Book List of the Week

Debbie Millman’s Book List: A Self-Portrait

By Steve Kroeter December 9, 2013

Debbie Millman: Graphic Designer; Sterling Brands, Design Division President; Design Matters, Host (New York)

As a child, the ebullient host of Design Matters, author, and branding expert Debbie Millman, writes in the introduction to her book list: “I ordered as many books as I could afford and when the boxes came in with my name on them, I spent a moment gingerly fingering the corrugated brown carton. I’d sit for a minute or two and imagine what was inside, what the books would be like, and of course how they would look. I have been in love with books ever since.”

That love of storytelling, both written and visual (and often a combination of both), is abundant in Millman’s choice of books and in the comments and even illustrations she sent accompany them. Several are books from her childhood. The Little Golden Book of Words, says Millman, “is one of the first books I ever remember reading. I remembered having little scraps of paper on the cover, with different illustrations of pets and fruit and, somehow, I remembered a carrot. I thought the book was about art, as the main image I had in my head was a simply, yet profoundly rendered color wheel. Long before eBay, I searched for this book in New York flea markets and finally found it. But it wasn’t a book about art, ironically enough; it is called “Words.” (That comment comes along with a photo of the color wheel.)

Color wheel form The Little Golden Book of Words by Selma Chambers, 1948

Another children’s book, Dot for Short, is about a ten-year-old girl who “sees an ad in a ladies’ magazine featuring a contest to write a limerick about ‘why you use Masterpiece Muffin mix.’ The prize was $10,000. She, of course, writes a limerick and . . . well, that’s all I am going to tell you. Needless to say the entire scenario of the book converged with my life, my interests, and even my fledging enchantment with—dare I say it—branding.”

Chris Ware’s Building Stories—a box of 14 individual pieces that include a gameboard, a newspaper, and two books, among other things, to tell the interlocking stories of the residents of one Chicago apartment building—is on Millman’s book list. She says, “The design is not limited to the story or the presentation of the book; it is central to the narrative.” Sprawling novels from the 18th to the 20th centuries also get their due. Millman comments on James Joyces’s Ulysses (the book not about design that has been cited by the most designers on Designers & Books), “A seminal quote from the book, ‘The longest way round is the shortest way home,’ has become the mantra of my life.“ Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is “remarkable in that it precedes modernism, postmodernism, and conceptual art by utilizing these techniques:
—blank chapters
—black pages
—white pages
—playful type
And it was all done in 1759!“

Debbie Millman has written six books on graphic design and branding, including the best-selling Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits, 2011 (Allworth Press) and The Brand Bible (2012, Rockport Publishers). Her most recent book, Self-Portrait as Your Traitor—just released this fall by HOW Books—is a a follow-up to her Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design (2009, HOW Books). In this new book of visual poetry, which combines writings and drawings, says Paula Scher in her introduction, Millman “has invented a 21st-century illuminated manuscript.”

Front and back covers of Self-fPortrait as Your Traitor by Debbie Millman, 2013 (HOW Books)

Watch the special video trailer for Self-Portrait as Your Traitor on the Designers & Books Online Book Fair.

Design Matters Podcast on Books: Debbie Millman & Michael Rock

Design Matters Podcast on Books: Debbie Millman & Sheila Bridges

comments powered by Disqus

Announcements

Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister

Now is Better

By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023

Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.

Order the book.

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future

By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022

Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.

Order the book.

Love Letter to a Garden by Debbie Millman

Love Letter to a Garden

By Debbie Millman
Contributions by Roxane Gay
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: April 15, 2025

From the award-winning artist, designer, and the host of the podcast Design Matters, Debbie Millman, this book tells the visual story of falling in love with gardening—and the philosophies that work conjures. Spread throughout are simple recipes using the garden’s ingredients from Millman’s wife, best-selling author Roxane Gay.

Order the book.

Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber

Milton Glaser: POP

By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023

This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.

Order the book.

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022

Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”

Order the book.

Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller

Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)

By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023

This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.

Order the book.