When it comes to seeking inspiration and learning, graphic designers are spoilt for choice. There is a wealth of literature at our fingertips, all waiting to be explored and enjoyed, helping us to improve and refine our graphic design skills.
No matter whether you’re an established creative or someone who has just enrolled on a graphic design course, I highly recommend this definitive list of 50 Best Graphic Design Books, expertly curated by our Shillington teaching team.
These books are library favourites at our six campuses around the world where Shillington students actively research and reference for their studies and design briefs.
1. Lance Wyman: The Monograph – Unit 20
This monograph is the first major publication devoted to the entire output of Lance Wyman. It showcases the achievements of a long and productive career, from his early work for General Motors, through to his iconic designs for the Mexico 68 Olympics to his more recent projects. An absolute must.
2. Eye Magazine
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal. It’s easily available by subscription and stocked by many specialist bookshops and magazine stores worldwide.
3. Spin: 360° – Unit 19
Spin: 360º is a portrait of one of London’s leading design studios. It’s a 520pp monograph that looks in mouth-watering detail at every aspect of Spin’s work in identity, print, moving image, retail, digital and environmental graphics, as well as the studio’s self-directed activities in publishing, curating and collecting.
4. Logo Modernism (Design) – Jens Muller
Modernist aesthetics in architecture, art, and product design are familiar to many. In soaring glass structures or minimalist canvases, we recognise a time of vast technological advance which affirmed the power of human beings to reshape their environment and to break, radically, from the conventions or constraints of the past. Less well known, but no less fascinating, is the distillation of modernism in graphic design.
This unprecedented publication, authored by Jens Müller, brings together approximately 6,000 trademarks, focused on the period 1940–1980, to examine how modernist attitudes and imperatives gave birth to corporate identity.
5. Typorama: The Graphic Work of Philippe Apeloig – Philippe Apeloig
Philippe Apeloig’s design career began in 1985 at the Musée dOrsay where he designed the poster for the museum’s first exhibition, Chicago, Birth of a Metropolis. He is noted for his posters, many of which are in the collection of MoMA, and his typography, including the typefaces Octobre and Drop.
This highly recommended book surveys and explores the entirety of Apeloig’s graphic design process and philosophy. His posters, logos, visual identities, books and animations are reproduced along with the steps in their development, and the major influences that fuel his work.
6. How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make Things Look Better, Make People Laugh, Make People Cry, and (Every Once in a While) Change the World – Michael Bierut
Protégé of design legend Massimo Vignelli and partner in the New York office of the international design firm Pentagram, Michael Bierut has had one of the most varied careers of any living graphic designer.
In this must-have book, Bierut presents 35 projects that illustrate the breadth of activity that graphic design encompasses today, his goal being to demonstrate not a single ideology, but the enthusiastically eclectic approach that has been a hallmark of his career. Inspiring, informative and authoritative, it’s become the bible of graphic design ideas.
7. Type Plus – Unit 17
Today, graphic designers use type in partnership with graphic elements in ways that turbo charge meaning and impact. Type Plus is a book that investigates the practice of combining typography with images to increase effectiveness, potency and visual impact.
8. Ready to Print : Handbook for Media Designers – Kristina Nickel
These days, designers must be proficient in creating final artwork and be familiar with pre-print and production processes. Ready to Print helps designers prepare their data and materials so that the best possible result can be achieved with an optimal print run.
9. Project Japan. Metabolism Talks… – Rem Koolhaas & Hans Ulrich Obrist
Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism—the first non-western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan’s postwar miracle.
Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images—master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions—telling the 20th century history of Japan through its architecture, from the tabula rasa of a colonised Manchuria in the 1930s to a devastated Japan after the war, the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo, to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, to the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo ’70 in Osaka and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair.
10. Cook It Raw – Andrea Petrini
Cook it Raw doesn’t just tell the story of an exciting collection of avant-garde chefs who come together to create unique dining experiences that explore social, cultural and environmental issues. It’s also an excellent example of classic editorial design. A must for aspiring chefs and food lovers interested in cutting edge gastronomy – and designers looking for further inspiration.
11. Manuals 2: Design and Identity Guidelines
After the success of Manuals 1 Unit 15 there was never any doubt that Manuals 2 Unit 18 would follow. In this book, Unit Editions presents another thorough compendium of graphic standards and corporate identity manuals.
12. The Design Annual 2015 Edition
The Design Annual is an inspiring collection of incredible creative work brought to you by the makers of Computer Arts, net, 3D World and Creative Bloq. Absolutely packed with world-class design projects, spanning the full spectrum of creative disciplines. These include the Computer Arts staples of graphic design, branding, illustration and motion graphics; stunning 3D artwork, character design and concept art courtesy of 3D World; and of course the eye-catching front-end design across web, apps and other digital platforms that graces the pages of net magazine every month.
13. Stitt Autobiographies – Alexander Stitt
Stitt Autobiographics is a pictorial record of the 50-year professional life of graphic designer Alex Stitt, who has been the hand behind many aspects of Australia’s culture since the 1950s, and has been described by Phillip Adams as one of the country’s most under-recognised creative talents. If you want to discover his account of the how, why and for whom Stitt worked for, then this book uncovers everything, including 1,800 illustrations, comic strips, storyboards and film title frames.
14. Drawing Type: An Introduction to Illustrating Letterforms – Alex Fowkes
Part inspiration and part workbook, the images of hand-drawn type will inspire and excite any designer to draw and explore type. Drawing Type features real-world projects and sketchbooks of well-known type designers, including interviews about their processes.
15. Why Fonts Matter – Sarah Hyndman
Fonts have different personalities that can create trust, mistrust, give you confidence, make things seem easier to do or make a product taste better. They’re hidden in plain sight, they trigger memories, associations and multi-sensory experiences in your imagination. This book by Sarah Hyndman – who has joined us for guest lectures atShillington – opens up the science and the art behind how fonts influence you and explains why certain fonts or styles evoke particular experiences and associations.
16. Type: New Perspectives in Typography – Scott Williams
This selection of typographic design, edited by leading typographers A2/SW/HK, showcases more than 100 carefully selected contemporary designers, including the best examples of their current work, and also features an introduction by Rick Poynor.
17. Watching Words Move – Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar
This legendary document of typographic creativity, after nearly fifty years of Watching Words Move, is now available for the first time as a trade book. New essays by top designers add value even for those already familiar with the original text.
18. Don’t Get a Job… Make a Job: How to make it as a creative graduate – Gem Barton
Too often a design or architecture degree is seen as a means to an end (a job in an established practice). But imagine for one moment that there are no employers, no firms to send your CV to, no interviews to be had – what would you do? How would you forge your own path after graduation? This book celebrates the various strategies that students and graduates are taking to succeed in their design careers.
19. Otl Aicher – Markus Rathgeb
Otl Aicher was an internationally acclaimed graphic designer and educator, renowned for his corporate identity work, visual communication systems, and typography. Although Aicher wrote a number of books on design, this book is the first comprehensive and authoritative account of his life and work, with extensive illustrations from private archives, museums, and Aicher’s estate.
20. I Used To Be a Design Student – Frank Philippin
This book offers a rare chance to read what graphic designers feel about their education and profession. Fifty influential designers give the low-down about their student days and their professional lives.
21. Nice to Meet You Again: Business cards, greeting cards and invitations – Viction:ary
Expanding the spectrum of visual greetings from business cards to include greeting cards and invitations, the third of the Nice To Meet You collection encapsulates the new perspectives designers have brought forward in representing companies and individuals in unique and small brand items.
22. Making a Splash: Graphics That Flow – Viction:ary
Fluid continually deforms and shapes to its physical environment under applied force. With potential to flow and respond to texture and its surroundings, this substance has been an enduring creative influence in visual explorations, widely adopted as a dynamic colorant in image-making with the help of digital editing tools. Collating applications across the fields of advertising, branding, graphic and fashion design, Splash, Drip, Brush, Flow surveys new creative approaches that fully embrace the unique characters of liquid forms in black or blended colours.
23. Special Edition: Artist Collaborations on Packaging Design – Viction:ary
Presenting a medley of playful and masterfully crafted designs from around the world, Special Edition focuses on product packaging that stands out for its engaging concept, unexpected choice of material or artistically elaborate design.
24. Monotone: New Single-colour Graphics – Viction:ary
Creativity flourishes within limitations. When a palette is kept at a minimum, it dares designers to create variety out of singularity, and distinctiveness out of ordinary. When done well, single colour designs leap out in the world of visual frenzy, and project ideas in a compact and powerful way.
As the latest addition to Viction:ary’s colour-themed collection Palette, Monotone singles out a distinctive array of visual projects that thrive on the clever use of limited colours.
25. Layout Essentials: 100 Design Principles for Using Grids – Beth Tondreau
Adhering to certain layout and grids standards and principles is important for any job from brochures, annual reports and posters to websites and publications. However, knowing how to bend the rules and make certain grids work for the job at hand takes skill. This book outlines and demonstrates basic layout/grid guidelines and rules through 100 entries including choosing a typeface, striving for rhythm and balance with type, combining typefaces, using special characters and kerning and legibility. An essential read.
26. A Smile in the Mind, Revised and Expanded Edition: Witty Thinking in Graphic Design – Beryl McAlhone
First published in 1996, A Smile in the Mind rapidly became one of the most influential books in graphic design – a rich source of design ideas and an entertaining guide to the techniques behind witty thinking.
Now extensively revised and updated, this book explores the powerful role of wit in graphic design, making the case for wit, as the magical element that builds the world’s biggest brands and engages people with messages that matter.
27. Counter Print Books: Animal, Monogram, Human, Alphabet & Nature Logo
Counter Print books offer collections of logos focusing on different themes, such as Animal, Human, Alphabet and Nature. Each book contains over 300 logos from some of the world’s leading design companies such as Pentagram, FITCH, Wolff Olins, Pushpin Group, Hey, Chermayeff & Geismar, Berger & Föhr and many more.
28. Ken Garland: Structure and Substance – Unit 09
Ken Garland: Structure and Substance is the first comprehensive monograph devoted to the entire career of legendary English designer Ken Garland, from student exercises in the 1950s to his self-published photography books of recent years.
29. Start Me Up!: New Branding for Businesses – Robert Klanten
Little brand, big effect: In the age of startups and a new generation of entrepreneurs, corporate design is being redefined through distinctive visual creativity. Never before has there been more enthusiasm surrounding entrepreneurship. Today, young entrepreneurs across the globe are relentlessly developing innovative products and services.
Fresh businesses and social initiatives are appearing in industries ranging from fashion to farming, from high-tech to creative handcraft. These companies are run by passionate professionals who are well aware that following their vision is just as important as continuously communicating their vision’s brand.
Corporate branding works as an extension of a business by visually expressing its concept, so it is no surprise that new stories require a new visual language. Start Me Up! presents a wide range of original examples for inspiration and is a comprehensive compendium of innovative corporate design for a new generation.
30. D&AD15
D&AD ’15 is the indispensable guide to the celebrated work from the past year. The 53rd edition Annual has been designed by designer David Pearson and D&AD President, Mark Bonner at GBH. Well known for his work for Penguin Classics, David alongside colleagues Alistair Hall and Paul Finn have designed the cover in five different colourways to reflect what is the very essence of D&AD: The Pencil.
31. Women in Graphic Design 1890-2012 – Gerda Breuer
Why are there so few women in the history of design? Why do previously well-known women become forgotten, and at what point can someone be considered successful? Do women create differently to men? What effects of the gender debate are noticeable in today’s everyday working life, and are women judged today solely on the basis of their quality of work?
This book prompts a look beneath the surface: with numerous contributions from design historians, programmatic texts and a comprehensive collection of biographies, alongside interviews with internationally recognised female designers such as Irma Boom, Paula Scher, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Julia Hoffmann and Tina Roth Eisenberg.
32. People of Print: Innovative, Independent Design and Illustration – Marcroy Smith & Andy Cooke
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