Table of Contents
- 12 Months. 12 Books. 12 Skills.
- Why this reading plan works
- January: The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
- February: Ways of Seeing — John Berger
- March: Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t — Steven Pressfield
- April: Poking a Dead Frog — Mike Sacks
- May: Predatory Thinking — Dave Trott
- June: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It — Cory Doctorow
- July: The Art of Spending Money — Morgan Housel
- August: I’m Glad My Mom Died — Jennette McCurdy
- September: Noise — Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass Sunstein
- October: Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model — Marty Cagan
- November: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
- December: M Train — Patti Smith
- How to actually read…
- What reading actually changes
Do not index
Do not index
Read time: under 7 minutes
12 Months. 12 Books. 12 Skills.
Your Kindle library (or bookcase) looks impressive. 47 books on design thinking, 23 on user psychology, 11 on leadership.
You’ve read maybe three of them. No judgment. My “purchased but unread” pile could fill a small library, too.
We’ve all been there, buying books with good intentions, then letting them collect digital dust while we scroll LinkedIn for the 47th time this week.
But here's what most designers won't admit:
We're drowning in resources but starving for depth.
We bookmark Medium articles we never finish. We save Instagram carousels we never revisit. We screenshot threads that disappear into the void of our camera roll.
We tell ourselves we're learning. But really, we're just collecting.
I spent my first two years in UX doing exactly this. I'd buy a course, watch the first two modules, then abandon it for the next shiny thing. I'd download templates, add them to my Figma files, and never touch them again.
I was moving fast but going nowhere.
The shift happened when I stopped trying to learn everything and started focusing on learning deeply. Not courses. Not tutorials. Books.
Actual, full-length books that forced me to sit with ideas longer than a 280-character hot take.
This isn't about becoming some design philosopher who quotes Don Norman at parties (please don't be that person). This is about building a foundation that compounds over time. One that makes you better at solving problems, explaining your work, and seeing patterns others miss.
Here's a different approach: 12 months, 12 books. Each one builds a specific skill. Each one connects to the next. No fluff. No “must-read” lists copied from someone else's blog. Just books that'll actually change how you work as a UX designer.
Why this reading plan works
Most reading lists fail for the same reason most diets fail. They’re too ambitious. They lack structure. They rely on motivation instead of systems.
“Read 52 books this year.”
Cool. Which ones? In what order? For what purpose? Without answers, all you get is guilt.
This plan works for three reasons:
1. One book per month is realistic
That’s 20–30 pages a week. If you can scroll Instagram for 30 minutes a day, you can read 30 pages a week. The math isn’t the problem. Priorities are.
2. The sequence matters
These books build on each other. Fundamentals first. Psychology next. Collaboration and thinking later. By December, January’s ideas land differently because you’ve built context.
3. Each book has a job
This isn’t about looking well-read. Each book targets a gap most designers have. One skill per month. By next year, you’re not just another designer with a polished portfolio; you’re someone who understands why things work.
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January: The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
The book that stops you from calling confusion ‘edge cases.’
Start here. Always.
Before you design anything well, you need to understand why things fail.
Norman’s book isn’t really about doors and switches. It’s about responsibility. About stopping the reflex to blame users for bad outcomes.
Affordances. Signifiers. Feedback. Constraints. These aren’t buzzwords, they’re the atoms of good design.
What you gain: Language. Not opinions. When someone asks why your solution works, you can explain it without saying “it feels better.”
Top 3 takeaways:
- Good design explains itself. If you need instructions, something already went wrong.
- If users make the same mistake, it’s not user error, it’s design failure.
- Constraints guide behavior better than warnings ever will.
February: Ways of Seeing — John Berger
You’ll never trust ‘just a layout’ again.
Understanding how context manipulates perception. This book permanently changes how you look at images, interfaces, and “neutral” design decisions.
Berger shows that seeing is never passive. Power, culture, and framing shape interpretation long before logic enters the room.
What you gain: A sharper eye and a healthy suspicion of “just aesthetics.”
Top 3 takeaways:
- Design is never neutral.
- Context alters meaning more than content.
- What’s emphasized reveals who the system serves.
Short book. Long shadow.
March: Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t — Steven Pressfield
Turns your ideas into something other humans can actually carry.
If you can’t explain your work, it doesn’t matter how good it is.
This book sharpens how you write, present, and persuade. Which means your ideas actually survive beyond Figma.
What you gain: Clearer thinking through clearer language. Communication is a multiplier. This book proves it.
Top 3 takeaways:
- If it’s boring to write, it’s boring to read.
- Clear thinking shows up as clear sentences.
- Respect the reader’s time or lose them.
April: Poking a Dead Frog — Mike Sacks
A crash course in editing: what to cut, when to pause, and why ‘almost’ never ships.
Designers obsess over clarity. Comedians obsess over timing.
This book is a collection of conversations with comedy writers from The Onion, The Simpsons, SNL, and beyond. It’s not about jokes, it's about timing, restraint, and reading the room.
Comedy writing and UX have more in common than most designers realize. Both are about saying less, choosing the right beat, and knowing exactly when something lands or doesn’t.
What you gain: A sharper instinct for restraint. You start recognizing when something is “technically fine” but emotionally flat.
Top 3 takeaways:
- Setup matters more than punchline. Context does 80% of the work
- Kill your darlings. If it’s funny (or beautiful) but doesn’t serve the moment, it goes.
- Clarity beats cleverness. If the audience has to work to get it, you’ve already lost them.
May: Predatory Thinking — Dave Trott
A manual for winning with constraints instead of complaining about them.
Most problems aren’t solved head-on.
Trott teaches you to look sideways. To reframe weaknesses as advantages. To question assumptions that everyone else accepts. This is creativity without mysticism.
What you gain: A sharper eye for angles others miss.
Top 3 takeaways:
- The obvious solution is usually the weakest one.
- Constraints aren’t limits, they’re leverage points.
- If everyone agrees instantly, you’re probably missing the real opportunity.
June: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It — Cory Doctorow
The pattern behind why products don’t ‘get worse’ they get repurposed.
You already felt this book before you read it.
Platforms start great. Then they rot. Slowly. Predictably. By design.
Doctorow names the pattern, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
What you gain: System-level literacy. You stop blaming “bad UX” and start seeing incentive structures.
Top 3 takeaways:
- Platforms optimize for who they serve now, not who they promised to serve first.
- User-hostile design is often a business decision, not a design failure.
- Good UX can be undone by bad incentives.
July: The Art of Spending Money — Morgan Housel
Teaches you to choose what to protect, not just what to optimize.
This isn’t about budgeting. It’s about values.
Housel reframes money as a tool for buying freedom, time, and peace not status. Designers will recognize the parallel immediately: every product decision is a trade-off, whether we admit it or not.
What you gain: Judgment. The ability to prioritize without over-rationalizing.
Top 3 takeaways:
- Short-term wins often sabotage long-term trust.
- Good decisions look boring in the moment and obvious in hindsight.
- Enough is a powerful concept. More features don’t always mean better outcomes.
August: I’m Glad My Mom Died — Jennette McCurdy
For anyone whose default setting is ‘sure, I can take that on.’
This book isn’t about shock value. It’s about control, compliance, and the quiet damage of being “good” for too long. For designers, it lands uncomfortably close to work: people-pleasing, over-functioning, and mistaking approval for success.
What you gain: Emotional clarity. And permission to redraw boundaries without over-explaining yourself.
Top 3 takeaways:
- Not every requirement deserves compliance.
- Being high-performing can still be unhealthy.
- Your voice gets clearer when you stop performing for approval.
This is especially powerful for designers navigating authority-heavy environments.
September: Noise — Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass Sunstein
A fix for the invisible bug where the same work gets three different verdicts.
Most teams think their problem is “bias.”
This book argues it’s often noise: random variability in judgment that makes outcomes depend on who’s in the room, what they noticed first, or what mood the org is in.
For designers, that’s not abstract. It’s the reason good work gets blocked, mediocre work ships, and “alignment” feels like a slot machine.
What you gain: Decision hygiene. More consistent calls, fewer politics-driven outcomes, and a cleaner way to defend decisions.
Top 3 takeaways:
- Decide independently first, discuss second.
- Noise is different from bias and it’s everywhere.
- Use decision hygiene (checklists, structured comparisons) to cut randomness.
October: Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model — Marty Cagan
A blueprint for escaping roadmap theater and building teams that can actually steer.
Most orgs don’t have a design problem. They have an operating model problem.
This book explains what has to change (team empowerment, leadership responsibilities, outcome focus) for good product work to be possible at all.
For designers, this is gold because design quality often dies upstream, in how work is funded, scoped, staffed, and decided.
What you gain: Language and mechanics to diagnose why execution keeps collapsing into output mode and what to fix upstream.
Top 3 takeaways:
- “Transformation” is leadership work, not a team process tweak.
- Give teams problems to own, not feature lists to ship.
- Empowered teams beat roadmap-driven delivery.
November: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
Reads like a fire alarm for anyone designing systems that make decisions for people.
This is not a casual read.
It’s a blunt, unsettling argument about what happens when intelligence outpaces control and why “we’ll fix it later” is not a strategy.
For designers working with AI, automation, or decision systems, this book reframes the concept of responsibility at scale.
What you gain:
A long-term lens. Beyond features, roadmaps, or engagement metrics.
Top 3 takeaways:
- Optimization without alignment is dangerous. Systems do exactly what you tell them to do, not what you meant.
- Small design decisions compound at scale.
- “Someone else will handle ethics” is how disasters happen.
You don’t need to agree with every argument. You do need to sit with them.
December: M Train — Patti Smith
A reminder that the best experiences are built from noticing, not ideating.
This isn’t a design book, and it’s barely a memoir.
M Train is about wandering, routine, loss, obsession, and how meaning is built quietly over time. Patti Smith writes the way designers should think: observant, patient, and deeply human.
There’s no framework here. That’s the point.
What you gain:
Sensitivity. To mood, to memory, to the invisible layers users bring with them.
Top 3 takeaways:
- Rituals matter. Small repeated actions shape how places and products feel.
- Silence is a design choice. Not everything needs explanation.
- People move through experiences emotionally, not logically.
This book slows you down, but in a good way.
How to actually read…
A simple system:
- 30 minutes in the morning. Not at night. No phone.
- Messy notes. One idea per chapter you can use this week.
- Apply one thing weekly. Reading without application is entertainment.
- Don’t be precious. Skim. Skip. Come back later.
Consistency beats perfection.
What reading actually changes
Reading won’t make you a senior overnight. But it will change how you see problems.
You’ll spot patterns faster, explain decisions more clearly, and be able to defend your work without defensiveness.
You stop feeling behind, not because you know everything, but because you understand fundamentals.
That’s real confidence.
You can coast on talent and tools for a few years. Then you hit a ceiling. And the designers who built depth, slowly, quietly; move past you.
This plan isn’t about looking smart. It’s about thinking clearly.
One book a month. One year.
That’s it.
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