Designers & Books Blog

 

856 blog entries
Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter April 7, 2014

“My book list is like album tracks that take me back to a moment in time,” says Fiona Raby, a partner (with Anthony Dunne) in the industrial design research studio Dunne & Raby. The partners’ work encompasses “speculative everything,” to use the title of Dunne and Raby’s latest book, which sees design as a tool for speculating on how things might be and to imagine possible futures. More...

By Fiona Raby April 7, 2014

Written in a strange language, coming from another place entirely, the idea that the material world could be shaped by and embody a very different set of values than the ones surrounding us today. The inventive and wondrous visual creativity in this book has fueled Dunne & Raby’s current fascination with a kind of imaginative speculative anthropology.

Design Matters: On Books
April 2, 2014

In this interview by Design Matters host Debbie Millman on Design Observer, book designer Irma Boom talks about why she doesn’t think the book is dead, how she designs, and much more. More...

Book List of the Week
March 31, 2014

From Our Archive: April is National Poetry Month in the U.S. In honor, we take a look at five designers’ book lists from our archive that have included books of poetry—by authors ranging from Shakespeare to Mark Strand—as design inspiration. More...

By Cleto Munari March 31, 2014

Discovering this remarkable American poet was a revelation for me. I have even produced a table using his visionary poem dedicated to a man and his camel. His often surreal metaphors are a continuous inspiration for my work.

Weekly Wrap-Up & Preview
March 28, 2014

Our Wrap-Up & Preview is back, now appearing at the end of each month with highlights from the previous weeks and a foretaste of what’s to come. Over the past several weeks we featured a book list from Anthony Dunne of Dunne & Raby and an essay on “digital flattening” by logo designer Mark Fox, who also sent some new additions to his book list. We celebrated our three-year anniversary with a look back at some book lists from our archive and and we also posted themed book lists honoring the birthdays of architects Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe and in collaboation with CreativeMornings and its March theme of “Hidden.” More...

By Wim Crouwel March 27, 2014

Mies van der Rohe is one of my heroes.

Books on Designers
March 27, 2014

Happy Birthday, Mies van der Rohe! These 12 books on architect Mies van der Rohe (b. March 27, 1886, d. August 19, 1969) were chosen or written by our contributors, including Massimo Vignelli, Stanley Tigerman, and Phyllis Lambert, or come from our featured publishers. Building Seagram was the winner of the 2013 Designers & Books Design Book of the Year Award, Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies was a Designers & Books Notable Book of 2012, and Detlef Mertins’s Mies was just published this month. More...

Themed Book Lists
March 26, 2014

A follow-up to “50 Books on Type on Typography,” here are a dozen additional books from our contributors that explore lettering. 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...