19 Ingenious Design Books to Inspire You in 2017

Salvador Dalí produced many masterpieces in his life, and one of them was a cookbook. Les Diners de Gala was semi-autobiographical, based on the lavish dinner parties of Dalí and his wife, Gala. This year Taschen reprinted the book ($60), which originally came out in 1973. You might not actually attempt any of the 136 recipes (do you really want “Thousand year old eggs”?), but you’ll certainly feast on the surreal paintings and collages that fill the book.

For 52 weeks straight, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec mailed each other illustrations. The two designers had a pact, to create one hand-drawn data visualization a week. The drawings might represent how many animals one designer saw in a given seven-day period, or every time one designer felt a surge of envy. The colorful, curious postcards now fill the pages of Dear Data ($35), the duo’s coffee table book and permanent record of their project.

Designed by Apple in California ($200 or $300) is every inch the Apple product. It took eight years to develop, is bound in white linen, and printed on “specially milled, custom-dyed paper with gilded matte silver edges.” Longtime Apple photographer Andrew Zuckerman shot all 450 pages of products in the company’s signature style—high definition hero shots of technology, set on a white background. This is product porn at its least apologetic.

Do you know how to see the world around you? As in really see it, visually and artistically? No matter your answer, Eating With The Eyes ($50) will challenge you to look more closely. Pentagram designer Harry Pearce filled his book with 200 photographs of scenes that are easily overlooked. Sidewalks, dirty walls, crumpled textiles---this is the banal stuff that surrounds us, all the time, but rarely comes across as poignant. Pearce has an eye for finding abstract beauty in it.

Failed It! ($13) is equal parts platitudes and botched photographs. The platitudes are nothing new---for decades, quotable politicians, scientists, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have touted the virtues of failure. The pictures in Failed It!, on the other hand, feel novel. Or maybe they won’t: many of them resemble amateur, flubbed 35 millimeter prints, like the outtakes from a roll of family vacation photos. Most people would regard these oddly exposed, finger-over-the-lens shots as trash. Artist Erik Kessels, who authored Failed It!, prizes them.

Want to know how much the average graphic designer makes? Or which Pantone color most designers prefer? Graphic Designers Surveyed ($19) can fill you in on some, if not all, of those statistics. Publishers GraphicDesign& quizzed 2,000 designers from the US and the UK to compile some facts and figures about the industry.

Look Inside ($60) is an ode to the cutaway graphic. This book is for the especially curious, as it invites readers to peer inside structures as small and specific as a tape cassette and as huge and multi-layered as Earth itself. The book includes inside views of historic buildings, pieces of machinery, and even a few entries that are purely fantastical. They're beautiful reminders, all, that something always lies beneath the surface.

Some years ago, the renowned scientist James Lovelock got the idea for a book. It would be “the scientific equivalent of the Bible,” he said, and would read like a how-to manual for humans to rebuild the world, in the event of a mass catastrophe. The Earth and I ($30), which Lovelock co-authored, is not that book---but there are traces of it present. The book is an information-rich account of how the earth came to be, how it behaves, and how we humans impact it. A prestigious list of scientists, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, contributed chapters. The art in the book is especially noteworthy: illustrator Jack Hudson created it, and though he favors a cheerful, mid-century style, his work for The Earth and I is scientifically rigorous. Understanding the workings of the planet has never looked better.

If this year’s presidential election made you feel disconnected from some other part of the country, pick up *The United States of America * ($300). The compendium of 700 photographs, all from National Geographic’s archives, show slices of life from all 50 states. The book stretches across geography and time; some of the early images date back to the 1920s, and the newest ones were captured with state-of-the-art digital cameras. Think of it like an armchair tour through our collective history.

Benjamin Grant combs through Google Earth everyday, in search of a satellite picture that shows off a dazzling, geometric square of earth. When he finds a particularly magnificent one, he posts it to his Instagram feed, Daily Overview. It’s impossible to tire of seeing our planet from this angle. Last year, the best snapshots from that feed made it into a lush new coffee table book, Overview: A New Perspective of Earth ($25).

Nicholas Felton is a data-viz whiz. But this year, he trained his attention on the work of photographers whose images communicate information---through composite imagery, multiple exposures, slow shutter speeds, and other forms of photographic trickery. He calls his collection Photoviz ($55).

Famed graphic designer Paul Rand also wrote and published books. One such book, A Designer’s Art ($50), was especially literary. Finished in 1985, the book looks at design intellectually. Rand’s essays in the book cited academics. Prints of his logo work for IBM, ABC, and Westinghouse, along with indie work for magazine and book covers, supported his arguments. The manifesto went out of print in 2000, but this year design critic Steven Heller revived it.