12 Visual Communication Books That Will Inspire Beautiful Presentations
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Your presentations represent you, your ideas, and your brand. If your presentations look sloppy, your audience will assume you are also sloppy with your research and business management.
Your presentations need to look polished, sophisticated, and interesting. However creating stunning presentations is no easy task. Even if you hire a professional presentation designer, you will still need to know some design basics to approve the designs and also ask for revisions in way that designers will understand. If you don’t know some design basics, you might have a hard time asking for the type of design you need, or creating that design yourself.
To help you develop presentations that will represent you in a positive light, consider reading some of the design books included below. Even if you skim the pages and absorb only some of the information, your presentations will still improve as a result of your effort.
1. Graphic Design: The New Basics: Second Edition, Revised and Expanded
Summary: Our bestselling introduction to graphic design is now available in a revised and updated edition. In Graphic Design: The New Basics, bestselling author Ellen Lupton (Thinking with Type, Type on Screen) and design educator Jennifer Cole Phillips explain the key concepts of visual language that inform any work of design, from logo or letterhead to a complex website.
This revised edition replaces sixty-four pages of the original publication with new content, including new chapters on visualizing data, typography, modes of representation, and Gestalt principles, and adds sixteen pages of new student and professional work covering such topics as working with grids and designing with color.
Graphic Design: The New Basics: Second Edition, Revised and Expanded
2. Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students
Summary: Our all-time best selling book is now available in a revised and expanded second edition. Thinking with Type is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication, from the printed page to the computer screen. This revised edition includes forty-eight pages of new content, including the latest information on style sheets for print and the web, the use of ornaments and captions, lining and non-lining numerals, the use of small caps and enlarged capitals, as well as information on captions, font licensing, mixing typefaces, and hand lettering.
Throughout the book, visual examples show how to be inventive within systems of typographic form–what the rules are and how to break them. Thinking with Type is a type book for everyone: designers, writers, editors, students, and anyone else who works with words. The popular companion website to Thinking with Type (www.thinkingwithtype.com.) has been revised to reflect the new material in this second edition.
Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students
3. Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills
Summary: Have you ever struggled to complete a design project on time? Or felt that having a tight deadline stifled your capacity for maximum creativity? If so, then this book is for you.
Within these pages, you’ll find 80 creative challenges that will help you achieve a breadth of stronger design solutions, in various media, within any set time period. Exercises range from creating a typeface in an hour to designing a paper robot in an afternoon to designing web pages and other interactive experiences. Each exercise includes compelling visual solutions from other designers and background stories to help you increase your capacity to innovate.
Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills
4. The Non-Designer’s Design Book
Summary: For nearly 20 years, designers and non-designers alike have been introduced to the fundamental principles of great design by author Robin Williams. Through her straightforward and light-hearted style, Robin has taught hundreds of thousands of people how to make their designs look professional using four surprisingly simple principles. Now in its fourth edition, The Non-Designer’s Design Book offers even more practical design advice, including a new chapter on the fundamentals of typography, more quizzes and exercises to train your Designer Eye, updated projects for you to try, and new visual and typographic examples to inspire your creativity.
The Non-Designer’s Design Book (4th Edition)
5. Visual Design: Ninety-five things you need to know
Summary: Visual Design speaks design, through design, to designers, presenting 95 core design principles with concise text and a touch of visual wit. Author of the bestselling Index series on design basics, Jim Krause uses a combination of Helvetica and Dingbats to teach a wide range of design topics (both conceptually and compositionally related) in a one-topic-per-spread format. Using humor, practical tips, and inspiring visual examples, Krause makes it clear how each of the 95 axioms of effective design are relevant and applicable across all forms of visuals: print, Web, and fine arts.
Visual Design: Ninety-five things you need to know. Told in Helvetica and Dingbats. (Creative Core)
6. Lessons in Typography
Summary: Get hands on with type in this lesson-based addition to Jim Krause’s popular new Creative Core series on design fundamentals. In Lessons in Typography, you’ll learn the basics of identifying, choosing, and using typefaces and immediately put that knowledge to work through a collection of exercises designed to deepen and expand your typographic skills.
7. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Summary: You don’t need to be a genius, you just need to be yourself. That’s the message from Austin Kleon, a young writer and artist who knows that creativity is everywhere, creativity is for everyone. A manifesto for the digital age, Steal Like an Artist is a guide whose positive message, graphic look and illustrations, exercises, and examples will put readers directly in touch with their artistic side.
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
8. Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team
Summary: From research and analysis through brand strategy, design development through application design, and identity standards through launch and governance, Designing Brand Identity, Fourth Edition offers brand managers, marketers, and designers a proven, universal five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity. Enriched by new case studies showcasing successful world-class brands, this Fourth Edition brings readers up to date with a detailed look at the latest trends in branding, including social networks, mobile devices, global markets, apps, video, and virtual brands.
Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team, 4th Edition
9. Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team
Summary: The rise of infographics across nearly all print and electronic media—from a graphic illuminating the tweets of the women of Isis to a memorable depiction of the national geography of beer—reveals patterns in our lives and the world in often startling ways.
The Best American Infographics 2015 showcases visualizations from the worlds of politics, social issues, health, sports, arts and culture, and more. From an elegant graphic comparison of first sentences in classic novels to a startling illustration of the world’s deadliest animals, “You’ll come away with more than your share of . . . mind-bending moments—and a wide-ranging view of what infographics can do” (Harvard Business Review).
“This is what information design does at its best – it gives pause, makes visible the unsuspected yet significant invisibilia of life, and by astonishing us into mobilization, it catapults us toward one of the greatest feats of human courage: the act of changing one’s mind.”—from the Introduction by Maria Popova
The Best American Infographics 2015
10. Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
Summary: Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You’ll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation.
Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
11. The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don’ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures
Summary: In today’s data-driven world, professionals need to know how to express themselves in the language of graphics effectively and eloquently. Yet information graphics is rarely taught in schools or is the focus of on-the-job training. Now, for the first time, Dona M. Wong, a student of the information graphics pioneer Edward Tufte, makes this material available for all of us.
12. Envisioning Information
Summary: This book celebrates escapes from the flatlands of both paper and computer screen, showing superb displays of high-dimensional complex data. The most design-oriented of Edward Tufte’s books, Envisioning Information shows maps, charts, scientific presentations, diagrams, computer interfaces, statistical graphics and tables, stereo photographs, guidebooks, courtroom exhibits, timetables, use of color, a pop-up, and many other wonderful displays of information. The book provides practical advice about how to explain complex material by visual means, with extraordinary examples to illustrate the fundamental principles of information displays. Topics include escaping flatland, color and information, micro/macro designs, layering and separation, small multiples, and narratives. Winner of 17 awards for design and content. 400 illustrations with exquisite 6- to 12-color printing throughout.
Conclusion
What book would you add to this list? Share your suggestions with us on Twitter; tweet us at @Ethos3.
Additional Resources:
9 Books To Help You Improve Your Presentations
7 Great Business Books To Inspire You
Free Stock Photos To Beautify Your Professional Presentations
