What I read in 2025

The year-end reading list. Thirteen things, mostly not from the design press, that earned their place on the studio’s shelf or in the studio’s reading queue this year.

Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. Already on this site’s spring reading list. Worth a second mention. The framing has shaped how the studio scoped projects in 2025.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Caused a lot of arguments in 2024 and 2025. Most of them are downstream of a more interesting underlying point: most of the design industry is producing for an audience whose attention has been substantially reshaped by the products it has built. The book is one of several pushing me to think more carefully about what the studio is responsible for.

The Premonition by Michael Lewis. Re-read this year. Holds up.

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Short, aphoristic, easy to dismiss as another book in the “creativity” genre. The chapters on listening, on what the artist is doing when nothing is happening, are better than the genre usually allows.

Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit. From 1984. Difficult. The argument that personal identity is less stable than we treat it as has, oddly, been more useful for thinking about brand systems than most of the brand-systems books I read this year.

The Pattern on the Stone by W. Daniel Hillis. From 1998. The clearest book I have ever read on what computers actually are. Would recommend to any designer who works near software and wants to understand what is happening underneath.

Maggie Appleton’s writing on AI and the indie web is the most thoughtful publication I subscribed to this year. The pieces on what generative AI does to the web’s social fabric are required reading.

Robin Sloan’s notes keep being the publication that has shaped my thinking on the web most. The recent piece on “specialness” is a useful counter to the prevailing AI-doom narrative.

Frank Chimero on quitting Twitter again, plus the more recent essays on what writing on a personal site is for. Required reading for designers thinking about their own publishing.

Are.na is the tool I have been using most for collecting reading and reference, and the community there has improved noticeably this year. Worth setting up a free account and following five or six people whose work you respect.

The London Review of Books, continuing subscription. Most of what I read out of design comes from here.

Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian) by Maria Popova, which I have been reading since around 2010. The pace has slowed. The quality is steady. Worth the long read.

Ahmad Shadeed’s blog is the technical CSS writing I send to other designers most often. The recent posts on :has() are the clearest treatment of the topic.

Thirteen things, more than usual. The year had more reading than the studio expected. The shape of next year, given how the studio’s calendar is filling, will be different.

If you have a recommendation for the next list, send it. The next quarterly reading post lands in spring.