I’m hosting this month’s edition of the IndieWeb Book Club. Thank you to Zachary Kai for getting this fun thing going with a kickoff post about The Creative Act, an artistic playbook by Rick Rubin, and to Joe Crawford for the November edition with an intro to Scott McCloud’s mind-expanding Understanding Comics.
My pick for this month’s book club is The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams.
I’ve noticed that there’s a theme to the books we’ve picked so far for the club: they demystify artistic processes with the goal of making them approachable to a broader audience, deepening the appreciation of things you already enjoy like music, comics and the visual arts.
Each one goes from strategic and inspiring to more tactical and grounded, from Rubin’s near-mystical worship of the sacredness of creativity, to the tour through the history of visual communication by McCloud, to the immediately applicable tips of the Non-Designer book. Williams’ book being the most practical of the bunch makes sense given the business-like purpose of graphic design, but the theme of democratizing creativity is still strong through all of these books.
If the word “Design” with a capital D sounds intimidating to you - don’t be fooled! The basic principles aren’t carved into a stone tablet handed down from on high, it’s simply a way of seeing the world and a skill. And like any other skill, it can be improved with practice and a few starting tips.
It’s such a short read that it’s a bit of a stretch to call it a book. It’s like the skimmable Cliff Notes version instead of a dull textbook. But don’t be fooled - it packs a punch. It’s an impressively succinct distillation of design fundamentals that really helped me at the beginning of my career and still holds up well for anyone looking for an introduction.
It’s exactly the plain-speaking book that I needed back when I was a junior developer fresh out of college. I didn’t have any inkling that I’d become a designer one day, I simply wanted my work to look good. Over the years, I’ve met so many people who reminded me of those early days, people of all backgrounds and roles that aren’t necessarily looking to be designers by trade, but appreciate good layouts and want a few pointers to get there.
If that sounds like you, then this is the book I always recommend as a starting point. It takes the two main principles of graphic design - layout and typography - and distills them down to bite-sized walkthroughs and exercises. They’re much easier to master than you’d think and form the skeleton that everything else hangs on. Color, word choice, usability and all the rest come way later compared to these simple fundamentals.
So give it a spin and let me know how you like it! You can write up a blog post and send me a webmention, hit me up on the socials, or drop me an email, whatever works, and I’ll add links and quotes here.
Also check out the wiki page for the book club for more info or to sign up to host an upcoming month!