The 7 best books for design in the real world
The books that have inspired and helped this project
By now you know I have complaints about design culture. One big one is how design books assume readers have great power and just needs design knowledge. This is rarely true! In the real world designers often don’t get to make many decisions, far less than many of us want. This raises the question: if I’m complaining so much about design culture, which books are helpful? Here is my list of recommendations for books that help solve the real challenges designers face:
The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide, by Leah Buley. This book’s very premise escapes the pretense that holds designers back. It presumes that you are often outnumbered and misunderstood, which means you need a better playbook. Buley takes a practical view of the real challenges we face. It’s a key resource to all designers and researchers, even if you work on a larger UX team. It covers many of the common situations that frustrate you and reframes them into problems you can solve, which is a major goal of Why Design Is Hard.
Communicating the UX Vision: 13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideas, by Martina Schell, James O'Brien. These authors feel communication is the real medium designers work in: if you’re ignored, it’s a failure of communication more than design talent alone. They focus on the anti-patterns of design communication, the situations that we get trapped in, and explain how to get out of them. Their pattern list and related advice is a checklist of situations all designers need to study.
Articulating Design Decisions, Tom Greever. This book pairs nicely with Communicating the UX Vision, but goes deeper into the practice of making and explaining design decisions, focusing on specific types of presentations, situations and meetings. Greever guides you through various situations and presentation types with hard-earned lessons that will save you years of frustration.
Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace, Gordon MacKensie. If you feel the corporate world is dragging you down and destroying your creativity, this is the book for you. Written by a former executive at Hallmark, he explains how he used the metaphor of a giant hairball to help him accept and work within the limitations of large organizations. It’s only in print, but it’s worth it for the beautiful hand-drawn art on many of the pages.
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, by Roger Fisher, William L. Ury, and Bruce Patton. Designers negotiate frequently without realizing it. This classic guide to negotiation will help you recognize how much of your work is working out deals, either with clients or coworkers, and this will improve your ability to find mutually beneficial ways to get your needs met.
Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers, by Ellen Lupton, Jennifer Tobias and Josh Halstead. This eye-opening combination of design history and practical advice will change how you think about your profession. It’s recommended reading for all designers, graphic or otherwise, regardless of your background (although the title obviously defines its intended audience). It will widen your sense of what design means, of who has contributed to the profession and of who we need to attract to get the world we want. Lupton is a legend and this is yet another excellent project with her name on it.
Design For The Real World, Victor Papanek. Papanek was an early advocate for design ethics in the 1970s and criticized the profession for its environmental waste, societal damage and short-term thinking. This entertaining classic roams through design advice, ethics lessons, history, brainstorming methods and more. It’s curmudgeonly and inspiring at the same time.
Mega design book and film recommendations list. If you want more curated recommendations, my list of over 100 suggested books and movies with useful, short reviews, is for you. I read most of the canon for book research and want everyone to benefit from all those hours.
What book did we miss? Tell us what you recommend and what problem it solves for readers.
