Summer Reading

Summer holidays are the perfect time to catch up on your reading… Here are some top picks from some of our DA Friends to help you brush up on your design theory, along with a bit of rest and relaxation this summer:

Paul McNeil “The Visual History of Type”
The Visual History of Type is a comprehensive, detailed survey of the major typefaces produced since the advent of printing with movable type in the mid-fifteenth century to the present day. Arranged chronologically to provide context, more than 320 typefaces are displayed in the form of their original type specimens or earliest printing…

Hall of Femmes: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon was the first to create what came to be known as Supergraphics: monumental graphics designed in harmony with architecture. Her iconic style – mixing Swiss Modernism and West Coast Pop – pioneered the look of California Cool, an important moment in graphic design history.
In addition to an impressive portfolio, she boasts a fascinating life story. Ranging from being a teenage flamenco dancer, to marrying a well known film director, to suddenly finding herself a young widow with a child to support. At a crossroads, she moves to Switzerland to study under the influential modernist designer Armin Hofmann, before returning to the U.S and creating influential designs that were bigger and bolder than her Swiss counterparts…

Sarah Schmidt “See What I Have Done”

Sarah Wilson “First, We Make The Beast Beautiful”
Sarah Wilson — bestselling author and entrepreneur, intrepid solver of problems and investigator of how to live a better life — has helped over 1.2 million people across the world to quit sugar. She has also been an anxiety sufferer her whole life. In her new book, she directs her intense focus and fierce investigatory skills onto this lifetime companion of hers, looking at the triggers and treatments, the fashions and fads. She reads widely and interviews fellow sufferers, mental health experts, philosophers, and even the Dalai Lama, processing all she learns through the prism her own experiences…

Barbara Brookes A History Of New Zealand Women
What would a history of New Zealand look like that rejected Thomas Carlyle’s definition of history as ‘the biography of great men’, and focused instead on the experiences of women? One that shifted the angle of vision and examined the stages of this country’s development from the points of view of wives, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts? That considered their lives as distinct from (though often unwillingly influenced by) those of history’s ‘great men’?
In her ground-breaking History of New Zealand Women, Barbara Brookes provides just such a history. This is more than an account of women in New Zealand, from those who arrived on the first waka to the Grammy and Man Booker Prize-winning young women of the current decade. It is a comprehensive history of New Zealand seen through a female lens…