Coudal Recommends

On Design

Paul Rand by Steven Heller

Paul Rand changed everything. And then he changed it again. Heller's book
outlines his single-minded devotion to "good work" and examines all the
major projects. A love-letter. Of course= we're assuming you already
have Rand's From Lascaux to Brooklyn and A Designers's Art on your shelves.

The Russian Avant Garde Book

A smart and attractive anthology of the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich and others, we've found this book to be a powerful design stimulant. By MoMA Print and Illustrated Books Curator, Deborha Wye.

Marks of Excellence

The history, beauty and logic of trademarks always inspires. Per Mollerup's big black book follows me home and then back to work, over
and over. It's probably time to get a second copy.

The Typographic Grid

Hans Rudolf Bosshard's beautiful book takes the essentials of organizing type and presents them clearly and conversationally.

FontBook: Digital Typeface Compendium

The yellow one.

The Work of Edward Tufte

Envisioning Information,
Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative and

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Good advice, solid reasoning and spectacularly beautiful bookmaking. Sigh.

Grid Systems in Graphic Design

An understanding of
Josef Muller-Brockmann's Opus is not optional.

Pantone Color Guides

Never, ever on the shelf. Always on someone's desk, most of the time open. Nuff said. Also very helpful, The Process Color Manual.

On Writing

Style: Toward Clarity and Grace

Two really important things.

On Writing Well

If you're a journalist, a businessperson, or the occasional author of
letters, memos, blog entries, and emails, William K. Zinsser's On Writing Well is a book
you should reread every year. The essential work on clear and
interesting non-fiction writing.

The Chicago Manual of Style

The Bible for preparing and editing manuscripts for publication. The 15th edition is now available.

Roget's International Thesaurus

Seasoned newspaper men and elementary English teachers might call it a crutch. But when you get right down to it,
a thesaurus is a reference tool like any other: it can be used effectively or poorly. This is
the one we turn to when we're looking to pin the perfect shade of meaning on the paper.

Elements of Style

If your education was worth anything, you were assigned
Strunk and White's Elements of Style for a class. If you're anything like us, you've misplaced and repurchased it a number of times since.

Webster Third New International Dictionary

Someday we'll own the complete OED. Until then,

this unabridged monster will do just fine.

On Code

HTTP: The Definitive Guide

Comprehensive and surprisingly easy to read.
David Gourley and Brian Totty's volume contains the answers to all those questions about how the web works you shouldn't need to ask.

The PHP Bible

God there are a lot of ugly, thick books in this section of the bookstore, and
this might be the ugliest
of them all. But Tim Converse and Joyce Park have written the clearest
and easiest to navigate primer on PHP. Runner-up in the
ugly-but-effective category goes to
Core PHP Programming by Leon Atkinson.

Cascading Style Sheets

Eric Meyer's
Definitive CSS Guide
is the O'Reilly book with the salmon on the cover. No-nonsense
tutorials with a well-worn index. There are recently a lot of other
titles in this category. You may ignore them without worry. This is it.

Designing With Web Standards

We could have redone our site using CSS without ever looking at
this lovely orange book.
We could have developed our own workarounds and reinvented the proper
structure for a style-sheet. We probably could have even deciphered the
frustrating inconsistencies of "The Box Model" on our own. Thank God we
didn't have to.

Managing and Using MySQL

Kingfisher on the cover. Clear, precise explanations inside.