Our Favorite Design Books — 2018 Edition

We need to be honest with you — we have a dark obsession. We buy glorious, oversized, weighty, colorful, impeccably-made, occasionally expensive books about creators and the things they create.

Illustrators, designers, entrepreneurs, architects, visionaries … we love them all. Many of the books on this year’s list celebrate those who capture a unique time and place: 1950s Southern California, 1980s Miami, the fantasies of space-age design, the delicate wonder of the natural world, or the glitter-bomb apex of disco-era New York City.

Identity: Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv

The NBC peacock. Mobile’s Pegasus. Pan Am, PBS, Chase, NYU … the sheer number of brand identities Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv forged or remade over the last 60 years is incredible. Identity is more than a catalog of famous logo design, it can be a surprisingly personal visual essay on the icons that define business, entertainment, travel, and global culture.

Studio 54

There’s a saying that everyone who moves to New York City moves there five years too late. All the good stuff already happened, and you missed it. Few places represent that idea more than the sex + drug + glam + grit + disco heyday of Studio 54. This superlative visual history is full of rare photos that chart the glittery rise, cultural impact, and movie-script fall of “the greatest party in the world.”

Brand by Hand: Blisters, Calluses, and Clients: A Life in Design

We’ve followed Jon Contino’s career for a long time, and this new graphic design retrospective captures Jon’s unfiltered honesty, distinctive style, and singular ability to make great commercial art inspired by experiences both good and not-so-good. This is simply beautiful work, especially for fans of illustration and hand-lettering.

Walt Disney’s Disneyland

Theme parks have come a long way since 1955, but Taschen’s new technicolor-fused book shows just how forward-thinking Uncle Walt’s vision was. Disneyland’s creation forged a new template of product design, mixing and matching creative and technical professionals in unprecedented ways. Disneyland, and Disney, share a complex history (and legacy), but the park changed our idea of what an immersive experience could be, and how it could be built.

I Thought About It in My Head and I Felt It in My Heart but I Made It with My Hands

His style has been ripped off for years by countless imitators, but Rob Ryan’s work is unmistakable. The cut-outs and stencils are beautiful in their original form, but this retrospective is crafted immaculately, and it’s a true joy to leaf through. Few designers can match Ryan’s alchemy of nature, wonder, wit, science, poetry, and hope.

The Art of the LP: Classic Album Covers 1955–1995

Lamenting lost art forms is a national pastime, especially when it comes to all things music-related. The album cover as cultural touchstone, however, is a hard one to lose. While vinyl sales (and album art) have rebounded over the last 10 years, The Art of the LP celebrates the peak of the art form, when covers blended and advanced representations of sexuality, identity, art, death, and … of course … getting high.

A Peculiar Paradise: Florida Photographs

Florida, state of many adjectives. National Geographic photographer Nathan Benn captures them all in his Kodachrome archive of 1980s Florida. His eye was drawn to all of Florida’s contradictions: urban sprawl and untamed nature, family-friendly tourism and the narcotics boom, working-class life and outrageous fortune. A Peculiar Paradise is in turns striking, nostalgic, ludicrous, and timely.

Typeset in the Future

Writer, designer, and critic Dave Addey expertly catalogs how the future is spelled out, literally. Typeset in the Future is an informative and engaging expansion of one of his favorite subjects — the typography in movies and TV shows set in our not-so-distant future. Spoiler alert: spaceships love Eurostile. There’s no love for the serif in 2049, sadly.

Ray Gun

Speaking of the future … for a large part of the 20th century, ray guns were marvels of industrial design, playing to double-feature fantasies of how the future would look (and behave). Times have changed, and they’re mostly gone from the toy section, but Ray Gun showcases the colorful, deco-inspired creations that fueled thousands of Saturday afternoon adventures.

The Stan Lee Story

Confession: we don’t own this book. Why? Because it’s a limited edition of 1,000 numbered copies (each signed by the late subject), and it retails for $1,500. So, we’ll wait for Powerball and think about it. Stan was certainly no stranger to self-promotion, but his influence is undeniable. This dazzling, oversized book is a de facto obituary, but it also serves as a history of comic books and the people who made them.