5 Books Every UX Designer Should Read
With so many books out there, it’s hard for my fellow bookworms to decide which to chew through next. Here’s a collection of favorites I’ve read or heard about recently and have found useful.
UX is an expansive field which requires knowledge of a variety of traditional design disciplines as well as other related industries. One rule of thumb is to have an open mind toward learning and expand your field of view as a designer — and gain new insights into a field that is active and changing.
Add these five to your summer reading list today!
Five Summer Must-Reads in Design
By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons (Ralph Caplan)
Not only did the title peak my interest, this book is vastly underrated. It delves into the history of design, going through its purpose and how to enhance its process today with many relevant examples aka object lessons.
Steal Like An Artist (Austin Kleon)
Filled with new truths about creativity: Nothing is original, so embrace influence, collect ideas, and remix and re-imagine to discover your own path. Follow your interests wherever they take you.
The Elements of Typographic Style (Robert Bringhurst)
A readable manual and reference on modern typography, exploring the art and history of the field as well as technical details, full of illustrated examples.
Interactions of Color (Josef Albers)
Color in design is incredibly influential and a need to know. Every study includes “such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds.”
Designing News: Changing the World of Editorial Design and Information Graphics (Francesco Franchi)
Information design is becoming more relevant in a data obsessed world. Communication via information graphics is explored and paired with visions of the future of news reporting by publishing companies and on the internet.
Bonus: Just for Inspiration
The Feltron Report (Nicholas Feltron)
Visualization of information has always fascinated me, ever since I saw what could be done with it through tantalizing infographics such as in The Feltron Report.
Through the lens of self-quantification, this data viz guru from Facebook recounts his life, broken down into a landscape of statistics and data.
Not Impossible: The Art and Joy of Doing What Couldn’t Be Done (Mick Ebeling)
Shown through a series of life stories, Ebeling describes ways to create new, simple, do-it-yourself technologies to help people surmount seemingly impossible odds.
Interesting from a maker/design perspective on deciding what’s meaningful to create, less emphasis on how to create it.
