Reading: late 2019

A short reading list, mostly not from the design press, of things I have been pushing on people this autumn.

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. A novel. Not a design book. The single best argument I have read this year for thinking on a longer time horizon than the design industry usually does.

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton. The book most worth pressing on any client who keeps asking for “modern, clean, minimal”. The chapter on what it means for a building to be honest is the chapter most designers should re-read once a year.

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. From 1977. Holds up. Most of the design systems literature of the last decade is, knowingly or not, a footnote to this book. Read the original.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau, free at Project Gutenberg. Re-read it this autumn for the third or fourth time. The chapter on economy is, accidentally, the best argument for charging more for design work that I have ever come across.

Chris Coyier’s blog is the most consistently useful CSS writing on the web. He does not always agree with the spec. The disagreements are usually instructive.

Frank Chimero on writing keeps being the writing I send to other designers when I want them to think about how their own writing reads.

The London Review of Books is the publication I subscribe to that has the least to do with design and is most useful for the writing it has me doing. The discipline of reading writers who are paid by the word and not by the click is, increasingly, the rare reading discipline.

Six things, with a long winter ahead. The list will be shorter in spring, when the days lengthen and there is less time to read. There is always less reading happening in the studio in the summer than in the autumn, which is, I think, the right shape of a year.