Design Books
Digital Materialities: Design and Anthropology
As the distinction between the digital and the material world becomes increasingly blurred, the ways in which we think about design are also shifting and evolving. Digital Materialities presents twelve chapters by scholars and practitioners working at the intersection between design and digital research in the UK, Spain, Australia and the USA. By incorporating in-depth understandings of the digital-material world from both the social sciences and design, the book considers how this combined knowledge might advance our capacity to design for the future.
British Design: Tradition and Modernity after 1948
British Design brings together leading international scholars, designers and journalists to provide new perspectives on British design in the last sixty years, and how it at once looked back to the past with the continuation of traditions that spoke to Britain's design heritage, and looked forwards with the embrace of modernist and postmodernist style. The book responds to and develops new ways of understanding the recent history of design in Britain, with case studies on designed spaces and objects, including domestic interiors, retail spaces, schools and university buildings and transport.
Research for Designers: A Guide to Methods and Practice
Design is everywhere: it influences how we live, what we wear, how we communicate, what we buy, and how we behave. In order for designers to design for the real world, defining strategies rather than just implementing them, they need to learn how to understand and solve complex, intricate and often unexpected problems. This book is a guide to this new creative process.
Shut Your Monkey: How to Control Your Inner Critic and Get More Done
Shut Your Monkey by Sketchbook Skool founder and artist Danny Gregory is about that pesky voice in your head that prevents you from expressing yourself creatively. It whispers in your ear, and sabotages your work before it's completed. In his new book, Gregory uses drawings, photographs, and motivational writings to communicate valuable knowledge on the creative process, gathered from his years working in the advertising and design industry. He offers a window into the workings of one's inner critic, and teach readers how to put it in its place.
Write Nothing in Here
Creative and copywriter Seema Sharma challenges you to get more ideas out of your day. With Write Nothing In Here she wants to engage and inspire people to come up with concepts without any brief; indeed, with the help of nothing.
100 Years Of Color: Beautiful Images
A perfect source of inspiration for any professional in the visual arts, this innovative book presents one hundred sensational examples of eye-opening color design, complete with all the information you need to reproduce them faithfully on screen or in print.
Simplicity: A Matter of Design
Simplicity: A Matter of Design offers a set of terms that allows us to discuss simplicity in design with precision. It looks into the basics of simplicity and researches more in depth three aspects of design: functionality (simplicity for comfort), aesthetics (simplicity for pleasure), and ethics (simplicity for conscience). There is an extra chapter on simplicity in communication.
Change Ahead
Change Ahead, by the author Carola Verschoor, is about the emerging practices at the intersection of business strategy, research, and design. It reveals her philosophy, working processes, and approaches to business creation and development. It introduces the need for an adventurous, explorative mindset in order to grow businesses that last by creating meaning and relevance with and for people.
Design the Life You Love
Design the Life You Love uses a simple but proven creative thinking and design process to give ordinary people new tools to think about life differently, and also includes fascinating examples from the world of art and design that relate to each step of the process, plus guided creative exercises. Turn constraints into opportunities with optimism and holistic thinking using four simple steps: taking the whole apart, forming a new point of view, putting it back together, and giving it form. The striking design and Ayse Birsel's hand-drawn art and type set off her brilliant, life-changing design process, empowering and inspiring readers to create a better life.
Tranparent: Translucency in Design
Transparency is a powerful attribute in design, carrying a personality that can be as glaring as hues. It extends and limits vision, spawns a sense of presence and absence and conceals and reveals content, luring viewers into exploring what lies beneath and beyond. In three sections sorted by opacity, transparency and then everything in between, this book unveils the mutable visual experiences of transparency and how they can be achieved through the inventive use of materials, paper and printing. Encompassing brand identities, product packaging, photography as well as installations, the 110 select works demonstrate how transparency is interpreted anew in design.
The Design Studio Method: Creative Problem Solving with UX Sketching
The Design Studio Method is a creative problem solving process that allows you to quickly generate ideas, evaluate them, and reach consensus, achieving that balancing act. This book simplifies the complicated method, explaining each step, each participant's involvement, and how to adapt the method to your needs.
CO LAB: Collaborative Design Survey
Young, hungry, interdisciplinary designers and artists are gathering to form small teams to tackle personal and commissioned projects, while challenging outdated views of authorship and agency-based assembly line production. Armed with cheap gear and accessible software, they can design anything for anyone, proudly leaving their mark on what they create. CO LAB offers a set of contextual essays on facets of collaboration and concludes with a highly diverse range of case study interviews.
Design: The Definitive Visual History
Design: The Definitive Visual History is a gorgeous and informative book cataloging everything from iconic designers to objects. This massive and colorful book profiles famous designers such as Alvar Aalto, Frank Gehry, and Philippe Starck and includes stunning images of buildings and interiors.
Not Invented Here: Cross-industry Innovation
Cross-industry innovation is a clever way to jump-start your innovation efforts by drawing analogies and transferring approaches between contexts, beyond the borders of your own industry, sector, area or domain. This inspirational, visual and elegantly illustrated business book presents key strategies and concrete tools for cross-industry innovation.
The Creativity Challenge
This book challenges you to go against your default ways of thinking in order to write, design, and build something extraordinary. Featuring more than 100 challenges, exercises, and prompts, each page guides you as you push past the way you normally see the world and uncover all-new possibilities and ideas. The Creativity Challenge teaches you that you already have immense creative potential in you-you just need to tap into it.
Nimble: Thinking Creatively in the Digital Age
Nimble is designed to help creative professionals cultivate the mental agility needed to thrive in today's digital age. This book focuses on providing creatives and aspirants with the tools and resources needed to generate and execute big ideas including: platforms that build community, branded utilities, high-quality branded entertainment, disruptive business models, marketing as service, and product designs that make our lives better.
How to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
How to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too is written for the manager with little time, in the spirit of the 80-minute MBA. The book is about improving costumer experiences - about designing a whole service, from the moment the customer starts thinking about the possible purchase until the end of the life cycle of the product. The perfect book for all business readers who are looking for an accessible introduction to the topic: short, concrete with tangible benefits clearly defined. It offers a method for adding more value for your clients and create a competitive edge.
The Service Innovation Handbook
The Service Innovation Handbook provides a language and practical concepts for understanding what is involved in service innovation design; 15 practical tools to stimulate creative approaches at the early stages of service innovation design and 16 cases demonstrating how different kinds of organizations have gone about designing their services. The book is aimed at people studying or working in organizational contexts trying to tackle complex challenges through service innovation who might come from a background in design, user research, IT, management, policy or entrepreneurship.
Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized: The Complete Interviews
Celebrated independent filmmaker Gary Hustwit's Design Trilogy famously brought in the insight of experts to beautifully present the subjects of typography, graphic design, urban design, architecture, and industrial design. This book features complete interviews from all three films in the Design Trilogy, including 100 hours of never-before-released conversations, with a foreword and notes on each interview by Gary Hustwit.
Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective
In Oblique Drawing, Massimo Scolari investigates "anti-perspective" visual representation over two thousand years, finding in the course of his investigation that visual and conceptual representations are manifestations of the ideological and philosophical orientations of different cultures. Images prove to be not just a form of art but a form of thought, a projection of a way of life. Scolari's generously illustrated studies show that illusionistic perspective is not the only, or even the best, representation of objects in history; parallel projection, for example, preserves in scale the actual measurements of objects it represents, avoiding the distortions of one-point perspective.
Dutch Design Yearbook 2014
The Dutch Design Yearbook offers a multifaceted survey of the best designs produced in the Netherlands in the fields of spatial design, product design, fashion and graphic design. This year's edition additionally focuses on those designs that will change our environment in the near future.
The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking
Contrary to popular belief, innovation is not some mystical art that's forbidden to mere mortals. The Four Lenses of Innovation thoroughly debunks this pervasive myth by delivering what we've long been hoping for: the news that innovation is systematic, it's methodical, and we can all achieve it. By asking how the world's top innovators-Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and many others-came up with their game-changing ideas, bestselling author Rowan Gibson identifies four key business perspectives that will enable you to discover groundbreaking opportunities for innovation and growth: Challenging Orthodoxies, Harnessing Trends, Leveraging Resources, and Understanding Needs.
Design Fundamentals: Notes on Visual Elements and Principles of Composition
Design Fundamentals: Notes on Visual Elements and Principles of Composition looks and functions like a student's sketchbook with handwritten notes and illustrations that capture the key concepts and assignments taught in a foundation course on the elements and principles of design. More than just a collection of gorgeously illustrated notes, this "notebook" is an essential guide to the basic elements of composition-dot, line, shape, form, color, texture, and pattern-as well as the principles for composing the elements on flat surfaces (paper, canvas, screens) and in three dimensions.
Super-Modified: The Behance Book of Creative Work
Presenting a selection of trailblazing creativity from around the globe tightly curated by the Behance team, Super-Modified takes you inside the trends driving today's most exciting art and design. For example, the book looks at how a humble material such as felt is currently experiencing a renaisssance in office spaces, furniture, and character design; how computer algorithms are being used to generate an infinite variety of breathtaking abstract shapes; how a focus on recycled design is making everything from discarded aluminum cans to shipping containers fair game for reinvention; and how the grand, cinematic visions of traditional architecture are finding their way into interior spaces.
Material Alchemy
Material Alchemy presents the most innovative, thought-provoking design approaches to materials within the 21st century. Enlisting the help of luminaries from the world of science, technology, and design to showcase new responses to material innovation and providing key insights into how materials will be utilized to shape our future environments.
Design to Grow: How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility
In Design to Grow, a Coca-Cola senior executive shares both the successes and failures of one of the world's largest companies as it learns to use design to be both agile and big. In this rare and unprecedented behind-the-scenes look, David Butler and senior Fast Company editor, Linda Tischler, use plain language and easy-to-understand case studies to show how this works at Coca-Cola-and how other companies can use the same approach to grow their business.
B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube
Covering subjects that range from authenticity to Grand Theft Auto to Dieter Rams, Deyan Sudjic's latest book has been called "a master class in musing on modern design." Though it is organized in A-Z format, it is not a dictionary or an encyclopedia in the strictest sense. Rather, it is an essential tool kit for understanding the world through emblematic examples, both historic and contemporary, from the field of design
Make Your Mark: The Creative's Guide to Building a Business with Impact
Featuring hard-won wisdom from twenty leading entrepreneurs and designers, 99U's Make Your Mark will arm you with practical insights for launching a purpose-driven business, refining your product, delighting your customers, inspiring your team-and ultimately-making something that matters.
Design in Frankfurt 1920-1990
Design in Frankfurt 1920-1990 outlines the prevalent design trends in Frankfurt and in the Rhine-Main-area from the 1920s to the 1980s. For furniture, interior and graphic design made in and around Frankfurt over seven decades, functionality, visual strength, austerity, aesthetics in clear shapes and the visionary element always played a major role. This first compact illustration of regional design also raises the question, to what extent German design in the 20th century defined itself through decentralized but intensively interlinked places and institutions.
To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure
In To Forgive Design Henry Petroski surveys some of the most infamous failures of our time, from the 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse and the toppling of a massive Shanghai apartment building in 2009 to Boston's prolonged Big Dig and the 2010 Gulf oil spill. These avoidable disasters reveal the interdependency of people and machines within systems whose complex behavior was undreamt of by their designers, until it was too late. Petroski shows that even the simplest technology is embedded in cultural and socioeconomic constraints, complications, and contradictions.