The Design of Dissent
Milton Glaser & Mirko Ilić
—Read more…So great is our knowledge, in the early years of the twenty-first century, of all that has come before us, so vast is our experience of both human success and also staggering, holocaustic failure, and so sophisticated is our understanding of how little we understand, how vaguely we understand, that a toxic cynicism pervades our spirit, shutting down our capacity for faith, for hope, for imagining change — and consequently shutting down our passion, our imagination. —Tony Kushner (FOREWORD)
I Wonder
Marian Bantjes
Apparently Marian Bantjes' approach to her first book was to make it "feel like a brick of gold." With a cover of gold and silver foils on a satin cloth with gold-gilded page edges and lots of gold ink on the interior, it's definitely a success, gold brick-wise. Her work is known for being both illustrative and typographic at once, involving intricate patterns and highly ornamental vector art. The graphics represent all of these aspects and fully entangled with the text throughout.
—Read more…HTML5 for Web Designers
Jeremy Keith
I don't read many books concerning web design since the web is always changing and often I can find out what I need to know straight from the source, which seems more appropriate anyway. But A List Apart is one of the best (and most attractive) resources I refer to online, and this is their first printed piece, published under the moniker A Book Apart.
—Read more…Stadt Alphabet Wien
Martin Ulrich Kehrer
I always forget to add the various books that come my way that aren't actually books that I read, but most likely hold court on the coffeetable or a prominent location on a bookshelf. Melanie brought me this one from Austria, and it documents Vienna's incredible old signage, in alphabetical order of the business names. Most of these were designed by master signmakers who, as is often the case, weren't necessarily typographers. So the letterforms are pleasingly unique and with anachronistic combinations.
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Logotypes and Letterforms
Doyald Young
In the strongest sense, letterforms do not age but become fixed to a period of time primarily in their application. Longevity is often precluded by blatant design approaches that are banal, modish, and consequently ephemeral. Many products and graphics are designed to seize the moment and cash in on a popular idea.
When I first browsed through this book, I didn't realize all of Young's logos are handlettered. After reading the introduction, I delved back into this catalog of work much differently.
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Make it Bigger
Paula Scher
An attractive tight-back bound book with edge-stained pages, Make it Bigger is at its heart a survey of Scher's work from the 70s through the 90s. Yet it feels more like a memoir or a study of process than just a portfolio of her work. I loved her discussion of discovering how to "sell down" designs at CBS Records (get the highest decision maker on your side and everyone else will fall in line). The various hierarchies of her different positions and the diagram of a meeting are some of my favorite parts of the book.
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The Russian Avant-Garde book 1910–1934
Margit Rowell & Deborah Wye
I noticed this on Leslie's good reads page and put it on my to-read list more to remember it as a potential resource. But I wound up with some time to kill in NYC and the Mid-Manhattan library has it for reference use only, so I went to visit. The book went with the 2002 exhibit that came out of a gift of 1,100 illustrated books from the Judith Rothschild Foundation.
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Hatch Show Print
Jim Sherraden, Elek Horvath, & Paul Kingsbury
Today part of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Hatch Show Print is also the oldest operating letterpress shop in the US. This books takes a look at the history of the shop with lots of samples of posters from the early circus days through the rise of country music to their contemporary work. It's a very handsome book.
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How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul
Adrian Shaughnessy
Another working title for this book was How to be a graphic designer without losing your shirt, and that one actually reads a bit more accurate than this one. This is more about good business practices for finding a job, being freelance, and setting up & running a studio than the more philosophical practices I thought I might find here.
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Book One
Chip Kidd
One of the great advantages to designing book covers is that you don't ever have to have an idea, much less a thought, ever, in your head. That is the author's job. Through a manuscript, he or she will give you all the ideas and thoughts that you could possibly need to design a jacket.
If you've heard of Chip Kidd before, the phrase "the closest thing to a rock star in graphic design" will probably ring a few bells, if not a huge gonging irritation for the inordinate ubiquity of the quote.
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