Book Recommendation
5 Must-Read Books for Designers
The only books you will ever need for understanding design
Design sense, design knowledge, and design intellectual are like a never-ending sea. There are many parameters, criteria, interpretations, and assumptions on numerous topics in the system itself. Hence, it lies in the reader’s decision on the book they wish to read. Reading helps to unkey the design creativity and design intellectual of the individual. Many books by famous designers are offered as guide books and inspire people to explore their creativity quotient.
1. Layout Essentials: 100 Design Principles for Using Grids
Graphic designers need to understand grid theory. As grids are the foundation of all the design projects, one must know all the grids’ rules. This book guides us through layout guidelines with 100 design principles, including choosing the typeface, striving for rhythm, balance with type, combining typefaces using special characters, and kerning, and legibility. This book helps us design more professionally, accurately, and precisely where the individual creates brochures, reports, posters, and layouts.
The golden ratio has been used in art and architecture for thousands of years. Also called the golden section, the golden ratio describes a ratio of elements, such as height to width. The ratio is approximately 0.618. In other words, the smaller segment (for example, the width) is to the larger segment (the height) as the larger segment is to the sum of both segments. — Beth Tondreau, Author
2. The Design of Everyday Things
This book helps us to understand how some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them. The author Don Norman wrote this book in the late 1980s but is still relatable today as it has been updated a few times. This book provides knowledge that helps you to communicate the design decisions. It clears our vision of excellent and bad design choices and elaborates more on good design factors.
A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem — Don Norman, Author
3. Don’t make me think
This book is served as a bible for innumerable web designers and businesspeople. It has an excellent explanation of creating simple websites and navigating people through books in the digital medium. It is helpful for the everyday user problems to usability. Also, it gives us a precise workflow of how to propose design changes to stakeholders.
If you want a great site, you’ve got to test. After you’ve worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can’t see it freshly any more You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it — Steve Krug, Author
4. Thinking with Type
In the streams of typography, this is the most recommended book. It is a guidebook that will explain the visual examples of possibilities of innovations within defined typography formats, tenets, and rules and how to modify them.
Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy’s habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail. By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place, or product — Ellen Lupton, Author
5. About Face: The Essentials of Interaction
All the primary design interfaces we are used to are in the digital medium. Hence, it must be essential to have a book that elaborates more on interaction design. This book serves as a one-stop for UI/UX designers.
Define what the product will do before you design how the product will do it — Alan Cooper, Author
