7 Books All Designers Should Read

Being a stand-out designer means you can never stop learning, evolving, and understanding. Aesthetic is ever-changing and establishing a unique, timeless look can turn into somewhat of a life’s work for most designers. So, if you are a passionate designer who wants to hone their craft, these are the books you should read and come to know well.

While all of these books are hand-selected and recommended whole-heartedly, we thought it’d be pretty uncool not to let you know that we may make money if you choose to buy from these links.

“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.”

“Fire,” yells someone in a theater. Immediately everyone stampedes toward the exits. What do they do at the exit door? Push. If the door doesn’t open, they push harder. But what if the door opens inward and must be pulled, not pushed? Highly anxious, highly focused people are very unlikely to think of pulling.”

“Work on as many ideas as you can. Even the weak ones will act as a springboard into a new way of thinking. Don’t edit yourself, let the ideas flow out. Use ideas as a pathway, let them act as signal markers on your path to a great idea. ”

“Visual communication of any kind, whether persuasive or informative, from billboards to birth announcements, should be seen as the embodiment of form and function: the integration of the beautiful and useful. Copy, art, and typography should be seen as a living entity; each element integrally related, in harmony with the whole, and essential to the execution of an idea.”

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”

“To design is to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.”

“Like a muscle, your creative abilities will grow and strengthen with practice.”