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
By Steve Kroeter October 23, 2012

Architect Farshid Moussavi: Farshid Moussavi Architecture (London)
Profile     Book List
Architect Farshid Moussavi—who will be the speaker this Thursday, October 25, in the Fall 2012 lecture series of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)—is the second designer in the collaboration between the GSD and Designers & Books that features book lists from a variety of GSD guest lecturers. Concurrent with this collaboration, a display of selections from Moussavi’s Designers & Books list as well as publications from the library’s collections by and about the architect and her work are on view at the GSD’s Frances Loeb Library through October 26. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter July 30, 2013

Paolo Deganello first came onto the design scene in the 1960s as a founder of the radical Italian design collective Archizoom. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter July 16, 2013

Graphic designer Coralie Bickford-Smith: Penguin Books UK (London)
Profile     Book List
“My book list contains the favorites that I find in my hands time and again when starting a project or feeling a bit lost,” says London-based graphic designer Coralie Bickford-Smith, whose book covers for Penguin Classics’ clothbound series recalling the age of Victorian bookbinding have won her recognition and fans worldwide. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter September 16, 2013

Phyllis Lambert, Founding Director Emeritus of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), one of the world’s preeminent museums focused on architecture, has some advice for architects at all stages of their careers: “Young architects, architects tout court, must be deeply and widely engaged in reading—asking essential questions.” Lambert is the winner of the 2013 Designers & Books Design Book of the Year Award for her book Building Seagram. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter June 28, 2011

Graphic designer Chip Kidd: Alfred A. Knopf  (New York) 
book list 
As a book jacket designer turned novelist, Chip Kidd is keenly attuned to the power of both the visual and the verbal. In an interview with Véronique Vienne for Designers & Books, he talks about the interplay of images, words, and ideas within the framework of his second novel, The Learners (2008), whose main character is a graphic designer working in advertising during the 1950s. In addition to his novels, Kidd, an art director at Alfred A. Knopf, has authored a number of books on comic-strip art.  More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter May 14, 2013

Textile design firm executive Michael Maharam: Maharam (New York)
Profile     Book List
As CEO of his family’s over 110-year-old textile firm, Michael Maharam has introduced the work of modern and contemporary graphic, fashion, and industrial designers to the company’s commercial fabric lines. Hella Jongerius, Maira Kalman, Abbott Miller, and Paul Smith, among many others, have all designed for Maharam, which has become known for the progressive design and engineering of its textiles for architects and interior designers. More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter October 4, 2012

Architect Tod Williams: Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (New York)
Profile     Book List
Architect Tod Williams savors what he reads. “I read slowly and want to be deeply engaged,” Williams says in the introduction to his book list for Designers & Books. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter July 9, 2013

Branding design firm executive Alexander Haldemann: MetaDesign (San Francisco)
Profile     Book List
As head of MetaDesign, an award-winning brand-design agency that has developed brand systems for clients like Apple, Adobe, Current.TV, Nike, and Sony, Alexander Haldemann spends a lot of time thinking, writing, and speaking about the creativity needed to communicate the identities of some of the world’s most recognizable products. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter April 10, 2012

Product Designer and Design Educator Bruce Hannah: Hannah Design and Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY)
Profile   Book List
The books that Bruce Hannah chose for his Designers & Books list make up an eclectic selection reflecting the curiosity and far-reaching interests of an eminent product designer and also the breadth and conceptual perspective of a lifelong teacher. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter November 25, 2013

At a time when the return to handcraftsmanship is often in the news and the community of design “makers” continues to grow, the custom bicycles built by Richard Sachs—and the attentiveness he brings to building them—are still a rare ideal. This same attentiveness is just as evident in what he calls the “pile“ of books he “built” for his list. More...