Feed your head

Last fall I started reading a lot of professional books — don’t ask me why — books about design, but also about creativity, innovation, advertising, and branding. Stretching my subject matter turned out to be one of the best things I ever did. It’s given me a perspective on why we do what we do as designers and art directors, and helped me separate out the value from the busy work. I’ll talk more about the individual books in later posts, but right now let me just give you a reading list. Asterisks mark highly recommended reading, but I’ve gotten a lot from all these books.

Marty Neumeier: The Brand Gap* and Zag*

David Aaker: Managing Brand Equity

David Ogilvy: Confessions of An Advertising Man

Peter Mayle: Up the Agency: The Funny Business of Advertising

Tom Kelley: The Art of Innovation*

Michael Schrage: Serious Play*

Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart: A Smile in the Mind*

Roger Enrico: The Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars

Sergio Zyman: Renovate Before You Innovate: Why Doing the New Thing Might Not be the Right Thing

Martin Lindstrom: Brand Sense

Nicholas Ind: Great Advertising Campaigns: Goals and accomplishments

Martin Roll: Asian Brand Strategy*

I’m currently in the middle of How Brands Become Icons* by Douglas Holt (it already gets an asterisk — I’m only on page 50 and I can tell — and Universal Principles of Design (very Sprockets), as well as the second installment of Philippe Djian’s Doggy Bag series — but that’s another story.

Not bad for a slow reader.