Here are three books that I read in the last year and found to be inspiring and valuable additions to my bookshelf.

Adrian Shaughnessy: How to be a graphic designer: without losing your soul
I would say, straight off, that if you’re a graphic designer, you must read this book. Own a copy. Illustrator Siggi Eggertsson said that its awesome design made him suspicious of the quality of the content, but the content is at least as good as its design. It works as a handbook, a resource for inspiration, and gives solid and practical advice. It covers how to set up your own design studio (with helpful diagrams), and how to handle job interviews. Here is a very good interview with Shaughnessy that focuses on his book.

As for the book title, I think it is apt: ‘losing your soul’ (I think it means becoming disillusioned with your craft, which is easy enough to do) is a danger in everything, and in a profession that is primarily preoccupied with surfaces, it’s especially precarious. This book did a great job at inspiring me, and hopefully other designers will find it useful, too.

[Amazon UK: How to Be a Graphic Designer, Without Losing Your Soul]

Robin Kinross: Unjustified texts: perspectives on typography
This happened to be one of the books I picked off the shelf while I was researching for my dissertation, and was a fantastic find. Self-published, and with no less authority (perhaps more?), Kinross’ ‘Unjustified texts’ gathers together 25 years’ worth of writing on the themes of editorial typography, the emergence of graphic design in Britain, and the work of modernist designers.

This is an unusual and smart collection of writings that I’d recommend to designers who are interested in history and culture. The essays also deal with the recognition and definition of graphic design as a profession, and the writings are no less relevant to the current day and even the future.

[Amazon UK: Unjustified Texts: Perspectives on Typography] [Hyphen Press]

Christopher Burke: Paul Renner: the art of typography
Originally Burke’s PhD thesis, Burke converted his ideas into a highly readable and beautifully-designed book. It is the only biography on Paul Renner, the designer of the typeface Futura. Although not as widely used as Helvetica, geometric sans-serif Futura has been prominently (over)used in advertising and across visual culture since its creation in 1927. Burke argues that Futura was a product of the classic German third way: an answer to the conflict of Roman (western) type, and German gothic blackletter. This was highly contentious in Germany in the early twentieth-century. The political and social forces behind the creation of Futura are compelling, and Burke does a fantastic job at revealing them. Here is a longer review of this book at Typebooks.

[Amazon UK: Paul Renner: The Art of Typography]