Baseline Shift
Princeton Architectural Press
Powell’s City of Books
Amazon
Baseline Shift captures the untold stories of women across time who used graphic design to earn a living while changing the world.
Baseline Shift centers diverse women across backgrounds whose work has shaped, shifted, and formed graphic design as we know it today. From an interdisciplinary book designer and calligrapher starting out in Harlem’s Renaissance, to the invisible drafters of Monotype’s drawing office, the women represented here include auteurs, advocates for social justice, and creators ahead of their time. The fifteen essays in this illustrated collection come from contributors with a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. Baseline Shift is essential reading for students and practitioners of graphic design, as well as anyone with an interest in women’s history.
Ethics in Design and Communication
Critical Perspectives
Bloomsbury
Powell’s City of Books
Amazon
This timely collection brings together critical, analytic, historical, and practical studies to address what ethics means in the practice of design.
Designers face the same challenges as everyone else in the complex conditions of contemporary cultural life-choices about consumption, waste, exploitation, ecological damage, and political problems built into the supply chains on which the global systems of inequity currently balance precariously. But designers face the additional dilemma that their paid work is often entangled with promoting the same systems such critical approaches seek to redress: how to reconcile this contradiction, among others, in seeking to chart an ethical course of action while still functioning effectively in the world.
A Short Guide to Research (for Designers)
Amazon
A pocket book on design research.
Developed from a series of lectures on how to conduct research, this short guide explains various research methods, along with key concepts underpinning quality research. The guide includes introductory ethnographic techniques, as well as a section dedicated to design-specific techniques.