• Written by Rich McNabb • Proofread & Edited by Claude AI
Nine documentaries about design, creativity and craft that are genuinely worth your time, covering graphic design, typography, urban planning, advertising and indie game development.
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What I love about documentaries is the human aspect of it. It’s the same reason I enjoy reading autobiographies, I love learning about people and how they think. No wonder I went on to become a product designer. I also love learning about the interesting ways people go about problem solving, the trial and error before eventually landing on the eureka moment. These are nine documentaries about design that have stuck with me.
A look beyond blueprints and computers into the art and science of design, spotlighting designers from a range of disciplines whose work shapes our everyday world.
I really like how each episode focuses on a different design discipline from a different designer, everything from illustration, footwear, stage design, architecture, automotive, graphic design, photography, interior design, costume design and typeface design. Sometimes you get the best ideas and inspiration from disciplines you don’t usually work in, it kind of cross-pollinates and provides different perspectives and approaches based on the medium or design constraints associated with it.
I actually spoke with Paula Scher when she gave a talk at Webstock in 2014. My friend was starstruck and probably wouldn’t have gone up and spoken to her if he wasn’t with me.
A feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with the manufactured objects around us and the people who design them. The perfect complement to Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things,” which to this day has had a lasting effect on how I view design and our relationship to physical objects and digital products. It was an absolute game-changer when I was first starting out in User Experience Design and forced me to look at the world from a different angle.
Some products almost have a personality, they evoke a strong emotional response before you’ve even used them. Others give you clues through affordances or signifiers, small visual cues that tell you how something should be used or interacted with, without a single word of instruction
An exploration of typography, graphic design and global visual culture told through one of the world’s most recognised typefaces.
What I love about this documentary is the response you get from people. It’s either “oh yeah, I’ve seen that” or “wait, you watched a film about fonts, like on purpose?” That’s when I know not to follow up with “I’ve also read a book over 200 pages long on Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski,” because I know I’ve already lost them by that stage, the eyes have glazed over and they’re looking for the nearest exit. The people who have seen it, we normally go on to have an array of different conversations, both about and not about design.
If you’re curious about typography, you might like popular fonts for mobile and web or designing geometric fonts.
An inside look at the creative minds behind some of the most iconic advertising campaigns ever made, including “Just Do It” and “Got Milk.” If you like the Mad Men TV series you may enjoy this documentary, or want to learn more about how some of these slogans came into existence.
If I’m honest, I thought this movie was about art frauds and copycats based on the title when I first watched it. Since then, I’ve come to learn that “copy” is shorthand for copywriting for ads.
An InVision documentary exploring how design-driven companies are reshaping entire industries, featuring designers and product leaders from Netflix, Twitter, Airbnb and more.
I remember how much easier it was creating rapid prototypes with InVision by uploading images. At the time I was doing app design, InVision was originally built as a companion tool for Sketch and Photoshop, letting you upload designs from both and turn them into an almost realistic app to usability test with customers for a New Zealand travel mobile app. I would share the InVision link with people and they would swear they already had the app on their phone. This wasn’t the case, it was still being built at the time, but it was believable enough that we could hand someone a phone and ask them to complete a few tasks while we refined the UX/UI of the mobile experience.
Once valued at $1.9 billion, it failed to successfully compete with Figma’s seamless, browser-based, collaborative design environment, which offers both design and prototyping natively within the platform.
A documentary about the design of cities, exploring the strategies and challenges behind urban design through conversations with architects, planners, policymakers and thinkers from around the world.
Gary Hustwit, the man who directed Objectified and Helvetica, both of which also appear on this list. If you enjoy his approach to storytelling and documentary making, this might be one for you.
It’s a balancing act between housing, accessibility, mobility, public space, civic engagement, economic development, and environmental concerns. Building for what’s required right now, and for what might be needed in the future, is not for the faint of heart.
Inventor Tim Jenison sets out to understand the painting techniques used by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, with fascinating results.
Tim often dreams about painting a Vermeer, who some consider one of the greatest painters of all time. Yet Tim is completely undeterred by the fact that he isn’t a painter, he’s a “computer graphics guy,” VFX by today’s terms, using technology to create realistic and immersive scenes for movies. Given the year it was painted, it almost looks like a video image or photograph given the detail and colours captured on canvas. He sets about learning how he might be able to duplicate the work in the modern era.
A look at a new class of exotic sports cars engineered to push the boundaries of what’s physically possible on four wheels.
I’m by no means a car person, yet I really enjoyed the intersection of the various disciplines. Hypercars represent the pinnacle of automotive design, engineering and performance.
They cost millions of dollars and are strictly limited in production, often built in batches of fewer than 100. These projects push the boundaries of what’s possible, and hopefully make a few breakthroughs along the way as new approaches and materials get tested. It must be amazing to see concepts that were once just sketches in a notebook become something tangible.
A documentary following indie game developers as they create games and share their work, and themselves, with the world.
I recently rewatched this one with my son, who is a massive gamer, and loved how the design, code, story and gameplay all come together to create immersive worlds for you to explore. Especially considering the word “indie” is short for independent, which meant sometimes it was only a couple of people responsible for creating these games, competing against some of the gaming giants with thousands of employees and huge budgets. What I loved about this was how much of themselves they put into creating these games, often making sacrifices to see their dream come true, and the enjoyment of watching others interact with something they’d worked so hard to get right.
What ties all nine of these together isn’t the subject matter, it’s watching someone wrestle with a problem long enough to find their way through it. A typeface, a hypercar, a city block, a painting technique lost for centuries. The medium changes, but the process is always the same: get stuck, keep going, eventually see it click.
That’s probably why I keep coming back to documentaries like these. Watching someone else’s eureka moment is oddly motivating for finding your own. This also explains why after almost 20 years I still think design is the best job in the world, it’s when you finally solve something that rush when it’s either going to come crashing down into a mess or when everything comes together and you take a step back to see all the hard work has paid off.