Book picks similar to
As Little Design as Possible by Sophie Lovell
design
non-fiction
art
ux
Designing Products People Love: How Great Designers Create Successful Products
Scott Hurff - 2015
You'll understand how to discover and interpret customer pain, and learn how to use this research to guide your team through each step of product creation.Written for designers, product managers, and others who want to communicate better with designers, this book is essential reading for anyone who contributes to the product creation process.Understand exactly who your customers are, what they want, and how to build products that make them happyLearn frameworks and principles that successful product designers useIncorporate five states into every screen of your interface to improve conversions and reduce perceived loading timesDiscover meeting techniques that Apple, Amazon, and LinkedIn use to help teams solve the right problems and make decisions fasterDesign effective interfaces across different form factors by understanding how people hold devices and complete tasksLearn how successful designers create working prototypes that capture essential customer feedbackCreate habit-forming and emotionally engaging experiences, using the latest psychological research
Inside Apple
Adam Lashinsky - 2011
Based on numerous interviews, this book reveals exclusive new information about how Apple innovates, deals with its suppliers, and is handling the transition into the post Jobs era.
The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects
Deyan Sudjic - 2008
What is it that persuades us to camp outside Apple stores to be the first to buy an iPhone? Why is it that a generation ago a typewriter might have lasted someone a lifetime, but now we write on computers that we upgrade every couple of years to shinier, faster, sleeker models? Why do the clicks of some car doors sound “expensive”? Deyan Sudjic charts our relationship—both innocent and knowing—with all things designed. From the opulent excesses of the catwalk to the playfulness of an Alessi jam jar, he shows how we can be manipulated and seduced by our possessions. With scintillating wit he addresses these questions and more, exploring the reasons why every designer yearns to put a personal stamp on a chair or an adjustable lamp, and where design ends and art begins. 71 black-and-white and 5 color illustrations.
Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design
Jennifer Bass - 2011
With more than 1,400 illustrations, many of them never published before and written by the leading design historian Pat Kirkham, this is the definitive study that design and film enthusiasts have been eagerly anticipating. Saul Bass (1920-1996) created some of the most compelling images of American post-war visual culture. Having extended the remit of graphic design to include film titles, he went on to transform the genre. His best known works include a series of unforgettable posters and title sequences for films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder. He also created some of the most famous logos and corporate identity campaigns of the century, including those for major companies such as AT&T, Quaker Oats, United Airlines and Minolta. His wife and collaborator, Elaine, joined the Bass office in the late 1950s. Together they created an impressive series of award-winning short films, including the Oscar-winning Why Man Creates, as well as an equally impressive series of film titles, ranging from Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus in the early 1960s to Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear and Casino in the 1990s. Designed by Jennifer Bass, Saul Bass's daughter and written by distinguished design historian Pat Kirkham who knew Saul Bass personally, this book is full of images from the Bass archive, providing an in depth account of one of the leading graphic artists of the 20th century.
The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time
Jim McKelvey - 2020
Louis glassblowing artist and recovering computer scientist named Jim McKelvey lost a sale because he couldn't accept American Express cards. Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting credit card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. With no expertise or experience in the world of payments, they approached the problem of credit cards with a new perspective, questioning the industry's assumptions, experimenting and innovating their way through early challenges, and achieving widespread adoption from merchants small and large.But just as Square was taking off, Amazon launched a similar product, marketed it aggressively, and undercut Square on price. For most ordinary startups, this would have spelled the end. Instead, less than a year later, Amazon was in retreat and soon discontinued its service. How did Square beat the most dangerous company on the planet? Was it just luck? These questions motivated McKelvey to study what Square had done differently from all the other companies Amazon had killed. He eventually found the key: a strategy he calls the Innovation Stack.McKelvey's fascinating and humorous stories of Square's early days are blended with historical examples of other world-changing companies built on the Innovation Stack to reveal a pattern of ground-breaking, competition-proof entrepreneurship that is rare but repeatable.The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that's much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent first-person look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems--one crazy idea at a time.
Nomadic Furniture
James Hennessey - 1973
How to Build and where to Buy Lightweight Furniture that Folds, Collapses, Stacks, Knocks-down, Inflates Or Can be Thrown Away and Re-cycledBeing Both a Book of Instruction and a Catalog of Access for Easy Moving
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Steven Levy - 2011
How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works.While they were still students at Stanford, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow, Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more.The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking. After its unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers—free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses—and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire.But has Google lost its innovative edge? With its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can the company that famously decided not to be evil still compete?No other book has ever turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.
Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
Rudolf Arnheim - 1954
Gestalt theory and the psychology of visual perception form the basis for an analysis of art and its basic elements.
Think Like a UX Researcher: How to Observe Users, Influence Design, and Shape Business Strategy
David Travis - 2019
You'll discover how to plan and conduct UX research, analyze data, persuade teams to take action on the results and build a career in UX. The book will help you take a more strategic view of product design so you can focus on optimizing the user's experience. UX Researchers, Designers, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts and Marketing Managers will find tools, inspiration and ideas to rejuvenate their thinking, inspire their team and improve their craft.Key FeaturesA dive-in-anywhere book that offers practical advice and topical examples.
Thought triggers, exercises and scenarios to test your knowledge of UX research.
Workshop ideas to build a development team's UX maturity.
War stories from seasoned researchers to show you how UX research methods can be tailored to your own organization.
Bauhaus 1919-1933
Magdalena Droste - 1990
Documents, workshop products from all areas of design, studies, sketches in the classroom, and architectural plans and models are all part of its comprehensive inventory. The Bauhaus Archiv is dedicated to the study and presentation of the history of the Bauhaus, including the new Bauhaus in Chicago and the Hochschule f
In Progress: See Inside a Lettering Artist's Sketchbook and Process, from Pencil to Vector
Jessica Hische - 2015
See everything, from Hische's rough sketches to her polished finals for major clients such as Wes Anderson, NPR, and Starbucks. The result is a well of inspiration and brass tacks information for designers who want to sketch distinctive letterforms and hone their skills. With more than 250 images and metallic silver ink printed throughout to represent her penciled sketches, this highly visual book is an essential—and entirely enjoyable—resource for those who practice or simply appreciate the art of hand lettering.
Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture
Casey Reas - 2010
Algorithmic processes, harnessed through the medium of computer code, allow artists to generate increasingly complex visual forms that they otherwise might not have been able to imagine, let alone delineate. The newest volume in our Design Brief series Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture is a non-technical introduction to the history, theory, and practice of software in the arts. Organized into themes linked to aspects of code—repetition, transformation, parameters, visualization, and simulation—each of the book's sections contains an essay, code samples, and numerous illustrations. An accompanying website (www.formandcode.com) features code samples in various programming languages for the examples in the book. An ideal introductory text for digital design and media arts courses, this unique primer will also appeal to students and professionals looking for a survey of this exciting new area of artistic production.
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
Jessica Livingston - 2001
These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done.But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do--create value--more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.
Mid-Century Modern: Interiors, Furniture, Design Details
Bradley Quinn - 2006
Never had homes been so thoroughly contemporary, with antiques and period styles entirely banished. Mid-Century Modern explores the interior decor of this seminal decade, concentrating on all aspects of a home's decoration-walls, flooring, surfaces, lighting, and, of course, furniture.Case studies examine beautiful present-day homes that exhibit mid-century style in an exemplary way, and suggest ideas for taking the 1950's look-complete with collector's pieces-and mixing and matching it with elements from other eras.
To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
Henry Petroski - 1985
More than a series of fascinating case studies, To Engineer Is Human is a work that looks at our deepest notions of progress and perfection, tracing the fine connection between the quantifiable realm of science and the chaotic realities of everyday life."Alert, inquisitive, unspecialized, wholly human...refreshingly eclectic." --The Spectator"Henry Petroski is an ardent engineer, and if he writes more good books like this, he might find himself nominated to become the meistersinger of the guild. [This is] a refreshing plunge into the dynamics of the engineering ethos...as straightforward as an I-beam."--Science