28 Must-See Documentaries For Designers

Watching documentaries is the best way to expand your expertise easily as well as to get inspired by watching real designers at work. This selection includes documentaries about various design fields from typography and advertising to industrial design.

BBC: The Genius of Design

Release year: 2010
Country: United Kingdom
Duration: 5 episodes of ∼ 59 minutes

BBC: The Genius of Design is a film about those who, in the context of modern digital and industrial society, are engaged in improving and perfecting products of various purposes, working hard to achieve a harmony of content and form.

Design is tightly connected with industrial production, and in our time there is no field where it has not borne fruit. This sphere and discourse have become especially relevant in the industrial development era.

Why Man Creates

Release year: 1968
Country: United States
Duration: 25 minutes

Why Man Creates is an Oscar-winning animated short documentary movie that tells about the essence of creativity.

Why Man Creates focuses on the creative process and different approaches to it. The action begins with ancient humans' hunting techniques: At first, they used stones and then they recognized them to be an insufficient tool so they began to make throwing spears.

In answering the question of why man creates, filmmakers indicate that the process of creation is divided into several stages. Ancient people were happy about a successful hunt and they were eager to depict their accomplishments. This is how cave painting was born. Later, first houses, work tools, vehicles were built, and so on, all the way to the active creativity of modern people.

Helvetica

Release year: 2007
Country: United States
Duration: 80 minutes

Helvetica is a film about typography, graphic design, and visual culture as a whole. Through the prism of the proliferation of one typeface which celebrated 50 years in 2007, the film deals with the general question of how typeface influences our life.

The film is an exploration of urban space and typefaces that fill it, as well as a series of interviews with well-known designers such as Wim Crouwel, Michael Bierut, Erik Spiekermann, Massimo Vignelli, Herman Zapf, and others about their work, creative process, choice and aesthetic component of typefaces.

Helvetica invites you to look at the thousands of words we can see every day from a different view, and this unites the world of design, graphics, advertising, and communication.

Design & Thinking

Release year: 2012
Country: United States
Duration: 74 minutes

Design & Thinking is a documentary inspired by the values of design thinking and explores entrepreneurs' and designers' views on the challenges of the 21st century.

What is design thinking? How the core principles of design thinking are applied in business models? How can people change the world around them by thinking creatively? That’s the true challenge for ordinary thinking, a call to innovate in the ever-changing world.

Objectified

Release year: 2009
Country: United States
Duration: 75 minutes

Objectified is an independent feature-length documentary directed by Gary Hustwit that tells about our complex relationships with objects of mass production and the people who designed them. This film is a look at the creative aspect of designing things, from toothbrushes to electronic devices. Using documentary footage and interviews the film depicts the creative process of some industrial designers who create objects that impact our daily life.

Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight

Release year: 2008
Country: United States
Duration: 73 minutes

The film explores the whole scope of work of Milton Glaser—a famous designer who for many people represents American graphic design. From newspaper and magazine design to interior, logos and brand identities, celebrated prints, drawings, posters, and paintings—the documentary examines the whole range of the great designer's creative work.

Skilfully directed by Wendy Keys, the film immerses the viewer in the everyday moments of Glaser's personal life and captures the designer's immense warmth and humanity, as well as his boundless depth of intellect and creativity.

PressPausePlay

Release year: 2011
Country: United States
Duration: 80 minutes

The digital revolution in art during the previous decade has allowed people to bring to life their wildest dreams and explore different creative opportunities, taking the game to the next level. What will this trend lead to? An improvement in film, music, and literature quality? A new understanding of true talent? Or the digital ocean of ubiquitous pop culture that we all are one day destined to drown in?

PressPausePlay is a film on the hopes and fears of current digital culture.

The Universe of Keith Haring

Release year: 2008
Country: United States
Duration: 90 minutes

The Universe of Keith Haring by Christina Clausen features rare archive footage along with monologues of Haring's friends, colleagues, and fans including Kenny Scharf, Yoko Ono, and Tony Shafrazi who share their memories and warm stories.

Having set the goal of keeping his art as accessible as possible, Keith Haring achieved it with the opening of the "Pop Shop" store in 1986 which functions as an online store today. Various products, from calendars to skateboards featuring Haring's works, erase the border between art and pop culture.

Sign Painters

Release year: 2013
Country: United States
Duration: 121 minutes

The documentary on signs that we see every day but often don't give any attention to. The hand-painted signs have been around and are a product of the fascinating 150-year-old American history. This used to be an ordinary job, but the labor of an artist who draws signs has now become very specialized—it requires unique skills combined with technological advances.

Sign Painters explores this little-known art through brief interview episodes with a number of artists such as Ira Coyne, Bob Dewhurst, Keith Knecht, Norma Jean Maloney, and Stephen Powers. These vanguards of unseen originality are leading a renaissance with a keen creative purpose and exemplify the working class American success story. The film highlights the appreciation for the balance between art and commerce.

The Cool School

Release year: 2008
Country: United States
Duration: 86 minutes

The Cool School is an uplifting and offbeat documentary film exploring the cross-section of art in Los Angeles in the 1950s. The focus of this historical journey is the Ferus Gallery which opened in 1957 and quickly became a cultural center featuring exhibitions highlighting local talents such as Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Wallace Berman, and Ed Kienholz.

18 more inspiring documentaries:

11. Beautiful losers

The documentary is about young artists and designers who, while distancing themselves from the world of traditional art, influence it anyway.

Release year: 2008
Country: United States
Duration: 90 minutes

12. Urbanized

The documentary about the problems and directions of urban development and factors that help some cities be better than others.

Release year: 2011
Country: United States
Duration: 85 minutes

13. Art and Сopy

The documentary on advertising and inspiration. It reveals the work aspects and tricks of some of the most influential advertisers of our time, people who really have an impact on our culture while remaining unknown outside the industry.

Release year: 2009
Country: United States
Duration: 90 minutes

14. Handmade Nation

The documentary explores the increasing desire of people to create do-it-yourself crafts and the new wave of art and design associated with it.

Release year: 2009
Country: United States
Duration: 90 minutes

15. Citizen Architect

The documentary looks at the life and legacy of the architect Samuel Mockbee, who sparked a radical architectural movement—the Rural Studio—at Auburn University, in one of the poorest areas of the USA.

Release year: 2010
Country: United States

Duration: 60 minutes

16. Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century

The documentary tells the story of the Bauhaus School of architecture and design founded in Weimar in 1919—one of the most impressive educational movements in the art of the 20th century. The school had a strong influence on modern architecture, painting, sculpture, design, and theater.

Release year: 1994
Country: United Kingdom
Duration: 60 minutes

17. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Ai Weiwei is the most famous Chinese contemporary artist, the "Beijing Andy Warhol" and a hooligan who has built his name and reputation not just with his exhibitions at the Tate Modern but also with his open opposition to the Chinese authorities.

Release year: 2012
Country: United States
Duration: 91 minutes

18. Paul Smith. Gentelman and designer

A personal and provocative portrait of a distinguished British designer. What is the secret of his success? Who is Paul Smith? How did a modest guy from Nottingham become known as a synonym for elegance in men's fashion?

Release year: 2012
Country: France

Duration: 60 minutes

19. Food Design

The documentary focuses on people working on the food and dishes' design. Every day thousands of professionals work to design food that tastes, smells, and looks good and attractive.

Release year: 2009
Countries: Austria - Netherlands

Duration: 51 minutes

20. Future by Design

This documentary highlights a brand new, revolutionary,and far-reaching vision of Jacque Fresco, a man viewed by many as Leonardo Da Vinci of our time. Contemporary to Einstein and Buckminster Fuller, Jacque is a self-taught futurist who often describes himself as a "generalist" or multi-disciplinarian who studies many interrelated fields of science.

Release year: 2006
Countries: United States
Duration: 86 minutes

21. Linotype: The Film

The feature-length documentary on Ottmar Mergenthaler's wonderful machine called Linotype. It represented the climax of the laborious ten years of work on inventing the tool that revolutionized printing. The film tells both of the device itself and of the people who are enthusiastic about this machine nowadays.

Release year: 2012
Countries: United States
Duration: 75 minutes

22. Zeitgeist: Addendum

The documentary directed by Peter Joseph is a sequel to Zeitgeist: The Movie. The film tells about the principle of how the US Federal Reserve works, of the American system of creating money, of cooperation between transnational corporations and the CIA, and analyzes the reasons for society's corruption.

Release year: 2008
Countries: United States
Duration: 123 minutes

23. The Art of Punk: Black Flag

This documentary is about the legendary Black Flag band's logo with the iconic four-bar icon that became a symbol of punk culture and its designer Raymond Pettibon.

Release year: 2013
Country: United States
Duration: 22 minutes

24. Comprar, tirar, comprar

The documentary follows the enduring conflict between producers and consumers in modern society. Its essence is in that the producers deliberately limit the durability of products to force the consumers to buy things more often. Otherwise, production will become unprofitable.

Release year: 2010
Countries: France - Spain
Duration: 75 minutes

25. Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview

This is a rare archival one-on-one with Steve Jobs, conducted by journalist and TV host Robert X. Cringely in 1995 during the production of a TV program on the introduction of the first personal computer.

Release year: 2012
Country: United States
Duration: 70 minutes

26. Abstract: The Art of Design

A Netflix original documentary series of 14 episodes, where each episode highlights one of the greatest and most innovative modern artists in the field of design. With the assistance of those whose work shapes our world every day, we get to learn more about how design impacts every aspect of life.

Release year: 2017
Country: United States
Duration: 52 minutes

27. Print the Legend

The award-winning original documentary by Netflix that focuses on the race unfolded between people who competed for market leadership in 3D printing and the home 3D printing revolution that quickly followed.

Release year: 2014
Country: United States
Duration: 100 minutes

28. The Artist Series by Hillman Curtis

This docu-series tells inspiring stories of several famous and leading designers of their time like Milton Glaser, David Carson, Mark Romanek, Paula Scher, and Stefan Sagmeister that worked at a design firm called Pentagram. The entire series is available for free at hillmancurtis.com.

Release year: 2014
Country: United States
Duration: 15 episodes ~7 min. each