Designers & Books Blog

 

856 blog entries
Daily Features
October 24, 2023

Renowned graphic designer and Designers & Books contributor Stefan Sagmeister brings us exactly the book we need now.

Titled Now is Better, this visual exploration of human progress over the past several centuries takes a long view that gives us cause for hope in the face of much of the current news. More...

July 13, 2023

A global Baedeker to the long and interesting history of the planned suburb.

One Book and Why
June 15, 2023

In this summer installment of “One Book and Why,” Frederick Steiner, dean of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, recommends Before Central Park, an authoritative recent chronicle of two centuries of the history of New York City’s most famous work of of urban landscape design More...

April 12, 2023

I have enjoyed her stories and her essays, but connect best to Grace Paley’s poetry. Read anything by her.

Daily Features
November 21, 2022

For this holiday gift-giving season, here is just a sampling of the books published in 2022 written and illustrated by our contributing architects, designers, and design critics. From the delicate drawings of Maira Kalman to the luminous wood constructions of architect Shigeru Ban, we hope they will provide inspiration for you — and ideas for your gift list. More...

October 6, 2022

In spite of being almost 100 years old, this book retains the power of its clarity of vision and purity of ideals and intent. How can you disagree with: “beauty being the overplus necessary to the human spirit.” Or with a reference to poetry—which “not only lies in the written word. Objects which signify something and which are arranged with talent and with tact create a poetic fact.”

 

Daily Features
October 5, 2021

David Feldman, son of the esteemed experimental printer, artist, and co-editor and co-designer of The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn, offers a poignant recollection of his father and the architect Louis Kahn. The essay is part of our continuing celebration of Kahn’s 120th birthday this year, which includes the re-issue of this 1962 book of the architect’s work. More...

October 29, 2019

Enjoy the music, and the playfully searching, the hermetic Cubism of Stein’s writing.

June 25, 2019

This is a “must read” for anyone interested in better understanding human response to our physical world.

Book List of the Week
June 5, 2019

As a tribute to architect Stanley Tigerman (1930–June 3, 2019), a giant of postmodernism, we are honored to share the list of books that inspired him, which he sent to Designers & Books in 2012. The list, he wrote, was “the tip of an iceberg that helps to define who I am in the autumn of my life.” More...