Books

A prac­ti­cal guide to mod­ern project man­age­ment. It’s being writ­ten right now. Read it for free.

The name says it all: prac­ti­cal walk­through writ­ten by a great guy who under­stands our cul­ture, our his­to­ry, and our human pat­terns and how they all fit togeth­er to make project bliss.

A quick read about how check­lists used in a vari­ety of indus­tries have saved time, lives, and heaps loads of patience. Read it.

Learn how to improve your rela­tion­ships with exist­ing clients and how to build stronger rela­tion­ships with new clients.

This book digs deep into the core of dig­i­tal project man­age­ment, through the tech­niques and into our hearts. A must read for any­one man­ag­ing dig­i­tal projects.

A great way to beef up the doc­u­men­ta­tion and process side of your PM bag of tricks. Way less wordy than PMBOK or oth­er resources. Not for dig­i­tal so much as an overview of PM, but still a great resource.

A fan­tas­tic book by Brett Harned (and fea­tur­ing our very own Rachel Gertz). Learn how to bet­ter esti­mate and plan tasks, scout and address issues before they become prob­lems, and com­mu­ni­cate with and hold peo­ple accountable.

This book isn’t just for your phys­i­cal spaces. The prin­ci­ples allow you to clear clut­ter from your brain and focus on tidy­ing up your projects. For good.

The Pow­er of Habit argues that most of our basic actions are not actu­al­ly the prod­uct of well-con­sid­ered deci­sion mak­ing, but of habits that we often do not real­ize exist. After tak­ing you through lab­o­ra­to­ries, board rooms, and class­rooms to har­ness this new sci­ence, this book will have you plan­ning all the ways you can shake up your team and your processes.

Fol­low along as this free online dig­i­tal PM book gets writ­ten from front-to-back.

This book presents tech­niques, tools, and frame­works for help­ing mem­bers of your design team give and receive cri­tique so you can actu­al­ly strength­en your designs, prod­ucts, and ser­vices, rather than use ​“feed­back” mech­a­nisms to sim­ply assert author­i­ty or push agendas.

Just because you don’t fly with the crowd does­n’t mean you don’t fly. A short book about chal­leng­ing the flow and defin­ing your own way of doing things. Great for PMs who need a lit­tle emo­tion­al support.

Most of what we do inter­sects with the pur­chase and sell­ing of goods and ser­vices. Nao­mi Klein gives us a crys­tal clear pic­ture of the con­sumer mar­ket and our role as cre­ators and con­sumers. A good book to tuck under your belt in your role as a PM.

Change peo­ple, sit­u­a­tions, and things in an intu­itive way. Based on case stud­ies and social psy­chol­o­gy. One of the best Heath books we’ve read. Read this, if it’s the last thing you do.

A fun, well-writ­ten and clear path­way for nav­i­gat­ing team dynamics.

Rise above your com­peti­tors, take hold of your client rela­tion­ships, and take your busi­ness to new heights be rethink­ing how you sell your ideas and your services.

A crash course on hir­ing design ser­vices. Read this, then buy a copy for all of your clients.

We are a prod­uct of the way our care­givers raised us. Stan blows the lid off how we inter­act with oth­ers based on our ear­ly attach­ment styles. Not just a help­ful guide for love rela­tion­ships, but also for uncov­er­ing how to relate to oth­er peo­ple that are very dif­fer­ent from us. Must listen!

Aaron Dig­nan maps out what the future of work can look like when we rethink how pow­er and deci­sion mak­ing is orga­nized and dis­trib­uted in our orga­ni­za­tions. The result is one of the best, prac­ti­cal books on set­ting up and main­tain­ing a more demo­c­ra­t­ic company.

An incred­i­ble case study and prac­ti­cal method for build­ing employ­ee-owned, demo­c­ra­t­ic, peo­ple-first orga­ni­za­tions. It’s not a new method, but one that needs reviv­ing if we want to take diver­si­ty, inclu­sion, and sys­temic change seriously.

Brené Brown cracks wide the way to cre­ate hap­py peo­ple at work. Through vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty comes strength, wis­dom, and bet­ter leadership.

The first book we read on work­place democ­ra­cy. A quick sol­id read on why and how we should be dis­trib­ut­ing own­er­ship and decision-making.

An impor­tant no-non­sense book about the busi­ness of design.

A decent first-step on build­ing inter­nal design teams.

The book makes the case for why need to tran­si­tion away from an extrac­tive eco­nom­ic mod­el to a gen­er­a­tive one that is more humane, eco­log­i­cal­ly sus­tain­able, and bet­ter for our com­mu­ni­ties through the lens of dis­trib­uted own­er­ship and demo­c­ra­t­ic work­er-owned cooperatives.

One of the best cas­es for, and how to approach val­ue-based pric­ing in our industry.

This book offers a sim­ple sys­tem that can help you save for your expens­es, tax­es, and prof­it before you spend the rest on grow­ing. Awful title. Sol­id advice.

Think­ing of build­ing a start-up? Read this first. It’s a real­i­ty check and a moti­va­tor all in one. Spring for the pack­age to get the full meal deal.

Crit­i­cal to under­stand­ing why you’re often set up to fail at your orga­ni­za­tion and what you need to know to change that.

A his­tor­i­cal dis­sec­tion of the dynam­ics of pow­er, author­i­ty, deci­sion-mak­ing, and own­er­ship at work. It’s cen­tred in Cana­da, but the con­cepts are uni­ver­sal. Invalu­able if you’re seri­ous about mak­ing a demo­c­ra­t­ic workplace.

Read this book and make all your doc­u­ments look like they were designed by a pro.

Learn how to design with com­pas­sion and cre­ate expe­ri­ences that sup­port your users. This book trans­lates more than a dozen sites and ser­vices into a set of design prin­ci­ples you can start apply­ing right now.

Edi­to­r­i­al design is being thrust into excit­ing ter­ri­to­ry. This book explores the grow­ing role of the design­er in the next gen­er­a­tion news room.

This book presents tech­niques, tools, and frame­works for help­ing mem­bers of your design team give and receive cri­tique so you can actu­al­ly strength­en your designs, prod­ucts, and ser­vices, rather than use ​“feed­back” mech­a­nisms to sim­ply assert author­i­ty or push agendas.

A clas­sic book about the inter­sec­tion of writ­ing, edit­ing and design. It’s print-focused but explores so many impor­tant design con­cepts that have been ignored or for­got­ten on the web.

Not just for adver­tis­ing. This enter­tain­ing book exam­ines the cross-sec­tion of design and copy and their roles in cre­at­ing con­cepts that turn heads and get results.

Great typog­ra­phy on the web is still dif­fi­cult to come by. I have a good feel­ing this book will help change that. Jason walks us through the tra­di­tions to hold on to and the ones to ditch in this unpre­dictable dig­i­tal world.

It’s the best overview of a web­site work­flow that’s been pub­lished so far. Read this.

Learn the basics of typog­ra­phy from the best. A must read for any new designer.

This book will change the way you think about every object in your environment.

One of the best high-lev­el overviews of the func­tion and impact of design on soci­ety, cul­ture, pol­i­tics, and media that we’ve ever read. Must read for any per­son inter­est­ed in design.

Edward Tufte gets all the love when it comes to data visu­al­iza­tion books, but we find this one far bet­ter and more mod­ern. A great intro to data visu­al­iza­tion for any­one hav­ing to dis­play data to mere mortals.

This book is the one that made typog­ra­phy ​‘click’ for me. Every design­er should read this.

A great chance for project man­agers and team leads to buff up on their tech­ni­cal knowl­edge so they can ask the right ques­tions and not get in trouble.

It’s increas­ing­ly impor­tant to under­stand how tech­nol­o­gy works as it becomes more dif­fi­cult to under­stand what tech­nol­o­gy is doing – and doing to us.

Cap­i­tal­ism is mor­ph­ing into some­thing new and dif­fer­ent. As infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy slow­ly dis­man­tles the past econ­o­my of mar­kets, wages, and pri­vate own­er­ship, the ways we behave, work, and live are chang­ing. Paul Mason nav­i­gates this shift and plots a course to a more social­ly just and sus­tain­able economy.

A well-researched crit­i­cal analy­sis of the major tech­nolo­gies that are shap­ing, and about-to-shape our world. While most books pre­dict­ing the future of tech­nol­o­gy paint it with a nar­row rosy pic­ture, Green­field dives deep into the social con­se­quences and hid­den exter­nal­i­ties that have begun to take hold and moves us toward their log­i­cal con­clu­sions… which may not always be so rosy.

Tech­nol­o­gy isn’t neu­tral. It’s loaded with bias seed­ed from its cre­ators and often ends with prod­ucts that are sex­ist, racist, clas­sist, or ablelist. This is a great break­down of where things went wrong, and how we might do better.

Dou­glas Rushkoff inves­ti­gates the sys­temic issues that set the rich against the poor and the tech­nol­o­gists against every­body else and offers ways to opti­mize our econ­o­my for the human beings it’s sup­posed to be serving.