Book List of the Week

The Book List of the Week highlights the list of books provided by invited designers (including architects, fashion designers, graphic designers, interior designers, landscape architects, product designers, urban designers, and other design professionals) who have chosen books that inspire them and that have shaped their worldview or their ideas about design.
189 blog entries
Book List of the Week
October 27, 2014

This year’s DesignThinkers conference, Canada’s largest conference for visual communicators, hosted by the Canadian Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD) conference on November 6 and 7, 2014, features five graphic designers who have sent us book lists: Ellen Lupton, Abbott Miller, Debbie Millman, Paula Scher, and Erik Spiekermann. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter October 20, 2014

As founder and director of MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory, Carlo Ratti investigates how digital technologies are changing urban living. Trained as an architect (he runs an architecture firm in Turin, Italy) and engineer, he also has several patents to his name. His Digital Water Pavilion, exhibited at the 2008 World Expo in Barcelona, was hailed by Time magazine as one of the Best Inventions of the Year. More...

Book List of the Week
October 13, 2014

We highlight five designers from Finland and Scandinavia this week. These are: architect Craig Dykers of the Norwegian-U.S. firm Snøhetta, Finnish architect Mikko Heikkinen (Heikkinen + Komonen), architect Jens Holm (HAO, Demanrk/U.S.), Juhani Pallasmaa (former dean of the School of Architecture at Helsinki University of Technology), and Danish product designer Jens Martin Skibsted (KiBiSi/Biomega). More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter October 6, 2014

Architect Daniel Libeskind, one of our original book list contributors, was the keynote speaker Thursday, October 9, at the first-ever Dwell on Design New York, a “festival of modern design” organized by Dwell magazine October 9–11. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter September 29, 2014

British architect Ian Ritchie lists 35 books that have inspired him in the course of a career that extends over 40 years. His celebrated work includes sharing the creation of the Louvre Pyramid and Sculpture Courts with I. M. Pei in Paris, the Leipzig International Exhibition Center Glass Hall in Germany, and The Spire in Dublin. More...

Book List of the Week
September 22, 2014

Four designers hailing from Germany are highlighted this week: graphic designer and “typomaniac” Erik Spiekermann (FontBook) and product/industrial designers Hartmut Esslinger (frog Design for Apple), Fritz Frenkler (frog Design), and Carola Zwick (Studio 7.5). More...

Book List of the Week
September 15, 2014

Almost all designers are in effect theorists, but here are five spanning different generations who are as much known for their theoretical reseach and experimentation as for their physical products. The designers are: architects Peter Eisenman (IAUS founder) and Jürgen Mayer H. (Metropol Parasol), graphic designers Sheila Levrant de Bretteville (Women’s Graphic Center) and Prem Krishnamurthy (Project Projects), and product designer Jonathan Olivares (A Taxonomy of Office Chairs). More...

Book List of the Week
September 8, 2014

Happy Year of the Pig! Revisit these four designers from China and Hong—each from a different area of design. They include product and graphic designer Freeman Lau, interior designer Ed Ng, fashion designer Guo Pei, and architect Rocco Yim. Also see our list of 15 Books on China and Design. More...

Book List of the Week
September 1, 2014

Back to school this week? Here are three “dean’s lists” of books selected by Mohsen Mostafavi, who heads Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design; Kent Kleinman, dean of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning; and Alan Balfour, former dean of the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. More...

Book List of the Week
By Stephanie Salomon August 25, 2014

We salute graphic designer Deborah Sussman (1931–2014), who passed away last week, with a look at the books that inspired the colorful designer of the colorful and distinctive environmental graphics that became synonymous with Los Angeles and the California New Wave movement. More...