Design your way

Graphic designers come in all shapes and sizes and vary from amateur to professional statuses.

Whether a Photoshop novice or an experienced calligraphy genius, there is always something to be learned in the world of graphic design. The beauty of this art comes from its constant learning process.

No matter who’s doing the research, a graphic designer will surely find nothing but extended information on which to build a more impressive portfolio, or to find out how other designers are using certain design styles.

If someone is new to the world of design, they may wonder where to obtain all of the information to get them started. Or perhaps you’re an experienced designer and would like to enrich your knowledge resume. Where do you find it?

Sure, an online blogger’s opinion can be incredibly helpful, as is the website created for this specific field. We still find it most engaging to open a book. There’s something to be said about the good old-fashioned snail read as there seems to be more thorough research throughout.

Below is a list of books for graphic designers that have been dubbed must reads in the design world.

How to be a Graphic Designer, without Losing Your Soul

Graphic designers constantly complain that there is no career manual to guide them through the profession. Design consultant and writer Adrian Shaughnessy draws on a wealth of experience to provide just such a handbook.

Aimed at the independent-minded, it addresses the concerns of young designers who want to earn a living by doing expressive and meaningful work and avoid becoming a hired drone working on soulless projects. It offers straight-talking advice on how to establish your design career and suggestions – that you won’t have been taught at college – for running a successful business.

This revised, extended edition includes all-new chapters covering professional skills, the creative process, and global trends, including green issues, ethics and the rise of digital culture.

Making and Breaking the Grid

For designers working in every medium, layout is arguable the most basic and most important element. Effective layout is essential to communication and enables the end user to not only be drawn in with an innovative design but to digest information easily.

Making and Breaking the Grid is a comprehensive layout design workshop that assumes that to effectively break the rules of grid-based design one must first understand those rules and see them applied to real-world projects

The Elements of Graphic Design

This very popular design book has been wholly revised and expanded to feature a new dimension of inspiring and counterintuitive ideas to thinking about graphic design relationships.

The Elements of Graphic Design, Second Edition is now in full color in a larger, 8 x 10-inch trim size, and contains 40 percent more content and over 750 images to enhance and better clarify the concepts in this thought-provoking resource.

The Ultimate Guide to Creative Cloud

Want to supercharge your creative workflow? Want all your apps to work in sync? Want to easily publish to multiple platforms and devices at the same time without any hassle? We thought so.

In this book – The Ultimate Guide to Creative Cloud – you’ll discover how to use the power of Adobe Creative Cloud to work faster, smarter and deliver your projects faster and in more style.

Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team

Whether your goal is to express a new brand or to revitalize an existing one, here is a proven, universal five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity. From research and analysis through brand strategy, design development through application design, and identity standards through launch and governance, Designing Brand Identity is an essential reference for the entire process.

Enriched by new case studies showcasing successful world-class brands from Herman Miller and General Electric to the Obama ’08 election campaign, this Third Edition offers new insights into emerging trends such as sustainability and social networks.

Graphic Design Manual

This newly revised book was first published in 1965. Elements of image and form are analysed and examined with regard to their inherent laws. The lessons of methodical design are used today in computer monitor design as well.

The desktop publishing technique requires very clear conceptual and methodical working processes. This book, which is divided into computer-system-friendly sections, will thus serve this new circle of users as a valuable introduction.

Type, Volume 1: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles

This book offers a novel overview of typeface design, exploring the most beautiful and remarkable examples of font catalogs from the history of publishing, with a special emphasis on the period from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, when color catalogs were at their height.

Taken from a Dutch collection, this exuberant selection traverses the evolution of the printed letter in all its various incarnations via exquisitely designed catalogs displaying not only type specimens in roman, italic, bold, semi-bold, narrow, and broad, but also characters, borders, ornaments, initial letters and decorations as well as often spectacular examples of the use of the letters.

Designing For Social Change: Strategies for Community-Based Graphic Design

Some call it design for the greater good. Others call it social design. Whatever you call it, it’s clear that an altruistic impulse is on the rise in the design community.

The latest addition to the Design Briefs series, Designing for Social Change, is a compact, hands-on primer for graphic designers who want to use their unique problem-solving skills to help others.

Author Andrew Shea presents ten proven strategies for working effectively with community organizations. These strategies can frame the design challenge and create a checklist to keep a project on track.

Thinking with Type

The organization of letters on a blank sheet — or screen — is the most basic challenge facing anyone who practices design. What type of font to use? How big? How should those letters, words, and paragraphs be aligned, spaced, ordered, shaped, and otherwise manipulated?

In this groundbreaking new primer, leading design educator and historian Ellen Lupton provides clear and concise guidance for anyone learning or brushing up on their typographic skills.

Graphic Design Thinking

Creativity is more than an inborn talent; it is a hard-earned skill, and like any other skill, it improves with practice.

Graphic Design Thinking: How to Define Problems, Get Ideas, and Create Form explores a variety of informal techniques ranging from quick, seat-of-the-pants approaches to more formal research methods for stimulating fresh thinking, and ultimately arriving at compelling and viable solutions.

In the style with which author Ellen has come to been known hands-on, up-close approach to instructional design writing brainstorming techniques are grouped around the three basic phases of the design process: defining the problem, inventing ideas, and creating form. Creative research methods include focus groups, interviewing, brand mapping, and co-design.

Stationery Design Now

Whether you’re starting your own business or simply trying to stay in business, three paper-based items are absolutely crucial to your company: letterhead, envelopes, and business cards. These items, along with your logo, are the pillars of a well-defined corporate identity.

Though seemingly ephemeral, the subliminal communications value of elegant stationery cannot be overestimated. The best stationery works hard for you, front-loading your corporate or freelance image, and conveying your company values in the most tangible way.

The Portfolio Handbook

Portfolios are a bitch to make. Thats why we wanted to help. It’s been a while since we were sophomores, but we never forgot the emotional roller coaster of trying to get our first job (we still go through it).

Looking back, we wish we would have known what we know now. This book is for you: a collection of our knowledge passed down to you in the hopes that you become better designers, better professionals, and better people.

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

A delightfully inquisitive tour that explores the rich history and the subtle powers of fonts.

Fonts surround us every day, on street signs and buildings, on movie posters and books, and on just about every product that we buy. But where do fonts come from and why do we need so many?

Who is behind the businesslike subtlety of Times New Roman, the cool detachment of Arial, or the maddening lightness of Comic Sans (and the movement to ban it)? Simon Garfield embarks on a mission to answer these questions and more, and reveal what may be the very best and worst fonts in the world.

Package Design Workbook

This comprehensive guide provides designers with a thoughtful packaging primer that covers the challenges of designing packaging for a competitive market in a very hardworking and relevant way.

Package Design Workbook addresses all aspects of the creative process including choosing a package format, colors and materials, final finishes, and special considerations such as awkward objects and unique display considerations.

This book breaks down the process of design in a much more comprehensive way than most books on the subject, which just analyze the final designs.

The Art of Color

In this book, the world’s foremost color theorist examines two different approaches to understanding the art of color. Subjective feelings and objective color principles are described in detail and clarified by color reproductions.

The Elements of Typographic Style

Renowned typographer and poet Robert Bringhurst brings clarity to the art of typography with this masterful style guide. Combining practical, theoretical, and historical, this book is a must for graphic artists, editors, or anyone working with the printed page using digital or traditional methods.

Having established itself as a standard in its field The Elements of Typographic Style is house manual at most American university presses, a standard university text, and a reference work in studios of designers around the world. It has been translated into italian and greek, and dutch.

Brand Identity Essentials

This book is the fourth book in the Essential series following Layout Essentials, Typography Essentials, and Packaging Essentials.

It outlines and demonstrates basic logo and branding design guidelines and rules through 100 principles including the elements of a successful graphic identity, identity programs and brand identity, and all the various strategies and elements involved.

Designing Brand Identity

From research and analysis through brand strategy, design development through application design, and identity standards through launch and governance, Designing Brand Identity, Fourth Edition offers brand managers, marketers, and designers a proven, universal five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity

Source: http://ift.tt/1doK1Qm