Weinschenk's second run at the same idea: research findings from psychology, one per spread, aimed at people designing interfaces. Reference rather than argument.

Short essays on self-knowledge and attention, mostly written for the internet before being collected. Uneven, and the good ones are early.

Collected comics from The Oatmeal. Mostly about small daily irritations.

Madden draws the same one-page comic 99 times, changing only the technique. Layout, viewpoint, genre, style.

Wilber's attempt to fit physics, biology, psychology and religion into one developmental scheme. Written as an interview with himself.

A count is sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel in 1922 and stays thirty years. The entire book happens inside one building.

A widower who has given up on people is interrupted by neighbours who will not leave him alone. Comic on the surface and not underneath.

Saunders takes seven Russian short stories and works through each line by line, explaining what the writer is doing and why. Essentially a writing class transcribed.

Cooper's interaction design textbook. Goal-directed design, personas and the full pattern vocabulary, at textbook length.

Mickle on Apple after 2011, structured around Cook and Ive pulling in different directions. Ends up being a book about what happens when operations wins.

Sutherland argues that the things which work in marketing usually make no economic sense, and that this is the point. Makes the strongest available case for testing the idea that sounds stupid.

The journal version of Rial's chart book. The prompts ask you to chart your own worries instead of reading hers.

Sivers on building and selling CD Baby, in about forty very short chapters. Argues most of business advice is aimed at companies you would not want to run.

Greever on defending design work to people who can approve or kill it. Structured around the conversation rather than the artefact.

Yogananda's account of his training in India and his move to America in the 1920s. The book that carried Indian spiritual practice into the West.

Identity work beyond the mark itself. Case studies at length, heavy on the artwork.

Hand-drawn one-panel explanations from Sketchplanations, one concept per page, from the Doppler effect to the Overton window.

Malinic on creative work: finding ideas, staying motivated, running a practice. Short chapters on heavily designed pages.

The Braun catalogue photographed properly, product by product. Shows how narrow the rules were and how much came out of them.

Forte's system for capturing and organising notes so you can find things later. The method is four steps and the book is mostly about sticking to them.

Collins and Porras compared eighteen long-lived companies against direct competitors to find what the survivors shared. Some of the conclusions have aged badly, which is worth reading for on its own.

The same canvas from the business model book, applied to a single career instead of a company.

A hundred findings from perception, memory and motivation research, each on a single spread with the study cited. Reference rather than argument.

Fifty concepts from science, politics and philosophy, four pages each with a timeline down the margin.

Hawking on relativity, black holes and the shape of the universe, written for people with no maths. The chapter on the arrow of time is the one that sticks.

The World Video Game Hall of Fame tells the industry's history through 64 physical things. Cartridges, cabinets, controllers, packaging.

Turabian's citation and structure manual. Reference only, and the standard one.

Chou's Octalysis framework, breaking motivation into eight drives and applying them to product design. Systematic to the point of being mechanical.

How Jack Ma built Alibaba from a flat in Hangzhou, written by an insider who ran international operations there.

Old gods brought to America by immigrants are losing ground to new ones built from television and money. Road novel underneath the mythology.

Rand's case for individualism, delivered through a collapsing industrial America and a very long speech.

Written against the Isaacson biography, arguing Jobs got substantially better at his job between NeXT and the iPod. Sourced from people close to him.

Peterson's second set of rules, structured as twelve chapters of argument and anecdote.

Benyus on designing by copying biological solutions. Reads as a survey of examples across materials, energy and manufacturing.

Ten accounts of games being made, each one going wrong in a different way. Schreier got people to talk about crunch on the record.

Second volume in the same format, with more on process and the business side of creative work.

Fadell on building the iPod, the iPhone and Nest, written as short chapters of advice. Direct to the point of blunt about managing and being managed.

Miller's argument is that a company should cast the customer as the hero and itself as the guide. A single framework, applied repeatedly.

Twelve New Yorker pieces from the 1960s on corporate failures, including the Edsel launch and the rise of Xerox. Reporting rather than case studies.

Seven years inside Facebook's policy team, written by someone who was in the rooms. Meta went to arbitration to stop her promoting it.

Short prompts on habit and routine, one or two lines each. Built for dipping into.

Two friends in New York date each other for forty days and publish their journals side by side. The gap between his entry and hers on the same evening is the whole thing.

507 line drawings of linkages, gears, ratchets and escapements, two sentences each, published 1868. A lookup book for when a mechanism has to do something and you cannot picture the arrangement.

First of the series. Political manoeuvring across several families, told in rotating viewpoint chapters.

Gombrich wrote this for children in 1935, in six weeks, covering everything from the stone age to the first world war. Still the clearest short history there is.

Runs through a UX project in order, from kickoff to handoff, with the documents each stage produces. Written for people who have to run the project, not just design it.

Exercises built around ten mental locks, like looking for the right answer, being practical, avoiding ambiguity. Works as a workbook with a pen, not as a read.

Fifteen years of fieldwork on slot machine design and the state players call the zone, built on the machines' own engineering documents. Every dark-pattern argument in software is here first.

Otomo's Neo-Tokyo, drawn at a density most comics never attempt. Worth owning in print because the paper size does half the work.

Everyday worries turned into charts and diagrams, many built from real objects photographed on a table. Reads in one sitting.

Farm animals overthrow the farmer and rebuild the same hierarchy. Short enough to read in a sitting.

How ByteDance built TikTok, written by someone who worked in Chinese tech. Focuses on the recommendation engine as the actual product.

Every version of the car from 1939 onward, with the design decisions and the people behind them.

Pool on how technology gets shaped by things outside engineering: regulation, public fear, money and history. The nuclear power chapters carry most of the argument.

Lamott on writing, built around one instruction: let the first draft be bad on purpose. Short chapters, mostly anecdote.

A working designer's guide to building a brand identity, from brief to delivery, using his own studio's projects.

Orwell essays, including the title one where he works out what he actually spends on books against tobacco. Short and mostly about money and class.

Raj Shamani on career and money for a young Indian audience. Short chapters, heavy on anecdote.

Product management where the buyer and the user are different people. Covers the parts consumer product advice skips entirely.

The business model canvas and the nine blocks it splits a company into. Designed as a workbook, and it works better used that way than read.

Berger interviewed several hundred designers about how they actually work. The useful parts are where they contradict each other.