The Bookshelf

Explore the latest contemporary topics, references and thinking in design, art, business and more.

Photo: Copyright to the Estate of Milton Glaser. Courtesy of Phaidon Press.
Skin Types - Combination. Magazine illustration. Seventeen, September 1967. Featured in Milton Glaser: POP.

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Skin Types - Combination. Magazine illustration. Seventeen, September 1967.

Featured Title, Milton Glaser: POP

From 1954, when he co-founded the legendary Push Pin Studios, to the late ’70s, Milton Glaser was one of the most celebrated graphic designers of his day, whose work graced countless book and album covers, posters, magazine covers, and advertisements, both famous and little-known. Glaser largely defined the international visual style for illustration, advertising, and typeface design and interest in his legacy continues unabated, with modern creatives acknowledging his influence.

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Save 20% at Phaidon.com

Receive 20% off your purchase with code AIGAS23 (Excludes signed and limited editions). Explore a selection of Phaidon books below.

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Artbook offers 25% off on their catalog of books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture. Explore more from Artbook below. Discount automatically applied.
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Tomi Ungerer: It's All about Freedom

From early childhood drawings of the 1930s to collages and objects from the last decade of the artist’s life, Tomi Ungerer: It’s All about Freedom presents a comprehensive cross section of Ungerer’s vast oeuvre for the first time, revealing the political and stylistic lines and breaks in his career as a “freewheeling artist.”

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A–Z of Record Shop Bags

This exhaustive collection of record-store bags provides a unique perspective on record shopping in the UK over the last century, bringing together over 500 incredible bags (some possibly the only surviving examples) to document the fascinating story of British high street record shopping.

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Ellen Lupton

Bauhaus Typography at 100

The Bauhaus looms large as one of the most influential legacies in 20th-century graphic design. Known for its bold sans-serif typefaces, crisp asymmetrical grids and clean use of negative space, the school emerged as the forebearer of a new look—one that seized the tools of mass production in the creation of a radical new art.

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Everyday Play

“Life must be lived as play,” said Plato, and this book will help you rediscover the wonder in the weekly grind, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. Throughout history, philosophers, artists and writers have found liberation in taking play seriously.

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Mexico: The Land of Charm

This volume gathers a surprising and engaging sampling of 350 pieces of printed matter: material that circulated between the 1910s and the 1960s, with print runs of anywhere from a thousand to tens of thousands of copies.

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Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots

Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots is the first publication to capture the enormous body of distinctive and visually ecstatic graphic design that emanated from California throughout most of the twentieth century.

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The Extreme Self

If you’re wondering why the inside of your head feels so strange these days, this book has the answers. The Extreme Self is a new kind of graphic novel that shows how you’ve been morphing into something else.

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Auto Erotica

Over the course of its 240 pages, Auto Erotica covers the gamut of motoring in Britain during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s through rare ephemeral booklets full of unusual graphic ideas and concepts.

Kelly Walters

Brown, Black + Latinx Design Educators

Kelly Walters collects twelve deeply personal interviews with graphic design educators of color from across the United States and Canada. The book centers the unique narratives of Black, Brown, and Latinx design educators, from their childhood experiences to their navigation of undergraduate and graduate studies and their career paths in academia and practice.

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New Grammar of Ornament

Ornaments are omnipresent: they can be found on buildings, fabrics, jewelry, tiles, ceramics and wallpaper. Scorned at the outset of the modern age, ornament has long since returned to architecture and influences design drafts as much as tattoo motifs.

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How Many Female Type Designers Do You Know?

A pioneering appraisal of female typographers, with historical research and interviews with contemporary practitioners.
This important new book surveys the past and present of women working in typography.

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CriticAll!

How can we encourage more people to become actively aware of and critical about the design of their environments? How can we make the realm of design criticism more inclusive?

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Ruben Pater

CAPS LOCK

CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It. CAPS LOCK uses clear language and visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. By sharing examples of radical design practices that challenge the supremacy of the market, it hopes to inspire a different kind of graphic design.

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R. Buckminster Fuller.

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

nitially published in 1969, and one of Fuller’s most popular works, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a brilliant synthesis of his world view.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Art =

Featuring more than 800 artworks from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, this groundbreaking book — organized by thematic keywords — draws upon The Met's online Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History — offering fresh, unconventional ways of engaging with visual culture.

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Massimo Vignelli

The Vignelli Canon

The famous Italian designer Massimo Vignelli allows us a glimpse of his understanding of good design in this book, its rules and criteria.

Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams, and Prison Escape Maps

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Annie Atkins

Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams, and Prison Escape Maps

A behind-the-scenes look at the extraordinary and meticulous design of graphic objects for film sets

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Snacky Tunes: Music is the Main Ingredient

The team behind the longest running food podcast, Snacky Tunes, presents a one-of-a-kind book exploring chefs' profound relationship with music through never-before-seen stories and recipes.

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R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern-Thinking

R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern-Thinking is a major reassessment of Fuller’s legacy in the context of design, examining his singular vision of new conceptual models for design and architecture, alongside his ideas on their potentially world-altering consequences.

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Gerard Unger

Theory of Type Design

Theory of Type Design, by internationally renowned Dutch graphic designer and typographer Gerard Unger (born 1942), is the first complete and accessible theory of the breathtakingly varied field of typography. "Of all designed objects letters are probably the most pervasive," as Unger explains at the beginning of his study. "Very familiar yet amazingly diverse in their appearance … there seems to be no limit to human ingenuity when it comes to varying letterforms."

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Jacqueline Francis + Stephen G. Hall

Black Lives 1900

How W.E.B. Du Bois combined photographs and infographics to communicate the everyday realities of Black lives and the inequities of race in America. This beautifully designed book reproduces the photographs alongside the revolutionary graphic works for the first time.

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Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound

The Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré created an unmistakable and entirely unique body of work, first as a writer and linguist, and then in a dazzling series of colorful drawings on a multitude of subjects, from his native Bété culture to the urban milieu of Abidjan to the all-encompassing themes of fraternity, equality and global understanding.

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Tallur L.N.: Interference Fringe

Using a range of mediums including found objects, appropriated industrial machines, carved stone and wood, cast bronze, and works embedded in concrete and studded with coins, Tallur questions the value we assign to money, icons and artifacts.

John Foster, Peter Dawson, Sean Adams + Tony Seddon

Graphic Design Rules

Graphic Design Rules is a handy guide for professional graphic designers, students, and laymen who incorporate graphic design into their job or small business. Packed with practical advice, this spirited collection of design dos and don'ts takes readers through 365 rules.

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Tony Nourmand

French New Wave

French New Wave: A Revolution in Design celebrates explosive and groundbreaking poster art that accompanied French New Wave films like The 400 Blows (1959), Jules and Jim (1962) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).

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Rossella Menegazzo, Stefania Piotti, Kenya Hara

WA: The Essence of Japanese Design

Through some 300 objects this book explores contemporary Japanese design: from everyday objects and packaging to interior design and lighting elements. Ultimately the book aims to explore the way in which Japanese design manages to harness its materials and at the same time combines respect for tradition with forward-thinking and experimentation.

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Bruno Vandermueren

Aeroflot: Fly Soviet, A Visual History

This book unfolds the story of Soviet air travel, from early carriers like Deruluft and Dobrolet to the enigmatic Aeroflot. Organized like an Air Force, with a vast fleet of aircraft and helicopters, Aeroflot was the world’s biggest air carrier of passengers and cargo, responsible for a wider range of duties than any other airline.

Ellen Lupton + Jennifer Phillips

Graphic Design the New Basics

Graphic Design: The New Basics explains the key concepts of visual language that inform any work of design. A foundational graphic design book for students, Lupton and Phillips explore the formal elements of design through visual demonstrations and concise commentary. From logos to letterhead to complex website design, this is a graphic design book for everyone.

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Ellen Lupton

Design Is Storytelling

Design Is Storytelling explores the psychology of visual perception from a narrative point of view. Presenting dozens of tools and concepts in a lively, visual manner, this book will help any designer amplify the narrative power of their work.

Keith Granet

The Business of Design

The Business of Design debunks the myth that business sense and creative talent are mutually exclusive and, unlike other lackluster business books, is written and illustrated to captivate a visually thinking audience. The Business of Design reveals the tools necessary to create and run a thriving design business in today's ultra-competitive marketplace.

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Ian Lynam

The Impossibility of Silence

Called “the Hunter S. Thompson of design writing,” Lynam uses his industry knowledge and sharp sense of humor to convey his philosophy on writing specifically in a professional creative setting.

Marty Neumeier

The Brand Gap

THE BRAND GAP is the first book to present a unified theory of brand-building. Whereas most books on branding are weighted toward either a strategic or creative approach, this book shows how both ways of thinking can unite to produce a “charismatic brand”―a brand that customers feel is essential to their lives.

Sean Adams

How Design Makes Us Think

How Design Makes Us Think collects hundreds of examples across graphic design, product design, industrial design, and architecture to illustrate how design can inspire, provoke, amuse, anger, or reassure us.

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Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh

Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty

World-renowned designers Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh set out on a mission: to find out what beauty is and the many ways that it impacts our lives. They turn to philosophy, history, and science to understand why we are drawn to beauty and how it influences the way we feel and behave.

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Phaidon Editors

Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design

Born of the traditions of fine art and printing, graphic design is a form of visual communication that seeks to inform, identify or promote through the combination of word and image. But unlike the written word or a work of art, a graphic design operates exclusively in the context in which it will be seen, and mediates between the wishes of the client and the expectations of the public.

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Jodi Hauptman + Adrian Sudhalter

Publishing as Practice

On the work of three contemporary artist’s-book publishers who have developed fresh ways of broaching politics in publishing
This book documents Publishing as Practice, a residency at Ulises—a curatorial platform based in Philadelphia—that explores publishing as an incubator for new forms of editorial, curatorial and artistic practice.

AIGA Eye on Design Book Review

In CAPS LOCK, Ruben Pater Untangles the Relationship Between Graphic Design and Capitalism. AIGA Eye on Design discusses how Pater's book adds to the growing conversation around the role of design in shaping society.

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The Bookshelf

Featured Title, Milton Glaser: POP

Save 20% at Phaidon.com

Save 25% at Artbook.com

Keep in Touch

Add your creations to the stacks.

Browse More Books

Tomi Ungerer: It's All about Freedom

A–Z of Record Shop Bags

Bauhaus Typography at 100

Everyday Play

Mexico: The Land of Charm

Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots

The Extreme Self

Auto Erotica

Brown, Black + Latinx Design Educators

New Grammar of Ornament

How Many Female Type Designers Do You Know?

CriticAll!

CAPS LOCK

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Art =

The Vignelli Canon

Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams, and Prison Escape Maps

Snacky Tunes: Music is the Main Ingredient

R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern-Thinking

Theory of Type Design

Black Lives 1900

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound

Tallur L.N.: Interference Fringe

Graphic Design Rules

French New Wave

WA: The Essence of Japanese Design

Aeroflot: Fly Soviet, A Visual History

Graphic Design the New Basics

Design Is Storytelling

The Business of Design

The Impossibility of Silence

The Brand Gap

How Design Makes Us Think

Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty

Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design

Publishing as Practice

AIGA Eye on Design Book Review

Our Partners

There Is Value In Membership

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