Daily Features

Creative Reading Lists for CreativeMornings

Designers & Books begins a collaboration with Tina Roth Eisenberg to provide monthly reading lists based on CreativeMornings themes.

By Steve Kroeter November 15, 2013

For the design-inclined and fans of things both visual and witty, Tina Roth Eisenberg and her swissmiss blog are a daily staple. Launched in 2005, each month her daily musings are seen and noted by more than 1,000,000 people around the world. Swissmiss was ranked number 14 in a list of the 50 world’s best design blogs by Times Online.

In 2008, out of her desire to provide a forum for the New York creative community to gather on a regular basis and meet, talk, listen, and have breakfast together, Tina founded CreativeMornings. The sessions take place on one Friday morning each month, are free and open to all, and in addition to eating, drinking, and socializing, include a short talk by someone known for being innovative, inventive, and interesting. Several hundred free tickets are offered for each session, and they are typically gone in three to five minutes after being offered online.

Animated illustration by Stewart Scott-Curran for the November 2013 CreativeMornings theme: bravery. ©CreativeMornings

There have now been close to 60 CreativeMornings talks in New York. The list of those who have spoken includes: Debbie Millman, Paola Antonelli, Steven Heller, Seth Godin, George Lois, Maira Kalman, Charles Renfro, John Maeda, Maria Popova, Milton Glaser, and Michael Bierut.

This idea has also captured the interest of the creative communities around the world. There are now CreativeMornings chapters in 60 cities—from Aarhus to Zurich—one on every continent except Antarctica. Volunteer teams manage the events in each city, and there have been some 900 CreativeMornings presentations offered globally. You can access the archive of all the talks that have taken place in each of the cities here.

Each month all the talks in all the cities focus on a theme selected by CreativeMornings organizers. For November the theme is “Bravery.” Examples of past themes are “Play,” “Happiness,” “Money,” and “Food.”

As part of her ongoing search to extend and expand the ways that CreativeMornings touches its community, Tina has invited Designers & Books to work with her team to develop book lists related to the monthly themes. Each of the titles will chosen from the books that have been submitted to Designers & Books by our designer and commentator contributors.

The first book list has been developed for the CreativeMornings theme for November—which is “Bravery.” There are 10 books on the list, and they are wide-ranging in how they acknowledge “courageous actions and bold examples of heroism.” The titles are selected from the recommendations by our contributors like Michael Bierut and Maira Kalman—and among the books included for this month are Ai Weiwei’s Blog and Gandhi, An Autobiography. The full list can be viewed here, and readers are invited to add to this list via a special CreativeMornings addition to our Community Book Lists.

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