Books like What is design? by Paul Jacques Grillo

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

Creative Confidence shows how every person can unlock and apply their creative potential in business and everyday life, using insights and examples from IDEO’s design practice.

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.

Second‑edition guide by Frank Ching that revises classic architectural principles—form, space, proportion, scale, circulation—using contemporary drawings and examples for students and professionals seeking clear visual instruction.

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.

Based on the 1975 Mary Duke Biddle lectures at the Cooper Union

Geometry lies at the core of the architectural design process. It is omnipresent, from the initial form-finding stages to the actual construction. Modern constructive geometry provides a variety of tools for the efficient design, analysis, and manufacture of complex shapes. This results in new challenges for architecture. However, the architectural application also poses new problems to geometry. Architectural geometry is therefore an entire research area, currently emerging at the border between applied geometry and architecture. This book has been written as a textbook for students of architecture or industrial design. It comprises material at all levels, from the basics of geometric modeling to the cutting edge of research. During the architectural journey through geometry, topics typically reserved for a mathematically well-trained audience are addressed in an easily understandable way. These include central concepts on freeform curves and surfaces, differential geometry, kinematic geometry, mesh processing, digital reconstruction, and optimization of shapes. This book is also intended as a geometry consultant for architects, construction engineers, and industrial designers and as a source of inspiration for scientists interested in applications of geometry processing in architecture and art.

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.