Book List of the Week

The Book List of the Week highlights the list of books provided by invited designers (including architects, fashion designers, graphic designers, interior designers, landscape architects, product designers, urban designers, and other design professionals) who have chosen books that inspire them and that have shaped their worldview or their ideas about design.

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189 blog entries

Book List of the Week

Intimate Identities: Louise Fili’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter August 7, 2012

Graphic Designer Louise Fili: Louise Fili Ltd (New York)
Profile Book List
For graphic designer Louise Fili, books play an outsize role. Her extensive body of work includes nearly 2,000 book jacket designs as well as numerous concepts for packaging, logos, and brand identities. More...

Book List of the Week

Intertwined Entities: Freeman Lau’s Book List—A Conversation with Zara Arshad

By Steve Kroeter March 12, 2013

Product and graphic designer Freeman Lau: Kan & Lau Design Consultants (Hong Kong)
Profile Book List
Design writer Zara Arshad: Design China (Beijing)
Profile
Internationally renowned product and graphic designer Freeman Lau (Lau Siu-Hong), with more than 300 awards to his name, has designed everything from posters and books to prize-winning water bottle packaging and a series of intertwining chairs and stools. He is also recognized for his work as an educator and curator, and in 2011 was a curator of the Beijing International Design Triennial. Lau’s book CMYK (2012) was just released in Hong Kong and Beijing this past December. Design China’s Zara Arshad, in an interview for Designers & Books, sat down with Freeman Lau recently to talk about reading, writing, designing, and publishing books in Hong Kong and mainland China. More...

Book List of the Week

Interiors as Main Characters and Houses as Important Players: Books Every Interior Designer Should Read—Dominique Browning

By Steve Kroeter April 26, 2011

Interior design editor and writer Dominique Browning (New York and Rhode Island)
book list
Visitors entering Dominique Browning’s home for the first time frequently have the same reaction: “I’ve never seen so many books!” Her love of books, plus her many years of experience at the forefront of the journalistic side of the style and interior design worlds, made us eager to invite her to submit a book list—and happy when she agreed. More...

Book List of the Week

Interaction and Information: Carola Zwick’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter January 22, 2013

Product/Industrial and Interaction Designer Carola Zwick: Studio 7.5 (Berlin)
Profile Book List
“As a designer you are concerned with observing and understanding change and solving emerging needs and problems. In addition, your concepts and ideas as well as the change you hope to trigger with your design intervention need to be communicated clearly,” says Carola Zwick, who along with Burkhard Schmitz and Claudia Plikat co-founded the Berlin-based industrial design firm Studio 7.5. More...

Book List of the Week

Inspired by Everyday Life: Nathalie de Vries’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter October 31, 2012

Architect Nathalie de Vries: MVRDV (Rotterdam)
Profile Book List
Co-founder of the Dutch architecture and urban design practice MVRDV, Nathalie de Vries is the third designer in the collaboration between the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) that features book lists from the GSD and guest lecturers. De Vries will give a lecture at the GSD this Friday, November 2, and a display of books from her Designers & Books list as well as publications by and about MVRDV from the GSD’s Frances Loeb Library collections will be on view in the library through mid-November. More...

Book List of the Week

Inspirations and Reflections of a Flâneur: Ken Carbone’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter July 12, 2012

Graphic designer Ken Carbone: Carbone Smolan Agency (New York)
Profile Book List
“Print is not dead in my life,” writes graphic designer Ken Carbone about his book list for Designers & Books. “I have shelves of books still in their shrink-wrap. I’m a certified book junkie.” More...

Book List of the Week

In the Realm of Ideas: The Book Lists of Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar

By Steve Kroeter March 1, 2011

Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar have been working together for more than 50 years to create visual identities and brand personalities for their clients. The portfolio of their work together—including their partner, Sagi Haviv, who joined the firm in 2003—encompasses many of the world’s most recognizable logos and trademarks, from the Chase octagon to the NBC peacock. More...

Architecture

In the Cube: James Biber’s Book List—Interview by Michael Bierut

By Steve Kroeter November 29, 2011

Architect James Biber: Biber Architects (New York)
Book List Video

Graphic designer Michael Bierut: Pentagram (New York)
Profile

Graphic designer and Pentagram partner Michael Bierut and one-time aspiring biologist turned architect James Biber have been friends, business associates, or both for over 20 years. They also share a major interest in books. Between the two of them they cover just about all the important ways that books can intersect your life: reading them, writing them, designing them, collecting them, being inspired by them—and in one case, fighting over them with a parent. More...

Book List of the Week

Imagining, Understanding, and Interpreting: Philip Freelon's Book List

By Steve Kroeter August 9, 2011

Architect Philip Freelon: The Freelon Group (Durham, NC)
book list
One look at Philip Freelon's varied portfolio of architectural work—his most recent high-profile commission is the Smithsonian's new National Museum of African American History and Culture (with David Adjaye and Davis Brody Bond Aedas), planned for the Mall in Washington, D.C.—and it becomes clear that this decidedly public work is as much about stimulating insights and constructing cultural bridges as it is about the skillful interweaving of artful forms and technology. More...

Book List of the Week

Hardcovers and Paperbacks Will Always Rule: Gail Anderson’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter March 6, 2012

Graphic designer Gail Anderson: New York
Profile Book List
Gail Anderson knows type. She’s made it the center of her much-admired work at Rolling Stone magazine and as the Creative Director of SpotCo, an agency specializing in graphic design for the theater world. With Steven Heller she’s written six popular books on type of all kinds, including New Ornamental Type and New Vintage Type. The team has a new book, New Modernist Type, coming out this fall. A recipient of the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award from the AIGA, Anderson is also an in-demand lecturer on graphic design topics. More...

Announcements

Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister

Now is Better

By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023

Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.

Order the book.

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future

By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022

Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.

Order the book.

Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman

Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People

By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022

Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.

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Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber

Milton Glaser: POP

By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023

This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.

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Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022

Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”

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Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller

Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)

By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023

This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.

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