10 Must-Read Books for Designers in 2021
Make no mistake: the large increase of interface designers roles' doesn't mean we have to simplify this discipline to pushing pixels. Managing, writing, meetings, systems and behaviour change among other areas need to be designed as well. Design is, ultimately, to enable, and as such, we must focus on each touchpoint the final user is interacting with to not just making it functional but also a delight. If you're willing to take a leap in this wonderful discipline, these books will surely accompany you on the journey!
Liftoff!
Why read?
Liftoff! is your guide to leveling up as a design manager and leader. It’s experience-driven approach written by designers for designers will help you hire and scale teams, develop careers, learn why diversity matters to your business, and solidify design’s role in your organization. Liftoff! will elevate your skills to lead your team and company to new heights.
384 pages, 2020
Design for How People Think
Why read?
User experience doesn’t happen on a screen; it happens in the mind, and the experience is multidimensional and multisensory. This practical book will help you uncover critical insights about how your customers think so you can create products or services with an exceptional experience. Corporate leaders, marketers, product owners, and designers will learn how cognitive processes from different brain regions form what we perceive as a singular experience. Author John Whalen shows you how anyone on your team can conduct “contextual interviews” to unlock insights. You’ll then learn how to apply that knowledge to design brilliant experiences for your customers.
240 pages, 2019
Writing Is Designing
Why read?
Without words, apps would be an unusable jumble of shapes and icons, while voice interfaces and chatbots wouldn’t even exist. Words make software human-centered, and require just as much thought as the branding and code. This book will show you how to give your users clarity, test your words, and collaborate with your team. You’ll see that writing is designing.
200 pages, 2020
Book of Branding
Why read?
Book of Branding is a creative guide for new businesses, start-ups and individuals, which puts visual identity at the heart of brand strategy. The conversational, jargon free, tone of the book helps the reader to understand essential elements of the brand identity process. Offering first hand experience, insights and tips throughout, the book uses real life case studies to show how great collaborative work can be achieved. Book of Branding is an essential addition to the start-up toolkit, designed for entrepreneurs, founders, graphic designers, brand creators and anyone seeking to decode the complicated world of brand identity.
256 pages, 2019
Building Design Systems
Why read?
Learn how to build a design system framed within the context of your specific business needs. This book guides you through the process of defining a design language that can be understood across teams, while also establishing communication strategies for how to sell your system to key stakeholders and other contributors.
162 pages, 2019
Design Beyond Devices
Why read?
Your customer has five senses and a small universe of devices. Why aren’t you designing for all of them? Go beyond screens, keyboards, and touchscreens by letting your customer’s humanity drive the experience—not a specific device or input type. Learn the techniques you’ll need to build fluid, adaptive experiences for multiple inputs, multiple outputs, and multiple devices.
393 pages, 2020
Figure It Out
Why read?
From incomprehensible tax policies to confusing medical explanations, we’re swamped with information that we can’t make sense of. Figure It Out shows us how to transform information into better presentations, better meetings, better software, and better decisions. So take heart: under the guidance of Anderson and Fast, we can, in fact, figure it out—for ourselves and for others.
416 pages, 2020
100 Things
Why read?
We design to elicit responses from people. We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. This book combines real science and research with practical examples to deliver a guide every designer needs. With this book youll design more intuitive and engaging apps, software, websites and products that match the way people think, decide and behave.
256 pages, 2020
How Innovation Works
Why read?
Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.
416 pages, 2020
Engaged
Why read?
Behavior change design creates entrancing—and effective—products and experiences. Whether you’ve studied psychology or are new to the field, you can incorporate behavior change principles into your designs to help people achieve meaningful goals, learn and grow, and connect with one another. Engaged offers practical tips for design professionals to apply the psychology of engagement to their work.
320 pages, 2020