A Curated List of Movies and Books For Designers

Expand your design horizons

The past year has been challenging for many in the digital design industry, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the power of creativity, innovation, and learning to fuel our work and our passions. So I decided to kick off 2024 with some fun and educational resources that will expand your design horizons and help you hit the ground running in the new year!

I. Movies

Let’s start with the classics.

All of Gary Hustwit’s movies:

🎥 — a study of the font’s history and influence on modern graphic design.

🎥 is a documentary about the role of everyday objects and industrial design in shaping our lives and the world around us.

🎥 — about the challenges and opportunities of urban design and development.

These three films are probably watched by every designer at the beginning of their career. But Hustwit has two other films to his credit that are unsurpassed:

🎥 — a deep dive into the design of modern workplaces and how they affect the people who work there.

🎥 — a portrait of the outstanding designer Dieter Rams, a story about his influence on the world of industrial design.

Moving on:

🎥 is a Netflix documentary series that profiles some of the world’s most innovative designers, exploring their creative processes and philosophies.

🎥 is another Netflix documentary series that explores the history of video games and their impact on popular culture.

🎥 — explores the concept of minimalism and its potential to help people live more consciously.

🎥 — Netflix is back with a documentary series about the intersection of design, technology and human experience.

🎥 And finally, my recommendation for and Unwind Your Mind (2021). These movies are not directly about design and designers, but they are examples of unsurpassed graphic design in their own right. So even if you’re not interested in meditation, brain structure, and psychology, I still recommend watching these movies to at least enjoy the beauty and animation, and at most learn something practical for yourself.

Let me know in the comments which ones you watched, which ones you liked best, and which ones you would recommend to other designers! 🤗

II. Books

No, this is not another trite list of books for designers. We’ll leave out Don Norman, Nir Eyal, and Steve Krug. Today we have a small selection of books including fiction ones, that will be particularly useful to us designers.

👨‍💼 — is a story about “office plankton” who are disillusioned with the ideology of success and happiness imposed by modern corporate culture. I wish I had read this book at the beginning of my corporate career.

🐜 One of the examples of unsurpassed storytelling that happened in my reading practice. After this book, I kept thinking about the importance of research — that the success of this book is 25% the skill of the author, but 75% the author’s own research and analysis of the data.

🤑 99 Francs, by Frederic Beigbeder. This is just very smart and creative. This story was one of the building blocks of my desire to work on something creative, preferably in advertising. In the end, I managed to get a job at one of the best advertising agencies in my home country at that time. I fled from there after exactly 2 weeks of “work” 😁.

🧠 . We live in an ever-changing world. New inventions, new rules, and new realities appear. Often the unfamiliar is frightening, but it is how we respond to all that is new, ambiguous, and contradictory that determines our success. This book on decision-making and understanding the world in general will help you to see every nonsense not as a mistake but as an opportunity.

🕶 — exposing the tricks that tech companies use to control you. I mentioned this one in one of the previous issues of Eidos and it is still at the top of my lists.

❤️ — in small chunks of text, the authors manage to share the results of their own research, conducted through surveys on social media, as well as reference studies conducted by psychologists with entirely different audiences. And the results are striking. You’ll suddenly understand that the concept of “beauty” is no longer so subjective.

I’m sure you’ll find something new on this list that will expand your horizons of design knowledge. Good luck and enjoy watching and reading!

Thank you for reading!
If you found this or any of my articles useful, you can support me on my or by 🤗