Three books I recommend instead of a course

People ask me fairly often to recommend something to read about design. I am Alexander Chernov, I have been doing this since 2005, and I am not going to recommend a course. Three books off my shelf instead, each with a caveat.

James Felici, The Complete Manual of Typography#

The only one on the list I call required reading. It is about craft: leading, widows, rivers, kerning, everything that separates typesetting from typing. Read it and you will never look at bad typography calmly again, which is a curse, and a useful one. I have recommended it to juniors for years and I have no idea whether any of them finished it.

Tim Brown, Change by Design#

I have been hard on design thinking as a design method, and I take back none of it. Brown’s book is worth reading for a different reason: it is a textbook of the language business uses to talk about design. You need to know what a CEO means when they say “design thinking”, if only so you can politely head off one more workshop with sticky notes.

Web Design Book of Trends 2015–2016#

I keep this one as a vaccine. It is a book of the trends of the future, published ten years ago. Half of them died within a year. The other half became so normal that they stopped being trends. Worth rereading every time a fresh report promises ten trends that will change everything.

And a record#

Bonus track. A vinyl record is the best teaching object in industrial design I know: the medium, the packaging, the typography on the label and the ritual of playing it, all in one thing you can hold. It also settles an old confusion. An obsolete format and bad design are different things. Vinyl outlived the cassette, outlived the CD, and looks likely to outlive streaming.

Books about design do not make you a designer. They give you words for what your hands already know.