For professional Graphic Designer like myself, finding design magazines, websites and books about design is very important.

I’m in the process of finding some good graphic design books for my library. I’ve discovered that even though there a lot of GD books, the good ones seem few and far between. On a recent trip to Barnes & Noble there were close to 100 GD books on the shelf, but after looking at each one, only two of them were actually worth buying.

Here are some important criteria I use when shopping for the perfect GD reference to go on my shelf.

1. Does the book give some history of design? It is important to see where design styles came from so that you can build on proven concepts and know why they may or may not work for design situations. Reading design history gives you a mental library of options as well as the reasons behind using them. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

2. Does the book offer basic and advanced design principles? It’s good to know things like what “kissing the edge” is and basic text hierarchy. It’s also good to know more advanced things like grid design and typographical systems.

3. Are the design examples in the book time tested or trendy? There is a lot of trendy design out there, that is here today and gone tomorrow. I think trends in GD are fine, but good design should work whether you live in the 1920′s or the year 2020. Why buy something that you won’t even look at in a year? Buy a book that you’ll go back to again and again.

Two books I highly recommend are Making and Breaking the Grid, put out by Rockport Publishers and Typographic Systems published through Princeton Architectural Press. I highly recommend looking into other books by these publishers as well.

Please let me know if this was helpful and or what graphic design related books you have in your library that you find are good resources.

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