
Profile    Book List
“I love it when a new technology is used to celebrate an old one,” writes graphic designer Rudy VanderLans in the introduction to the book list he recently sent along to us.

In this case he was talking about the fact that the digitally delivered Designers & Books website is very much about celebrating the medium of print. But the idea could easily be extended to VanderLans’s work as co-founder, with his wife, Zuzana Licko, of Emigre (1984–2005)—one of the most influential and controversial graphic design magazines ever, known for its experimental use of digital typeface design and layouts. More...

Daily Features
By Angela Riechers, Superscript January 27, 2014

Dutch-born Irma Boom is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost book designers, and is the youngest person ever to receive the prestigious Gutenberg Prize for a body of work. Her books are distinguished by her experimental approach to formats and a willingness to take design risks. Here she talks about book-making and her life in design. More...

Book List of the Week
June 23, 2014

From our archive, we’ve brought together 10 prominent American women working in graphic design—as practitioners and authors—and the books that inspire them. Design classics and hidden gems, books on nonfiction subjects from art to food, and novels all make the lists. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter January 13, 2014

The son of a famous pair of designers—his father is Gijs Bakker, co-founder of the Dutch design collective Droog and one of the first and most influential conceptual designers; his mother is the late jewelry designer Emmy van Leersum—Aldo Bakker is known for his designs for furniture and tableware in materials such as wood, porcelain, copper, and glass that also have an interactive quality. Objects, he believes, “communicate emotion through association, touch, texture, and materiality.” More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter March 24, 2014

Anthony Dunne, Head of Design Interactions at London’s Royal College of Art and partner, with Fiona Raby in the design studio Dunne & Raby, offers a list of books that “celebrate parallel worlds, the imagination, and unreality in some way.” Dunne is a co-author of the recently published Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. More...

Book List of the Week
By Stephanie Salomon July 19, 2016

The creator of the Morgan Library & Museum’s celebrated signage recommends 5 favorite books and gets a book dedicated to her own career spanning more than 60 years as one of the world’s more respected calligraphers. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter October 20, 2014

As founder and director of MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory, Carlo Ratti investigates how digital technologies are changing urban living. Trained as an architect (he runs an architecture firm in Turin, Italy) and engineer, he also has several patents to his name. His Digital Water Pavilion, exhibited at the 2008 World Expo in Barcelona, was hailed by Time magazine as one of the Best Inventions of the Year. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter July 22, 2019

Cesar Pelli (d. July 19, 2019) has been recognized for a lifetime of distinguished achievement in architecture. He designed some of the contemporary world’s most famous buildings, notably the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (1997), the globe’s tallest buildings until 2004. Take a look at the books that inspired Pelli. More...