Creativity & Design Books
A list of the references which will help you become better faster.
Books & Sketchbooks
In order to grow in our skills and career, we must learn. The following references and reviews are our top recommendations to help you reach the next level. Some will make you love sketching and some will finetune your understanding of the design job or how you can unlock your creativity. In the end, all of them will help you grow into a better designer.
Design Forward
by Hartmut Esslinger
Creative Strategies for Sustainable Change. One of the most influential designers and thinkers, as well as the founder of frog design – explains how ‘strategic design’ in business and society can and must bring about positive change through innovative creativity. A key component is the strategically extended definition of design as…
The Freelance Manifesto
By Joey Korenman
Designing beautiful boards and making smooth animation come naturally to us Motion Designers. It’s what we’re good at. However, designing the career we want, with the freedom, flexibility, and pay we crave, that’s more difficult. All of the above is within your grasp if you’re willing to take the plunge into freelancing.
Creativity, Inc.
By Ed Catmull
Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. From a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios—the Academy Award–winning studio behind Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story—comes an incisive book about creativity in business and leadership for readers of Daniel Pink, Tom Peters, and Chip and Dan Heath.
Sketching: Drawing Techniques for Product Designers
by Koos Eissen, Roselien Steur
This video will tell you what you need to know about it. Sketching is an incredibly broad and practical survey of sketching techniques for product designers. It goes without saying that the book is suited for the classroom, but every design studio will also find this manual an asset, because in spite of the ascendancy of the computer, hand-drawn sketches are still a very much used and key to explore your ideas quickly and communicate effectively.
Book Of Branding
by Radim Malinic
A guide to creating brand identity for startups and beyond. Made with real life case studies, “Book of Branding” is an essential addition to the start-up toolkit, designed for entrepreneurs, founders, visual designers, brand creators and anyone seeking to decode the complicated world of brand identity.
Mismatch
By Kat Holmes
Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn’t work for left-handed people, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. Holmes shows how inclusion can be a source of innovation and growth.
Nature Of Form
By FabLab Innovation Inc. USA
The World’s First Book on collection of organic elements from Nature into Forms, Textures, and Colors to inspire your design by Nature. A collection of forms, Textures & color, derived from Nature. The forms are classified into characteristic attributes as well. We reckon nifty use of this data in the fields of Product Design, Graphic…
Designed by Apple in California
by Apple
Designed by Apple in California chronicles 20 years of Apple design through 450 photographs of our products and the processes used to make them. A visual history spanning iMac to Apple Pencil, this hardcover volume is both a testament and a tribute to the meticulous processes of design, engineering, and manufacturing that are singularly Apple.
Creative Sketching in Product Design
by SendPoints
Sketches are very important in the expression of creative ideas, especially for product design. This book focuses on product creative sketches and presents over 50 outstanding sketches which including sketching tools and perspective theory from all around the world.
Super Normal
by Naoto Fukasawa & Jasper Morrison
204 everyday “super normal design”. Beyond space and time; the past and present of product design both point to a future that has long since begun. The super normal is already lying exposed before us; it exists in the here and now; it is real and available: we need only open our eyes; Fukasawa and Morrison make it visible for us.
AAD, Algorithms-aided Design
By Arturo Tedeschi
“Algorithms-Aided Design” presents design methods based on the use of Grasshopper, a visual algorithm editor. Algorithms allow designers to overcome the limitations of traditional CAD software and 3D modelers, reaching a level of complexity and control which is beyond the human manual ability.
10 Principles for Good Design
Dieter Rams
Exquisitely produced to reflect Dieter Rams’ aesthetic philosophy, this book presents highlights from a forty-year career designing iconic consumer products that enhance our daily lives. For decades, anyone who cared about product design looked to the Braun label when choosing their appliances, radios, and other…
Cradle to Cradle
By Michael Braungart
Remaking the Way We Make Things: “Reduce, reuse, recycle” urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as this provocative, visionary book argues, this approach perpetuates a one-way, “cradle to grave” manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution…
Whether it is about education, sketching, design or simply your vision on the design job. If you have a book which is relevant to our community, we’ll help you promote it to the designers around the world.