A spring reading list

A short reading list, mostly not from the design press, of things I have been pushing on clients and friends this spring.

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. Not a design book. Useful for designers because it is mostly an argument for being honest about the layers between what we observe and what is actually happening. Worth a read if you have ever sat in a meeting where a brand “decision” was being treated as if it had been received from a higher authority.

Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal. The clearest single account of what has actually happened to open-source maintenance over the last decade. Designers who work near software should read it. The framing of “interaction costs” is one I have been thinking with for months.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. A novel. Reading it slowly. The discipline of a man who has lost the world and is determined to live well in the smaller version that remains is, accidentally, a good model for running a small studio in 2021.

The Pudding keeps publishing better visual journalism than anyone else. Their year-end pieces are now my reference for what good editorial design on the web can do.

Robin Sloan’s notes are the most consistently useful thinking-out-loud I read. He is not, primarily, a designer. The angle of approach is useful for that reason.

Frank Chimero’s “What Screens Want” again, for the third or fourth time. The piece is from 2013. Most of it has aged better than the design writing of the last six months.

Ahmad Shadeed is writing the most useful technical CSS articles on the web. If you write CSS for a living, his RSS is required.

There is more, but those are the ones I keep handing to people. Six titles. Two from the field, four not. That ratio is, I think, the right one for a designer’s reading list.