Designers & Books: What Iconic Designers Are Reading

How to hack into the minds of the world’s leading design practitioners and critics.

We love design. We love books. And we’ve always found designers to be among the most intellectually curious, disciplinarily promiscuous, creatively voracious minds. So we’re thrilled for the launch of Designers & Books — a fantastic new portal for peering into the private libraries of the world’s most prominent design thinkers and doers.

Launching with 50 designers — including icons like, Milton Glaser, John Maeda, Elizabeth Diller, Norman Foster and Tim Brown, and Brain Pickings favorites like Paula Scher, Stefan Sagmeister and George Lois — the project spans a wide spectrum of design disciplines, from architecture to fashion to urban design to cultural interpretation, and kicks off with 678 books.

In addition to designers’ picks, reading lists are available from leading design writers, curators, educators and critics — or, as the site calls them, commentators.

So if you’ve ever wondered what graces the bookshelf of TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, the original information architect, wonder no more. (A handful of information design standbys, a few obscure yet indispensable vintage treats like Paul Kee’s The Thinking Eye, and Stewart Brand’s culturally cultish Whole Earth Catalog.)

Similar to the way that ‘good design can make your life better’ — we also believe that ‘good books can make your life better.’” ~ Steve Kroeter, Founder

Despite the clear gender bias and some glaring omissions (Hey, Tina! And what about MoMA’s Paola Antonelli, arguably the quintessential design advocate of our time?), Designers & Books is a fascinating and rare glimpse of the creative and intellectual fuel that powers some of today’s most influential design thinking, and very much worth your digital minute.

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Word on the Street: Found Urban Type Timed for Social Commentary

For the past 30 years, photographer Richard Nagler has been capturing urbanity’s ephemeral moments of existential irony by pairing found typography from the urban landscape with perfectly timed random passersby. His original inspiration for the series came one summer in the late 1970, when he was wandering the streets of Oakland and noticed the word TIME bolted in large letters on the side of an old building. As he looked up, a very old woman gazed out at him from a window near the type sign, and in that micro-moment he founded embedded a powerful visual metaphor for aging and the passage of time.

Word on the Street is a fantastic collection of Nagler’s richest such images from the past three decades, which iconic poet Allen Ginsberg eloquently and accurately described as “visual poetics.” Sometimes shocking, often surprising and invariably compelling, these portraits invite you, with a wink, to complete the barely bespoken narratives and look for those hidden yet staggeringly obvious human truths that interlace with the fabric of mundanity.

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Image courtesy of Richard Nagler

Thoughtful, amusing and deeply human, Word on the Street is an absolute treasure trove of meticulously timed serendipity, captured with a keen eye for poetic irony.

via NPR

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Victorian Women in Crime

Long before there was Superwoman, Lara Croft or even Mata Hari, there was a dangerous and suspicous character known as the New Woman — a Victorian rebel who rode bikes, spoke with cutting wit, and took orders from no one. In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime: Forgotten Cops and Private Eyes from the Time of Sherlock Holmes, Penguin editor Michael Sims orchestrates a meet-and-greet with the most notorious crime-fighting females of Victorian literature, from Loveday Brooke to Dorcas Dene to Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. Though rooted in fiction, the book bespeaks the era’s restlessness for the empowerment of women, embodying culture’s tendency to first imagine social shifts, then enact them.

The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime is out this week and highly recommended. It’s the sequel to 2009′s equally excellent The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.