Designers & Books Blog

 

856 blog entries
Guest posts
By Julie Lasky January 26, 2012

Guest blogger: Julie Lasky (Design Observer/Change Observer, New York)
Profile   Notable Books of 2011
Guest blogger Julie Lasky—design and visual culture journalist, critic, and author—talks about attempting to write a book for children on design. — SK More...

Daily Features
By Steve Kroeter February 12, 2014

Designers & Books presents its first annual Design Book of the Year Award. More...

Book List of the Week
August 4, 2014

To mark the publication of two new books about books and their covers, written by Knopf art director Peter Mendelsund, we’re featuring the book lists of five graphic designers admired for their book cover work. The designers, along with Peter Mendelsund, associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf and the author of What We See When We Read and Cover, both debuting this week, are Seymour Chwast (Push Pin Studios), Coralie Bickford-Smith (Penguin Classics), Chip Kidd (Alfred A. Knopf and author of Go!), and Carin Goldberg. More...

Book List of the Week
December 1, 2014

The art, techniques, and theories of photography have influenced the work of architects and designers almost since photography’s invention in the mid-19th century and subsequent reproduction in books and magazines. Here are five designers working today who have been inspired by photography books: graphic designers Kit Hinrichs, George Tscherny, and Véronique Vienne, architect James Biber, and fashion designer Reed Krakoff. More...

Book List of the Week
November 24, 2014

This week we’re highlighting the books that have had an influence on five industrial designers. The designers are:  Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO), the late Niels DiffrientDan Formosa (Smart Design co-founder), Sam Hecht (Industrial Facility, London), and David Weeks. More...

Book List of the Week
September 15, 2014

Almost all designers are in effect theorists, but here are five spanning different generations who are as much known for their theoretical reseach and experimentation as for their physical products. The designers are: architects Peter Eisenman (IAUS founder) and Jürgen Mayer H. (Metropol Parasol), graphic designers Sheila Levrant de Bretteville (Women’s Graphic Center) and Prem Krishnamurthy (Project Projects), and product designer Jonathan Olivares (A Taxonomy of Office Chairs). More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter October 25, 2011

Graphic design curator, educator, and practitioner Ellen Lupton: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (New York) and Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore)
Book List
Being at the intersection, as she is, of the worlds of design, publishing, academia, and museums, Ellen Lupton has a unique perspective on the importance and power of language. In the introduction to her list of “Books Every Graphic Designer Should Read” she makes the (not intuitively obvious) claim that “reading and writing are fundamental skills for any graphic designer.” She describes writing as the process of “converting fleeting notions into concrete things”—which seems to be not a bad working definition of design itself—and asserts that those who are truly influential in graphic design are all “confident and creative writers.” More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter August 21, 2012

Graphic designer Zuzana Licko: Emigre (Berkeley, California)
Profile    Book List
Co-founder of Emigre, one of the first independent digital type foundries, and an iconic magazine of the same name, with partner and husband Rudy VanderLans (featured this June on Designers & Books), Zuzana Licko has created typefaces inspired by the experimentation and innovative thinking new Macintosh computers made possible when they were first released in the early 1980s. More...

Daily Features
By Stela Razzaque, Superscript October 24, 2013

Over the past 400 years, only two chair designs have graced the distinguished reading rooms of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Here is the latest one by Barber Osgerby. More...

Book List of the Week
September 22, 2014

Four designers hailing from Germany are highlighted this week: graphic designer and “typomaniac” Erik Spiekermann (FontBook) and product/industrial designers Hartmut Esslinger (frog Design for Apple), Fritz Frenkler (frog Design), and Carola Zwick (Studio 7.5). More...