Books like The design encyclopedia by Mel Byars

A comprehensive guide to graphic design and typography, offering practical advice and design techniques for students and designers alike.

Bruno Munari, celebrated Italian designer, shares his vision that design should be beautiful, functional and accessible, exploring its impact on everyday objects from lamps to road signs and typography.

Sixth edition

The Elements of Graphic Design, Second Edition, presents a refreshed, color‑rich exploration of typography, layout and visual hierarchy, featuring over 750 images and new content on web design, modularity and motion.

"This encyclopedia is the most comprehensive guide available to international product design of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It includes more than 300 entries on influential designers and studios and the most important design-led manufacturers worldwide, both past and present, from Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy and Philippe Starck to Apple, Ikea and BMW. The products featured range from classic cars, furniture and ceramics to the latest MP3 players. Each entry includes an informative profile, a biography or company history, and a product chronology, and is accompanied by colour photographs."--Jacket.

For designers working in every medium, layout is arguably 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 in order to effectively break the rules of grid-based design, one must first understand those rules and see them applied to real-world projects. Basics include composing typographic space, format determination, and sequencing and systemization. Various types of grids a manuscript, column, modular, hierarchical a are also covered. Text reveals top designers' work in process and rationale. Projects with similar characteristics are linked through a simple notational system that encourages exploration and comparison of structure ideas. Each project is shown comprehensively so readers can see its structure revealed over several pages, at a size that allows for inspection of detail. Also included are historical overviews that summarize the development of layout concepts, both grid-based and non-grid based, in modern design practice.