Graphic Design Education & Book List
Every once in a while I’m asked what books I’d recommend. Here’s where I learned what I know.
The Foundation
When I got started in “design”, I was a computer engineering student with no intuitive grasp of style or layout. My aesthetics are driven primarily by information hierarchy, which meant that concepts were introduced in the right order, one after the other, as the reader follows the line of text. That’s the nature of writing: introducing concepts one at a time, and letting them build a picture in the reader’s mind. You have a lot of control.
It’s different on a two-dimensional (2D) page. The human eye will automatically jump to the most attention-grabbing element and then explore from there. Therefore, to control the eye, you must understand how to control attention. This means learning not only what attracts attention in order of contrast, but also learning to understand how people think. If you can do that, you can regain the control you had as a writer and introduce concepts—even multiple concepts—simultaneously and in the order you want.
To understand how people scan pages and process information, read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, a book about web usability. I find it much more accessible than Jakob Nielsen’s work, and a lot more fun.
If you have no sense yet of what goes into a basic page layout, Robin William’s The Non Designer’s Design Book is a good starting point. I also like John McWade’s excellent Before and After Page Design. They’re clear, to the point, and practical. If you read through these books, you will pick up a sense of the concepts that go behind a straightforward piece of print design. Both Williams and McWade have other books, and McWade publishes Before and After Magazine, which is an excellent magazine filled with similar “how do I make…” articles. You can buy a DVD with all the back issues for around $150, which is a deal. It goes back all the way to the dawn of desktop publishing; McWade was the guy that Apple hired when they discovered that people were using Macs to print things and had no idea that it could be good.
For an understanding of elements beyond the static page, I still refer to Herbert Zettl’s textbook Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. I first came across as an undergrad engineering student. This book taught me how to understand the cognitive aspects of composition on storytelling. It’s masterfully done.
To understand symbols, and semiotics, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is a powerful and literate thesis on the topic of sequential art, presented in comics form. Don’t be fooled by its comic book presentation: it’s a deeply insightful look into how graphics convey meaning. His third book, Making Comics is also pretty good. The 2nd book in the series, Reinventing Comics, isn’t quite relevant to this discussion and is probably pretty dated today.
On typography: I just ordered Ellen Lupton’s Thinking With Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students, based on the Thinking With Type Website. The McWade and Williams books mentioned earlier will also give you some basic typographic information.
In general, it’s useful to understand how the human eye is drawn to elements on the page. I don’t think I’ve really seen a reference for this anywhere. If you can understand how one might scan the landscape for saber-toothed tigers, you are on the right track.
Looking for Meaning
- John McWade wrote this succinct description on the role of story in Design. He makes the distinction between style and meaning very clearly.
Looking for Style
If you are looking for visual style to call your own, you might go to the Design section of your local bookstore and skim through the various “best of” design books. A lot of designers I know do this for inspiration. Online, there are places like Dribble, Vimeo, and the Behance Network where people post their works.
You can also look through pop cultural references and immerse yourself in the iconography and graphic feel of the times. Make note of photographic styles, popular typefaces, fashion, cars, appliances, leisure, foods…anything that is different from the world as we know it now YET is recognizable. Recognition is important in communication; otherwise, you are just ornamenting your work with an abstract aesthetic.
But really…your style will probably come from things you naturally enjoy, not through aping what others have done. If you’re not sure what you naturally enjoy, look for the things that naturally make you smile. This might be found in your hobbies and interests, the things that truly compel you. It might not even be visual. Those problems and ideas that keep coming back to you. Try expressing those. It may take a few years of experimentation.
For myself, I like finding the meaning in communication. I’m not much of a stylist, so I focus on how to clarify what I’m trying to say through visual means. My favorite sources for this are the book A Smile in the Mind and issues of Marty Neumeiers’s CRITIQUE: The Magazine of Design Thinking (sadly no longer published).
There are also several graphic designers that I enjoy reading about:
Milton Glaser, though his work may seem kind of subdued, goes deep into his work.
Craig Frazier, whose process is fascinating. His work is deceptively simple in appearance. I saw him speak once at a Boston AIGA meeting and I was really impressed.
Aaron Draplin is an American graphic designer who I’ve been watching because he has a love for American industrial graphics, more blue collar in his sensibilities than foofy. I think that’s cool.
For data visualization, Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is fun to flip through. While it won’t necessarily teach you anything about information graphic design on purpose, you will pick up an appreciation of the art. It’s not so much a reference for practice as it is a curated gallery collection of notable information graphic design.
Check out your local chapter of the AIGA to see who they have speaking.
Examples of Creative Process
So how does one become creative? There are several books that I like for kick-starting the creative process.
Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit comes to mind. It’s an amazing book about the creative process and dealing with the setbacks. You may want to read this at least once every couple of years, as some of what she talks about was beyond my comprehension because I had not yet experienced enough creative work to really recognize the value of what she was saying. It’s a very readable book, with many exercises.
Fashion designer Paul Smith wrote You Can Find Inspiration in Everything*: (*and if you can’t, look again). Reading about hist background as a cyclist who, upon wrecking his body in an accident, started working at a clothing warehouse. He developed a fascination for quality traditional British clothing, and started designing his own variants around it. The book itself, filled with stories and a glimpse of Smith’s world view, is sadly out of print.
Understanding your Audience
Learning how to plug into your own associations, memories, and influences is a good starting point. Find some part of you that is in the audience you are designing fore. Be the equivalent of a good essay writer: assume your audience is intelligent but ignorant of your topic.
It’s also good to expand your horizons into psychology. What shared experiences and emotions can you bring? These are connection points you can build upon to create a connection.
An interesting book to read is Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling On Happiness. It’s about the cognitive processes behind our desires, which helps us understand our own pursuit of happiness and where it fails. As design is often about conveying what makes us happy or not, this is good stuff to know. Consider also that Advertising is, on one level, about influencing how people think about their happiness.
I would also look at Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power, which is a useful distillation of, well, how people try to dominate other people. People have to deal with situations like this all the time. If you’re designing something that is intended to be used in this environment, then this can be useful stuff to know.
It wouldn’t hurt to look at a book on body language and sex; there’s one I have called SuperFlirt by Tracy Cox (Brit layout with lots of pictures, so it’s highly visual). Robert Greene has a couple of books on the subject as well, though I haven’t read them.
If you want to understand the mindset of the master performer, take a good look through Henning Nelm’s Magic and Showmanship: A Handbook for Conjurers. As a designer, you can be a performer by proxy, a showman. The art of misdirection and expectation management are important aspects of presentation to understand, especially in new media. It’s important to direct (or misdirect) on purpose, not by accident.
Between Happiness, Power, Sex, and Showmanship, you have an interesting cross section of topics to understand how human primal needs are expressed and directed. Combine that with your own experiences of daily life, and you have the basis of understanding to reach a mainstream audience. Figuring out how to translate the idea into powerful graphic statements…well, that’s the trick isn’t it :-)
Other Relevant Fields of Study
Cognitive Science is a multi-disciplinary field that centers around the study of the mind and behavior. It’s one of those fields that if I had known about it when I was applying to college, I would have totally jumped on it. The most immediate application I can think of is the use of eye-tracking tools to understand what the eye is looking at in real time, and an understanding of how our visual system (eyeballs, brain) actually works. If you have a science-oriented mind and can correlate your understanding of how people really see with what they feel, you might find CogSci very interesting as a designer.
Film, of course! Animation also, particularly the principles of animation hammered out by Disney’s Nine Old Men. It would behoove you to look also at the motion graphics industry, which produces some amazing graphic design in motion.
Music Composition. I’m really just getting into this, and haven’t yet formed an understanding of how to relate this to graphic design, other than composition IS a form of design.
Storytelling. There is a book by Robert McKee called Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. It is pretty astonishing. I have not yet fully absorbed it, but it definitely makes my list of canonical design references.
Video Game Development. Particularly the history of the early games, which were nothing more than moving blocks. That these crude graphics could convey any meaning at all is fairly amazing by today’s standards. The old masters of the genre understood motion, timing, expectation management, and use of context to set the stage for a great experience. Studying the missteps of the CD-ROM era is well worth doing as well.