23 Best Books Every Designer Must Read
Add them to your reading list to stay industry savvy
Published in
2 min readDec 21, 2016
Staying up-to-date on your design knowledge is a big part of continuously improving your career. I’ve complied a brief list of good books about usability, web design, graphic design and more.
In addition to past book lists I’ve complied, here are a few more to explore:
Visual Design
- 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design (Stephen Heller, Veronique Vienne)
- Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information (Manuel Lima)
Usability
- Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated (William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler)
- Moderating Usability Tests: Principles & Practice for Interacting(Joseph Dumas, Beth Loring)
- Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems (Steve Krug)
Web Design
- Prioritizing Web Usability (Jakob Nielsen, Hoa Loranger)
- Bulletproof Web Design (Dan Cederholm)
- Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond (Louis Rosenfeld Peter Morville Jorge Arango)
- Microinteractions: Designing with Details (Dan Saffer)
Psychology
- 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Susan Weinschenk)
- Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics (Stephen Wendel)
- Designing for Emotion (Aaron Walter)
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Nir Eyal)
Process
- Living with complexity (Don Norman)
- Simplicity: A Matter of Design (Per Mollerup)
- Graphic Design Thinking: Beyond Brainstorming (Ellen Lupton)
- Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions (Bruce Hanington)
- The Persona Lifecycle: A Field Guide for Interaction Designers (John Pruitt, Tamara Adlin)
Branding
- Brand Bible (Debbie Millman)
- Logo Design Love (David Airey)
- The Brand Gap (Marty Neumeier)
- Sticky Branding: 12.5 Principles to Stand Out, Attract Customers, and Grow an Incredible Brand (Jeremy Miller)
- The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build, and Accelerate Your Brand (Karen Leland)
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