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A pile of design books including The Design of Everyday Things

Thoughts  |  

The Design Books I Actually Finished

I own about sixty design books. I have finished maybe nine of them. The rest are bookmarked somewhere around chapter three, which I have decided to stop feeling guilty about.

These are the ones that changed how I work, rather than how I talk about work.

The Ones That Stuck

  • The ones with exercises. Anything I could do rather than agree with survived. Agreement is not retention.
  • The ones about constraints. Books about how to do more with less have aged far better than books about what is next.
  • The short ones. A hundred and forty honest pages beat four hundred padded ones every time.
A pile of design books on a desk
Roughly a tenth of the pile, and most of the value.

The Ones I Gave Away

Trend books. Anything with a year in the title. Anything where the case studies are all from companies with more designers than my client has employees.

A book that tells you what good design looks like ages badly. A book that tells you how to argue for it does not.

What is the one you actually finished? I am always looking for the next short honest one.