Abbott Miller

Graphic Designer / United States / Pentagram

Abbott Miller’s Book List

For Designers & Books I decided to focus on books that were influential on me as a student: as I get older, I realize that they continue to influence the way I think about art, architecture, and design.

6 books
Gregory Ulmer

This book connected Derrida to art and design in an interesting way.

Michel Foucault

Foucault's book offered a radically new way of thinking about modernity. I was obsessed with this book and it became the “gateway” book to the entire Foucault corpus: classifications, prison, death, sexuality, etc.

Carl E. Schorske

Brisk survey of the cultural setting in which Viennese modernism took hold: everything about this book comes to life: architecture, city planning, psychoanalysis, music, literature, painting. A brilliant model of cultural history.

Jed Rasula Editor
Steve McCaffery Editor

This is a sort of perverse “coffee-table” book in that it is a serious study of ways in which language and thought have been visualized. For me it functions to kickstart thinking about type, structure, and spatial aspects of layout. It has radical experiments, vanished languages, and truly strange “proposals” for how thought can be transmitted visually. Unusual and inspiring.

Marshall McLuhan
Quentin Fiore

A model of design and writing, and an exceptional case study of a partnership between a public intellectual and a great designer.

Sigmund Freud

The power of humor and the revelation of incidental details: an endlessly interesting book, even if almost every “joke” or example is terribly unfunny. You had to be there, I guess, and this book takes you there, at the birth of the insight.

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