Some of my favorite reads this year… would love to hear about yours in the comments!

The Name of the Wind / Zeitoun / Water for Elephants / Little Bee / The Hunger Games / The Help / The Forgotten Garden / The Tiger’s Wife / The Distant Hours / The House on Mango Street / The Glass Castle / A Reliable Wife / The Liar’s Club / The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo / What is the What / The Angel’s Game

We’re kicking off our 2011 gift guide series with design books. Why? Design books are the gift that keeps on giving! Above are some favorites from my own collection (which I refer to often), in addition to a few I wish would appear under my tree. Photographs and book descriptions provided by their respective publishers.

DIY Furniture: A Step-by-Step Guide
Featuring 30 designs by leading designer-makers from around the world DIY Furniture shows you how to use simple techniques to make stunning designer furniture from scratch. …Each project features hand-drawn diagrams with short, easy-to-follow instructions on how to build the piece.

Thinking With Type, Revised Edition
Thinking with Type is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication, from the printed page to the computer screen. …Throughout the book, visual examples show how to be inventive within systems of typographic form—what the rules are and how to break them.

By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art
…By Hand features the work of thirty-two artists whose innovative and unexpected uses of handicraft techniques such as embroidery, sewing, knitting, and crocheting are making the age-old craft versus art debate obsolete. From Kiki Smith’s lovingly etched birds, to Barb Hunt’s knitted land mines to dynamo-ville’s one-of-a-kind puppets, to Evil Twin’s handstitched publications, the artworks in By Hand revel in the care and consideration of craft.

Vera: The Art and Life of an Icon
…An innovator and one of the most successful female entrepreneurs of her time, Vera built her company on a radical philosophy: fine art should be accessible to everyone, not just a select few. Known for her iconic images of cheerful flowers, trendy geometrics, and vibrant ladybugs, she believed people should surround themselves with beauty. …In this volume, richly illustrated with Vera’s original sketches, paintings, and photographs of her worldwide travels, readers are introduced to the amazing woman behind the dynamic designs that continue to inspire and influence art, design, and fashion.

Pulled: A Catalog of Screen Printing
Popularized in the 1960s by Pop artists such as Andy Warhol, screen printing remains a favorite of artists due to its remarkable versatility and relatively low cost. In Pulled, best-selling author Mike Perry (Hand Job, Over and Over) collects the work of more than forty of today’s most talented designers who are, in their own way, pushing the boundaries of this dynamic medium.

Drawn In: A Peek into the Inspiring Sketchbooks of 44 Fine Artists, Illustrators, Graphic Designers, and Cartoonists
People are fascinated by artist’s sketchbooks. They offer a glimpse into private pages where artists brainstorm, doodle, develop and work on ideas, and keep track of their musings. Artists use these journals to document their daily lives, produce their initial ideas for bigger projects, and practice their skills. …See inside the sketchbooks of artists Jessica Hische, Mike Perry, Jen Corace, Matt Leines, Jill Bliss, Camilla Engman, Anders Nilsen and many more.

Design*Sponge at Home
The long-awaited home décor bible by design blogger Grace Bonney

To Each His Home: Inspired Interiors as Unique as Their Owners
…In To Each His Home: Inspired Interiors as Unique as Their Owners, photographer Bilyana Dimitrova takes readers on a tour of eight extraordinary homes that unabashedly express the personalities of their free-spirited owners. Dimitrova’s carefully crafted color photographs, accompanied by brief interviews with each homeowner, create vivid portraits of these one-of-a-kind American spaces.

The Printmaking Bible: The Complete Guide to Materials and Techniques
… The Printmaking Bible is the definitive resource to the ins-and-outs of every variety of serious printmaking technique practiced today. In-depth instructions are accompanied by profiles that show how working artists create their prints. Historical information, troubleshooting tips, and an extensive resource section provide more invaluable tools.

Stay tuned this week for our usual Mint gift guide round-ups… more books, DIY, and “gifts for good.”

From Chelsea Amato, a graphic designer living in Raleigh, North Carolina:

“This book was designed and written to illustrate the way in which Asian communities value their cooking traditions, methods, and manners. As a result of ethnographic research via interviews and surveys, I wrote and illustrated a cookbook on different Asian dishes. Each recipe page contains anecdotal commentary reflecting on the specific traditions and faux pas associated with each dish.”

Such a great idea, and beautifully executed.

Today I’m excited to be kicking off the Farm Anatomy blog tour, with a review and giveaway of renowned illustrator Julia Rothman’s new book. Farm Anatomy is filled with pages upon pages of illustration and hand drawn text — complete with charts, diagrams, and even a few craft projects , recipes, and how-tos.

How to enter (enter up to 2 times!):
1. Leave a comment on this post
2. Tweet about this giveaway and leave an additional comment on this post with a link to your tweet

The giveaway will end Sunday, October 16th at midnight and the winner will be announced on Monday.

If you’re not the lucky winner this time, you can also purchase Farm Anatomy on Amazon.

Be sure to check out other reviews & giveaways on the Farm Anatomy blog tour:
10/12– Growing with Plants
10/14 – The Things We Make
10/15 – Print and Pattern
10/17 – Small Measure
10/19 – SF Girl by Bay
10/21 – Pikaland
10/23 – The Spunky Coconut
10/24 – Pitch Design Union
10/25 – Reading my Tea Leaves
10/27 – Book By Its Cover
10/28– Design for Mankind

A big thanks to Storey Publishing for providing a review copy of this book.

I have very few graphic design books, but when I’m feeling particularly stuck and want to get away from the computer screen for a bit, a thick design book can be worth its weight in gold. My copy of the first Fingerprint is dog-eared and well-loved.

So it’s no surprise that Fingerprint 2 is just as good…. page after page of beautiful design work with handmade touches, authored by Chen Design Associates, a design firm well known for using handmade elements and combining them with today’s technology.

I’d recommend every graphic designer keep a few books around for those creative block days, and Fingerprint 2 would be right at the top of my list.

Thanks to HOW for providing a copy of Fingerprint No. 2 for review.

“My basic premise is that we can often learn more from people in other disciplines than we can from those in our own,”  says Designers Without Influences author Austin Howe. “Can a creative person learn anything from a nun or a professional hockey coach? We’ll soon find out.”

Howe wants designers to read this book, so like his previous Designer’s Don’t Read, he titles each short chapter with the time it will take to complete it. In the few minutes it takes you to eat lunch at your desk, you can learn something new and get inspired by the philosophies of Howe’s diverse cast of characters. His compilation of influences is outside the box; even random, and my bet is that if you take time to read Designer’s Don’t Have Influences, you might pick up a few new ones of your own.

Imagine a restaurant willing to have beautifully letterpressed menus for a single night’s, special-event dinner… now imagine being the lucky artist who gets to create those menus! Patricia Curtan’s talent shines in Menus for Chez Panisse, a collection of over 100 handmade menus for the Berkeley, California restaurant. With hand-set type and hand-carved linoleum block images, each menu is unique and a work of art.

You can pick up your copy of Menus for Chez Panisse from Princeton Architectural Press.

There is something sacred about a hardcover book. Therefore, I must confess my initial recoil at the cover images of The Repurposed Library: 33 Craft Projects that Give Old Books New Life. Thankfully, author Lisa Occhipinti details her lifelong devotion to the craft of book making as a precursor to their deconstruction and “transformation.”

“I feel a deep connection to the weight of a book, the tooth of its paper, and the smell of its ink (or mustiness),” she writes. “I wonder where books have been…have they been on vacation, and if so, where did they go?”

Chapter One details, “Understanding the Value of Books” and “Which Books are Best to Repurpose?” Occhipinti targets the “orphaned” books: “with cracked spines or obsolete information” and the “unwanted, dusty volumes…at garage sales.” Ah, now I get it! I’m back on board and ready for further instruction.

She offers many delightful projects. I especially like the decoupage switch plate cover, the Pagework Quilt and the Lettered Wreath made of rosettes from book pages. However, the most clever is the Kindle Keeper. A classic hardcover that opens to reveal an electronic device is my kind of style and subtle commentary.

— Shelley Cline for Mint

O Paper! It deserves a Whitman-esque declaration. It is a constant source of inspiration. And the dazzling art of paper cutting is enjoying a renaissance as of late, as compiled by Laura Heyenga in a new book entitled Paper Cutting: Contemporary Artists, Timeless Craft.

In the introduction, expert Natalie Avella details its rich history. Originating in China in 610 C.E., moving to Japan, then to Baghdad, Turkey, and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries before coming West across the Atlantic.

Avella writes, “Paper cutting puts us in touch with the need to ‘make,’ to use our hands creatively and escape the pixelated imagery that is everywhere in our screen-dominated lives.” In this book, you’ll find some familiar work, such as Nikki McClure and Real Simple‘s Matthew Sporzynski, as well as 24 other practitioners whose work is expertly photographed.

You generally won’t find a paper-cutting class in any art school. “It is almost always self-taught,” says Avella. So grab a copy of this book, and a sheet paper that’s just sitting in your printer, and your trusty craft blade and do some beautiful damage!

— Shelly Cline for Mint

In a time when many graphic designers are heading toward freelance (either because they want to, or because design jobs are just scarce), handbooks like this one become invaluable. Especially, I think, for recent grads hoping to take on projects while they look for full time employment. A Print Handbook was written by The Media Collective, and covers topics like Pantone versus CMYK, paper sizes, overprinting, trapping, different kinds of folds, and more, to take you from an on-screen project to printed piece. Says The Media Collective: “We really wanted something that was compact and included a lot of the questions we had about printing. There’s a lot of advice around about different areas of printing, but we wanted to see it in the flesh. For example, we had questions like ‘we know using a rich black with 40% cyan is often recommended by printers, but does this give you a black that is too cool in colour?’. So in the handbook we’ve got some examples for comparison.”

You can read more about it or pick up a copy right here.

Thanks TMC!

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Howdy Do It came from “how do you do It,” the question Ellie & Margot found themselves asking about their freelance lifestyles, and so Howdy Do It was born, a column about the things we do to keep ourselves organized, inspired and on track.