The Book Thief
How to find cool design books - tips and tricks from a person with a book problem :)
Okay, technically, I am not a book stealer!
I am a book lover, I love print more than digital and I specifically love books about design, typography and anything about old print or advertising. Most of my bargains come from scouring Amazon Marketplace. Quite often you’ll find that a book you want on Amazon is quite often available on Marketplace much cheaper, even with the addition of the £2.80 postage per book.
But this post isn’t about how to buy books, its about how to find great books, little hidden treasures you wouldn’t have necessarily come across. Part of my little design journey has had some serendipitous little moments. People I have found or blog posts about the very subject I love have fallen into my path one way or another.
One such example is Aaron Draplin. I happened upon a blog post about logo design and a link was available to a logo challenge class available on YouTube. I sat and watched this guy and my head about exploded! I love everything about this bloke’s work ethic, his thoughts on treasuring design and how to design simple but effective. His enthusiasm is awesome……and so is his book collection! I noticed he had a huge bookshelf in his video and some books laying around on his work surface. This was a goldmine!
Even better is that he also has his own book coming out this May 17th! I know I will be talking a lot more about Aaron in future posts!
What is this guy reading? What inspires him? Instantly I started taking screenshots and making notes of the authors and titles in his collection. i then found myself watching other logo and graphic design videos to see if there were any other books on show. I then also found a book called Bibliographic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books (newer version here ) – using these screenshots and this book I was able to make a list of great design books, some very hard to find and some very easily available and cheap on Marketplace. Slowly I have started to grow a nice collection of design inspiring books and keep looking and finding tutorials and blogs, such as Mackey Saturday’s logo design video tutorial (he’s also an amazing logo and brand designer), about design and being very ‘Detective Dave’ looking for new titles on bookshelves!
I have started a series of my design books and start listing them on my Instagram account solely for my book collection with video overview of what is inside them.
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Try and get hold of books about graphic and logo design, pre-computer times. See how these masters came to create such amazing and long-lasting, iconic artwork. You will learn more than you will realise.
So that’s the book stealing post for the day! 🙂
