Inspirational Books

There’s a war on my shelves between design and programming books.  It’s interesting that the programming books look like programming books, whereas the design books are all totally different shapes and sizes.  Here’s a few of the design books that I keep close at hand.

A Smile in the Mind

I borrowed this book off a friend and wanted to keep quiet about the fact I still have it, but he’s likely to read this so I’m going to get busted.  It’s by Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart, and explains the link between humour and wit and design: the subtitle is “witty thinking in graphic design”.

This book demonstrates through examples and short essays how important wit is to design.  It makes it seem so fundamental to design I can’t look at things the same way since reading it.

Show Me the Numbers

Show Me the Numbers by Stephen Few is a slightly technical introduction to the world of presenting tables and graphs.  It explains the history and psychology of presenting data, and gives practical advice and solid examples for producing incredible tables and graphs.

The technical background can be dry at times, but it’s watertight.  If you ever need to win a design argument with your boss, this book is a gold mine.  It’s helped me avoid pie charts time and again!

Paul Arden

I’ve mentioned Paul Arden’s books before on Quite Useful, but It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be is worth mentioning again.  On the surface it appears to be yet another self help book, but Arden’s insightfulness, originality and sense of humour makes me keep coming back to it.

Creative Code by John Maeda

If you’ve read my Beautiful Algorithms articles you’ll know I have a fascination with art and code.  John Maeda has done a lot to further digital art, and this book is an accessible set of case studies about this area.