Can You Recommend any Good Graphic Design Resources?

I'm asked this question every now and then, so I'm finally going to make a list of useful books and concepts. This page will be updated every once in a while, based on reader questions.

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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 and making sure that concepts are introduced in the right order. When you're writing, you just introduce concepts one at a time and the reader follows. On a two-dimensional (2D) page, however, the human eye will automatically jump to the most contrasting, attention-grabbing element and proceed 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.

• 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 a nice printed magazine filled with similar "how do I make..." articles.

• For an understanding of elements beyond the static page, I still refer to Herbert Zettl's textbook Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics, which I first came across as an undergrad engineering student. This book taught me how to understand the cognitive storytelling effects of media and composition.

• 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. This book will likely appeal more to storyteller types such as myself who emphasize meaning and communication over graphic style. His third book, Making Comics is also pretty good. The 2nd book in the series, Reinventing Comics, isn't quite relevant to this discussion.

• I wish I knew more about typography; I have not yet found an accessible book on the topic. The McWade and Williams books will give you some basics.

• It is very useful for you 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, so I'll have to make one up. If you can understand how one might scan the landscape for saber-toothed tigers, you are on the right track.

Looking for Style

If you are looking for visual style, then the best education is to look at what is out there now in the leading-edge companies doing design of any kind. You can 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.

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.

If you are looking for meaningful communication that has been effectively styled as to enhance the message, my favorite books are A Smile in the Mind, the various issues of Marty Neumeirs's CRITIQUE: The Magazine of Design Thinking (sadly no longer published), and studying the works of the famous thinking designers:

• 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.
• For data visualization, Edward Tufte's oevre of scholarly books, particularly The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, are useful to flip through once you've got a grasp of the basics. It's not so much a reference as it is a gallery of information graphic design.
• I am not up on my graphic designers these days, so you might check 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, though I think it's important to plug deeply into your own associations, memories, and influences so you can reach your audience. The trick, I think, is to be one of your audience. Or be the visual equivalent of a good essayist: assume nothing about your audience's frame of mind, and set it for them visually.

My book list will expand when I have some more time to dig the titles out.

• Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit comes to mind. I still haven't finished it, but the first six chapters always get me excited.

Understanding your Audience

It would do you well to remember that effectively awesome communication is predicated on a knowledge of psychology, shared experience, and shared emotion. This is how you build a bridge into the mind of your audience.

• An interesting book to read is Dan Gilbert's Stumbling On Happiness. This is ostensibly about cognitive processes of want and desire, but this is a useful book to understand because it is a way of understanding our own pursuit of happiness. 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.

• 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.