Ornament and Crime
Loos's furious case against decoration as a kind of cultural backwardness — wrong in ways that are still productive to argue with. It forces you to say out loud what you actually think beauty is for.
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EssayDesign & Aesthetics2012
Learnable Programming
Bret Victor
Victor doesn't just argue that programming environments are badly designed; he shows you, frame by frame, what better would feel like. Every example is an argument, and most of the field still hasn't caught up.
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The Crystal Goblet
Beatrice Warde
Warde argues that typography, like a wine glass, should be invisible in service of what it holds. Reason from her one principle and you'll never look at a printed page quite the same way.
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Ten Principles for Good Design
Dieter Rams
The ten lines Rams distilled from a career of designing things people kept — good design is as little design as possible, and nine more. Short because every one of them was earned.
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The Shape of Design
Frank Chimero
Chimero treats design as a way of being a thoughtful person, not a profession with deliverables. Generous, observant, and free to read in full online.
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Notes on "Camp"
Susan Sontag
Fifty-eight numbered jottings in which Sontag pins down a sensibility everyone recognized and nobody had named. The fragmentary form is the argument: some things can only be circled, never defined.
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In Praise of Shadows
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Tanizaki on how a whole aesthetic — lacquer, dim rooms, gold seen by candlelight — grew from living before electric light. A small book that retunes your eyes for days afterward.
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