Articles from: Reading List

Professor John Maeda’s course on Digital Typography begins on a Tuesday in the Fall of 1997 at MIT. Before getting deep into the rendering of movable type through PostScript and JavaScript, Maeda insists his 15 select students read the course’s only set text: Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. 

Photograph by Mike Harding, sneak.co.nz

The Elements of Typographic Style
Robert Bringhurst
Design, Writing
Buy a secondhand hardback copy of V 3.0+ if you can…  

Robert Bringhurst is not merely a designer and historian: He is a poet, widely published and highly regarded, who describes typography as ‘the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form’. That stopped me in my tracks too when I read it for the first time.

Do you know or have you ever had that ‘power-book’ feeling? And no, I’m not referring to laptop computing. I mean when you’re holding a book in your hands and you think: ‘this is special, this will be with me for a long time’. Or have you ever had something new or unexpected thrust into your life and bizarrely from then on you notice copies of it, or references to it everywhere? This is Bringhurst territory.  

Think of the Elements of Typographic Style as a compact encyclopedia; inspired in-part by The Elements of Style (featured elsewhere on the reading list)… It’s a rule-book for the ‘the most conservative of all the crafts’ whist also encouraging the reader to break those rules ‘beautifully, deliberately and well’. 

It includes histories of Western (Latin) and Non Western alphabets, descriptions of font rendering technology, conventions of measurement, anatomy and annotation, a thorough run through of diacritics, the mathematics of proportion, a taxonomy of the major font families, a glossary of terms… I told you it was encyclopedic. 

The expressive ’sounding’ of words and the visual representation of letterforms can work together to create layers of meaning. It has always been this way and the digital medium is no different. At LBi The Elements of Typographic Style has inspired a project called Lyric Type where song lyrics are typeset and animated in the pursuit of meaning and feeling… I hope to share our progress soon.

The Brand Innovation Manifesto
John Grant
Ideas, Planning

John Grant dun-harf love a manifesto: The New Marketing Manifesto, the Green Marketing Manifesto, the Have it With Chips Manifesto* and this one, the Brand Innovation Manifesto. Manifestos have a tendency to date over night but this one’s a bit special. It takes an Integrated view of brand strategy, planning and ideas generation. It’s full of theory, supported by useful examples.  An inspiring book for anyone looking beyond siloed Digital or Advertising thinking*.

* We live in hope.

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The Art Of Innovation: Success Through Innovation the IDEO Way 
Tom Kelley
Ideas 

Are you a member of the Church of IDEO? Because this is the IDEO bible: A snapshot of how this landmark agency functioned at the height of it’s powers. The Art of Innovation offers advice on the building blocks of good agency process, such as collaboration, brainstorming, capturing ideas… 

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The Mind Map® Book (Full colour illustrated Edition)
Tony and Barry Buzan™ 
Ideas 

A rather enthusiastic Times reviewer claimed that this book ‘will do for the brain what Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time did for the universe’… errr no, but The Mind Map Book certainly does a good job of encouraging, and training creative thinking. The premise being that as visually-lead creatures we find it easier to think-through and understand ideas when we can see them on the page. The theory is further drawn out (sorry I couldn’t resist) into visualising the interconnectedness of systems of ideas. Published by the BBC and citing Leonardo da Vinci as a practicing mind mapper, it’s 101 for all creatives who use pen and paper.
(Kudos to Dan H for sharing). 

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Interaction of Color
Joseph Albers 
Graphic Design 

If I possessed a fully functioning TimeMachinePro, the Weimar Bauhaus would be one of the first places I’d visit. This book is not the only visual theory text book to originate at the Bauhaus in the 1930s (another being The Colour Star by Johannes Itten). The subtle and subjective nature of colour relationships are explored concisely and demonstrated clearly in this small but perfectly formed book.

(Kudos to Pierre for slapping it down on my desk, woof!)

Envisioning Information
Edward R. Tufte
Experience Design, Graphic Design 

Part of a series of beautifully produced Tufte publications that includes The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Visual Explanations, these books are essential reading for anyone planning to building something handsome, information rich and easy to use. 

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Raster Systeme: Grid Systems in Graphic Design
Josef Muller-Brockmann
Graphic Design, Experience Design

One of the best books on layout and grids authored by one of the masters - Josef Muller-Brockmann. Don’t think about designing a thing without knowing this stuff first. The design geeks among us will get especially excited by the diagonal grids.

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The Complete Manual of Typography: A Guide to Setting Perfect Type
Jim Felici
Graphic Design 

The Alpha and Omega for type setting? Probably. Part of an Adobe sponsored publishing program to encourage excellence in design craft. This book covers all of the basics - know the rules before you commit type heresy.

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How to Have Creative Ideas: 62 Exercises to Develop the Mind 
Edward De Bono
Ideas 

Don’t judge this book by it’s awful cover… It’s one of a number of excellent De Bono books that could feature on the reading list. I have selected this one because it introduces the reader to 62 practical applications of the Lateral Thinking theory. Shout out to JMT for every time we’ve played the film game at the pub. 

More soon

The reading list is a new posting category here on the LBiQ blog. These are the ’set texts’, the most useful books directly relating to our profession. The reading list is sub categorised broadly as follows:

Ideas (including ways of thinking creatively, workshopping…)
Writing (inc. long copy, short copy, scriptwriting…)
Graphic Design (inc. layout, typography…)
Experience Design (inc. interaction design, service innovation…)
Drawing (inc. storyboards, scamps, wireframes…)
Photography & Cinematography
Planning, strategy & marketing theory 
Technology
No doubt new sub categories will be created as the list grows. When adding a book please use the Reading List tag category and consider the following classification order.

<Title> A Technique for Producing Ideas
<Author> James Webb Young
<Category> Ideas 
<Optional Image as web link>

<Brief Description> Widely held as the 101 for ideas thinking in advertising. The creative thinking technique outlined in this powerful little book can be summarised thus: 1 Learn - gather everything you can in support of your brief. 2 Brainstorm broadly and without judgment, combine existing elements in new ways. 3 Sleep on it. 4 Let the idea come to you. 5 Invite criticism and consider practical applications.

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The Elements of Style, illustrated edition
William Strunk Jr. (illustrated by Maira Kalman) 
Writing 

Punctuation, brevity, composition, spelling… This book is a lot more fun than it sounds. The Illustrated version is elegantly produced and sensibly edited-down to the core things every English ’speaker’ should know. One of my all time favorite reference books.

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Thinking with type
Ellen Lupton
Design, Writing 

This is much more than a book about typography. Yes it does a good job explaining the anatomy of type and how to set it, but this is a book about how to use type to enhance legibility, reinforce meaning and provoke emotional response. One for the writers as well as the designers.

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Drawing on the right side of the brain
Betty Edwards
Drawing, Ideas 

This is a book about how to be creative disguised as a book about drawing. Based on R.W. Sperry’s research into the right hemisphere of our brains, Betty explains how to control which side of your brain is dominant. Sounds crazy doesn’t it (left = conscious mind, language, rational / right= subconscious, music, visual)… All I can say is I’ve used this book for years and It works. 

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Cinematography, theory and practice
Blain Brown
Cinematography 

As Digital blends with film and TV this is one of those ‘if you read one book on the subject read this..’ moments. Filmspace, lens language, camera dynamics, continuity, lighting as storytelling. Theory and practical techniques in one place… This book is f*cking awesome.

OK enough reading for now. Plenty more to come…