Current reads
Extra Bold: a feminist, inclusive, anti-racist, nonbinary field guide for graphic designers
Extra Bold is the inclusive, practical, and informative career handbook that we've all been waiting for.
Part textbook and part comic book, zine, manifesto, survival guide, and self-help manual, Extra Bold is filled with stories and ideas that don't show up in other career books or design overviews.
The book features interviews, essays, typefaces, biographical sketches, and projects from dozens of contributors with a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, abilities, gender identities, and positions of economic and social privilege, adding new voices to the dominant design canon.
Jennifer Tobias's original, handcrafted illustrations bring warmth, happiness, humor, and narrative depth.
Keep reading to learn why Extra Bold is the (design) career guide for everyone!
Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History
Baseline Shift captures the untold stories of women across time who used graphic design to earn a living while changing the world.
Baseline Shift centers diverse women across backgrounds whose work has shaped, shifted, and formed graphic design as we know it today. From an interdisciplinary book designer and calligrapher starting out in Harlem's Renaissance, to the invisible drafters of Monotype's drawing office, the women represented here include auteurs, advocates for social justice, and creators ahead of their time. The fifteen essays in this illustrated collection come from contributors with a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. Baseline Shift is essential reading for students and practitioners of graphic design, as well as anyone with an interest in women's history.
I Wonder
From typographic illustrator Marian Bantjes, I Wonder will make you think in new ways about art, design, beauty, and popular culture.
This unique presentation features the elaborately crafted word pictures of Marian Bantjes, the most inventive and creative typographic illustrator of our time. Whether intricately hand-drawn or using computer illustration software, Bantjes's work crosses the boundaries of time, style, and technology. There is, however, another side to Bantjes's visual work: her thoughtful treatises on art, design, beauty, and popular culture that add a deeper dimension to the decorative nature of her best-known work. These reflections cover the cult of Santa, road-side advertising, photography and memory, the alphabet's letterforms, heraldry, and stars. Bantjes's writing style ranges from the playful to the confrontational, but it is always imbued with perspicacity, insight, and a sense of fun. Intended to inspire creatives of any persuasion, this is more than a collection of ideas: Bantjes has meticulously illustrated every page of the book in her inimitable style to create an accessible work of art that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
Quirky, poignant, astute, funny—this beautiful book presents a compelling collection of observations on visual culture and design. In Stefan Sagmeister's telling words, Bantjes's work is his "favorite example of beauty facilitating the communication of meaning."
Palette Perfect for Graphic Designers & Illustrators: Colour Combinations, Meanings and Cultural References
Both a practical and inspirational book filled with color combinations for any design and illustration project.
The use of color and its combinations creatively in illustration, graphic and product design also implies understanding what emotions they convey and how they affect our design and illustrations. We must also consider that color is also perceived differently in different countries and cultures. All this is widely explained in this second book in the Palette Perfect series, illustrated with projects by renowned international illustrators and designers, and organized by colors (identified with CMYK, RGB and HEX codes) and moods associated with the time of day. Based on real examples drawn from graphic, product and illustration, different innovative combinations and palettes are shown for each color and the meaning it conveys. Intended for graphic designers, design students, fashion and interior decoration lovers, and all those interested in exciting and unexpected color combinations that work.
Pantone: The 20th Century in Color
Longtime Pantone collaborators and color gurus Leatrice Eiseman and Keith Recker identify more than 200 touchstone works of art, products, decor, and fashion, and carefully match them with 80 different official Pantone Color palettes to reveal the trends, radical shifts, and resurgences of various hues. This vibrant volume takes the social temperature of our recent history with the panache that is uniquely Pantone.
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration
From Ed Catmull, co-founder (with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter) of Pixar Animation Studios, comes an incisive book about creativity in business—sure to appeal to readers of Daniel Pink, Tom Peters, and Chip and Dan Heath.
Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.”
For nearly twenty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner thirty Academy Awards. The joyousness of the storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable.
As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, where many computer science pioneers got their start, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the thirteen movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as:
Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better.
If you don’t strive to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them.
The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.
A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody
should be able to talk to anybody.Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change—it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.