Book List of the Week

Book List of the Week: Five Book Lists from the World of British Graphic Design

From logos to book covers

May 5, 2014

This week we highlight five book lists chosen by British graphic designers and critics (some are authors of their own major books on graphic design), from Penguin book cover designer Coralie Bickford-Smith to Eye magazine founding editor and visual culture critic Rick Poynor. Our complete list of graphic designers includes 46 contributors.

Jonathan Barnbrook's Book List

None of these are design books. I don’t read directly about design, but instead look to the philosophies and experiences found in literature to influence my work. To be a good designer, you need to understand human beings, and for me the novel is still the best way to understand how people experience, affect, and are influenced by the world around them.

Coralie Bickford-Smith's Book List

Books surround me. I have piles of them waiting patiently for my attention, some for work, some for pleasure or inspiration. Each book has its own memory of how and why it ended up in my consciousness and what it taught me. My book list contains the favorites that I find in my hands time and again when starting a project or feeling a bit lost.

Angus Hyland's Book List

Books, books. I seem to spend my life in books, either in their creation or distribution (usually to my local charity shop as I struggle to fit any more into my small house). My policy is to keep only what I actually need or think I might, optimistically, read at some mythical point in the future.

Harry Pearce's Book List

I'll never forget overhearing a graphic designer expounding on the number of business management books by his bedside. At first I panicked, thinking about my own reading preferences. I went home and looked through all my many, many shelves of books and realized there were none whatsoever on “business management.” In fact, very few were even about design; most were—and still—are concerned with the nature of the human mind.

Rick Poynor's Book List

Books led me to typography and graphic design. Love of reading became love of the medium in which the words are printed, of the type that composes these words, of the substrate that supports them, of the page layouts that give form to narrative and argument, of the covers and bindings that hold these texts and pictures together, of the lettering and imagery that seek to express a book’s essential nature.

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