We’ve rifled through the wall of books in the Scriberia studio to select our favourite sources of wisdom and inspiration, which we’ve loosely grouped around each week’s theme, below. (If you have suggestions to add, please let us know. We’re always keen to make new discoveries.)
Drawing
Make a World
Ed Emberley (1972; Little, Brown, 2007)
Several decades ago Emberley championed the idea that anyone can learn to draw by breaking things down into simple shapes, such as letters and numbers. His classic series of primers, especially Make A World, are an excellent introduction to translating complex objects into simple, clear and characterful forms.
How to Draw Stupid & Other Essentials of Cartooning
Kyle Baker (Watson-Guptill, 2008)
Baker is an award-winning comic artist and graphic novelist. Here he shares simple cartooning techniques to create essential storytelling effects, such as portraying honest emotions, adding comedy, and showing the illusion of movement.
Thinking With A Pencil
Henning Nelms (1957; Girard & Stewart, 2015)
A classic introduction to visualising concepts, data and relationships.
My Icon Library: Build & Expand Your Own Visual Vocabulary
Willemien Brand (BIS, 2021)
My Icon Library is essentially a source book of simple images to represent tricky business concepts, such as ‘finance’, ‘agile’, ‘team dynamics’ and ‘ways-of-working’. It is useful both as a reference guide and as inspiration for coming up with your personal library of hardworking images. (Check out The Noun Project too) We also recommend Brand’s Visual Thinking and Visual Doing books, designed to help business people from non-art backgrounds bring visual thinking more into their working practice.
How to Draw Anything
Scriberia (Quercus, 2017)
This is Dan and Chris’s warm, witty and wise guide to how to think about drawing – and how drawing helps you think – with foundational ideas and techniques to inspire and equip anyone, no matter your background.
Drawing Is Thinking
Milton Glaser (Overlook Press, 2008)
Glaser (1929-2020) was the eminent designer who came up with the celebrated “I ❤ NY” logo, and his very varied body of work and ideas have had enormous influence. Here, in pictures and words, he explores drawing as a means to experience and comprehend the world better. ‘When I look at something,’ he writes, ‘I do not see it unless I make an internal decision to draw it.’ This book for those seeking to deepen the reflective process behind their drawing practice.
Notetaking
The Sketchnote Handbook: the illustrated guide to visual note taking
by Mike Rohde (Peachpit Press, 2012)
Mike Rohde is a kingly figure among the sketchnoting community, with a considerable online following. While Rohde’s influential aesthetic may not be to everyone’s taste, his clear and simple Handbook, and his follow-up Sketchnote Workbook (2014), provide a solid range of techniques and frameworks that anyone can use to process, record and remember information better. The Handbook comes with 70 minutes of online video tutorials.
The Complete Book of Chalk Lettering
by Valerie McKeehan (Workman, 2015)
This workbook is a great practical primer for mastering basic letterforms and banners before developing your own lettering styles of all kinds, whether or not you ever want to work in chalk.
The Art of Visual Notetaking: A comprehensive guide to visual communication and sketchnoting
by Emily Mills (Walter Foster, 2019)
This is another popular introduction to visually recording study notes, to-do lists, bullet journals, production processes, project plans and so on. Mills has a different style but offers similar techniques to Rohde. Both authors give tips on handwriting titles and main text, creating icons to badge information, and laying out information with different structures, shapes and connectors.
UZMO: Thinking with your pen
by Martin Hausmann, (Neuland GmbH & Co. KG, 2019)
Three hundred pages of advice, strategies, models, layouts and practical examples useful for new and experienced visual facilitators. Haussman covers the fundamentals, such as how to distill complexity into lucid visuals, and how to draw clear script. He also shares sophisticated tools and tips for sketchnoting, presenting in meetings and facilitating dialogue.
Simplifying
Picture This: How Pictures Work
by Molly Bang (1991; Chronicle Books, 2016)
How does the composition of a picture affect our emotional response to it? Why are diagonals dramatic? Why are curves calming? Why does red feel hot and blue feel cold? Bang tackles these questions with profound insight and valuable lessons in simplicity of form.
The Graphic Design Idea Book: Inspiration from 50 MasterS
Stephen Heller & Gail Anderson (Laurence King Publishing, 2016)
This accessible and inspiring introduction shows fifty classic examples, and analyses each one to demonstrate a key element of good graphic design. The book’s themes include simplicity, colour, scale and ornament. Its underlying goal is to show us how, when it comes to impact, less is more.
Abram Games, Graphic Designer: Maximum Meaning, Minimum Means
Catherine Moriarty, June Rose & Naomi Games (Lund Humphries, 2003)
Abram Games (1914-96) was one of the 20th century’s most innovative graphic designers. He is perhaps best known now for his work as Britain’s Official War Poster Designer. Games sits at the pinnacle of Scriberia’s pantheon, and his philosophy of ‘maximum meaning, minimum means’ has become ours too. The monograph was produced for a major exhibition at the Design Museum, London, and features 180 colour illustrations of Games’s work, including unpublished as well as well-known designs.
The Laws of Simplicity
John Maeda (MIT Press, 2006)
In the digital age, we’re habituated to chasing after more and more things: more functions, more features, more content. Yet the result is often confusing and distracting. In response, John Maeda argues we gain more when we need less, proposing ten laws for simplicity in design, technology and business. Great guidelines for visual thinkers too.
GO: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design
Chip Kidd (Workman, 2014)
Graphic design, argues Kidd, is about solving problems – and because we all solve problems, we are all designers. Kidd’s introduction to graphic design aims to help us gain more awareness and confidence in our design decisions. Each spread demonstrates with visuals one core graphic design concept that’s usually taught in the first year of art school: form, size, scale, repetition and pattern, colour, typography, illusion and metaphor. The final section includes ten projects to try out. (This is yet another book on visual thinking that’s marketed for kids, but valuable for adults too.)
Storytelling
Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud (William Morrow, 2001)
This brilliant book takes the form of a comic that leads us through thousands of years of visual storytelling, from prehistoric image-makers to the X-Men creator Jack Kirby. Understanding Comics has won acclaim from luminaries such as Alison Bechdel, Neil Gaiman and Art Spiegelman. As Bechdel puts it, ‘McCloud’s masterwork is not just an indispensable treatise on comics, it’s also the best primer around on visual literacy and the mechanics of storytelling. A must-read for anyone interested in narrative of any kind.’
Cartooning: Philosophy & Practice
Ivan Brunetti (Yale University Press, 2011)
Brunetti’s short book on cartooning is both a splendidly written personal treatise and a 15-part practical course on topics such as the rhythms of storytelling and the challenges of character design. Each lesson combines techniques and theory with creative exercises and assignments, ranging from spontaneous drawings to single-panel strips and complicated multi-page stories. The charismatic author has illustrated each lesson with many of his own wonderful characters. Oddly a few of them suffer from last-century stereotypes. Despite that there is so much to enjoy and discover here.
Creating
Unfolding The Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures
Dan Roam (Portfolio, 2013)
Roam is a business expert whose book aims to show how thinking with pictures can help you discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and improve your ability to share your insights with others. Used properly, he argues, a simple drawing on a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or PowerPoint.
Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad
Austin Kleon (Workman, 2019)
An upbeat guide on staying creative, playful and focused, whether you’re just starting out or feeling worn by the long haul. Also check out Kleon’s previous bestselling books, Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work!
The Art of Creative Thinking
Rod Judkins (Sceptre, 2016)
Judkins is a lecturer at Central St Martin’s school of art whose books aim to inspire us all to think more confidently and creatively by learning from artists, economists and other prime innovators. His lively examples range from the Dada Manifesto to the school class in which every single student went on to win a Nobel prize. Along the way, we find out why, in the twenty-first century, it’s technically illegal to be as good as Michelangelo. And why we should contradict ourselves more often.
Mapping
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward Tufte (Graphics Press, 2001)
This is the classic book on the theory and practice of representing data visually. Accompanying Tufte’s authoritative and enlightening essays on how to display data, there are 250 illustrations of the best (and occasionally worst) statistical graphics from the past and present, from cholera maps to chronologies.
Napkin Sketch Workbook
Don Moyer (Blurb, Expanded 2nd edition, 2010)
This book doesn’t seem to have had the acclaim - and the distribution - it deserves, but it’s worth hunting out. Moyer’s intention for this workbook is to inspire writers to create visual explanations when words alone aren’t enough. It’s full of practical techniques anyone can use, and covers such topics as classic structures for storytelling, the process behind building effective visual explanations, common mistakes to avoid, and how to collaborate with designers.
Visual Journalism: Infographics from the World’s Best Newsrooms & Designers
Javier Erea (Gestalten, 2017)
An idea-triggering compendium of the finest newspaper infographics that transform difficult facts and dry figures into accessible and compelling visualisations.
The Decision Book: Fifty Models for Strategic Thinking
Roman Tschäppeler & Mikael Krogerus (Profile Books, 2011)
The authors distil some of the best work and life decision-making models used on MBA courses and elsewhere, and make the case for drawing the models to help you think them through. (Here’s a helpful summary of the book)