Books

Self-Reliance

Emerson’s text is widely available to read online, but this new Volume edition—produced with Design Observer—elevates his wisdom through the printed word. With twelve essays from Jessica Helfand’s Self-Reliance Project: pledge now and order your copy today!

Culture is Not Always Popular

Founded in 2003, Design Observer inscribes its mission on its homepage: Writings about Design and Culture. Since our inception, the site has consistently embraced a broader, more interdisciplinary, and circumspect view of design's value in the world―one not limited by materialism, trends, or the slipperiness of style. Fifteen years, 6,700 articles, 900 authors, and nearly 30,000 comments later, this book is a combination primer, celebration, survey, and salute to a certain moment in online culture.

Observer Quarterly

In the winter of 2015, we launched a new publication called Observer Quarterly. The idea is for each themed issue to include original writing, interviews, and photography alongside archival material that draws a narrative between the history and current condition of new and underappreciated aspects of design culture. Our first issue—the Acoustic Issue—covered new ways of looking at sound as part of the design landscape. The second issue examined tagging as a social, cultural, and indexical practice. And our newest issue—following our conference, Taste, which took place in Los Angeles in the spring of 2016—looks at the multiple intersections between design and food.

Design | The Invention of Desire

Advancing a conversation that is unfolding around the globe, Jessica Helfand offers an eye-opening look at how designed things make us feel as well as how—and why—they motivate our behavior.

More books by Jessica Helfand

How to

How to, Michael Bierut’s first career retrospective, is a landmark work in the field. Featuring more than thirty-five of his projects, it reveals his philosophy of graphic design—how to use it to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry, and (every once in a while) change the world. Specially chosen to illustrate the breadth and reach of graphic design today, each entry demonstrates Bierut’s eclectic approach. In his entertaining voice, the artist walks us through each from start to finish, mixing historic images, preliminary drawings (including full-size reproductions of the notebooks he has maintained for more than thirty-five years), working models and rejected alternatives, as well as the finished work. Throughout, he provides insights into the creative process, his working life, his relationship with clients, and the struggles that any design professional faces in bringing innovative ideas to the world. Offering insight and inspiration for artists, designers, students, and anyone interested in how words, images, and ideas can be put together, How to provides insight to the design process of one of this century’s most renowned creative minds.

More books by Michael Bierut

50 Books | 50 Covers Catalog

The ultimate “book of books” to catalog the 2015 winners of the 50 | 50 competition. Publisher, author, and previous 50 Books | 50 Covers recipient Dave Eggers introduces the book. Photographer George Baier IV, who has photographed countless authors and book jacket projects himself, has thoughtfully taken pictures of every book and cover winner. Mohawk generously donated the finest paper. Printed offset, locally, here in the United States. Copies no longer available.

Massimo Vignelli: Collected Writings

Massimo Vignelli (1931–2014) was one of the most influential designers of the twentieth—and twenty-first—centuries. The work he and his wife Lella accomplished at Vignelli Associates is universally admired. While Massimo himself never wrote for Design Observer, he appeared throughout its pages in spirit and as an example for over ten years. This collection of writings about Vignelli from the Design Observer archives—interviews, memories, observations, and critiques—includes selections from the lively comments and discussions that appeared after the original publication of these pieces. Contributors include Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand, Debbie Millman, and Alice Twemlow, among others. Get this book!

Persistence of Vision: Collected Writings of William Drenttel

Designer and publisherWilliam Drenttel (1953–2013) was co-founder and editorial director of Design Observer. Since its inception in 2003, Drenttel contributed to Design Observer almost weekly on all manner of topics, from social change to democracy to his early career on Madison Avenue. We’ve collected two dozen essays—originally published on Design Observer—and an introduction by friend and former literary editor of the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, and put them into print for the first time, including the lively comments and conversations that followed their original publication. Persistence of Vision is not only a tribute to a greatly missed design leader, but serves as an important addition to the design writing canon. Get this book!

The Design Observer Twenty: Our Partners

Observed

Ferryman—a Blackketter typeface for the contemporary reader—is the newest type family from type designer Felix Braden. Try it yourself here.

A feel-good story about paying it forward, one designer wedding dress at a time.

A miniskirt with a print of the Saudi Arabian flag stirs complex emotions—and controversy.

Net-zero superyachts may sound like an oxymoron, but think again: one company is proving that intelligent exterior design can significantly—and passively—reduce a superyacht's energy needs, and at the same time capture wind and solar energy almost invisibly.

Design justice is a framework for analyzing how design can both benefit and burden different groups of people, and how concepts of justice and equity should be considered in the context of design. MIT is bringing this work into the classroom—as many classrooms as they can.

Lillian Gilbreth was a pioneering scientist and businesswoman who was forced to reinvent herself after her husband and business partner died in 1924. Then she revolutionized the design of the kitchen.

Nodding to humanism and a “dash of science”, a new book just out from Rizzoli encapsulates design’s spirit—an unwavering quest to redefine our world.

Welcome to fall! Design Observer compatriot Jarrett Fuller reviews his favorite new design books.

Elegant, playful, speculative, and at times dystopian, Pavels Hedström wants nonhuman life to be so close as to be inescapable. He also wants to design—and build—a better world.

Rebranding the Irish Independent—with a harp, and the color green.

Carnegie Mellon seeks a new head for its School of Design.

Show me on the doll where the world hurt you: The weirdly cathartic world of TikTok’s doll roleplay community.

A new book pays tribute to more than seven decades of video game design.

From MIT: Could a new “living medical device,” made from human cells, eliminate the need for insulin jabs?

Want to teach people about the complexity of gerrymandering? Turn it into an art exhibit.

Coffee design—yes, you read that correctly—claims to be emerging “as as a valid, urgent form of art for the modern world, as vibrant and essential as any gallery painting or sculpture work”.

Far from whimsical origami, Fold is a research project based at Aalto University, working on industrial-scale green solutions for the paper and packaging industry. You can seem their work at Helsinki Design Week, and read more about them here.

Veteran graphic designer Linus Bowman highlights ten iconic Microsoft fonts to explain the company's outsized influence on type. (He also uncovers a font with a "shady" origin.) "Love them or hate them, it's impossible to deny their significance." Also: Thanks for the memories, Calibri.

Resi is a female-led architectural tech start-up, founded by Alex Depledge and Jules Coleman, that’s on a mission to change, democratize, and have a sustainable impact on the UK residential home development market.

In an effort led by Reading Rainbow star Levar Burton, more than 175 actors, authors, and activists have signed an open letter opposing book bans in the U.S. “It’s only a matter of time before regressive, suppressive ideologues will shift their focus toward other forms of art and entertainment, to further their attacks and efforts to scapegoat marginalized communities, particularly Bipoc and LGBTQ+ folks.”

Jobs | September 23