A Book About Design: Complicated Doesn’t Make It Good
by Mark Gonyea
2005
Another Book About Design: Complicated Doesn’t Make It Bad
by Mark Gonyea
2007
These are awesome! I love them both.
In theory, these are picture books about design, written and illustrated for young children. As such, they are about as long and have about as much text as you might expect from a picture book intended for to be read either by or to very young beginning readers.
In practice, they are design books that show some of the foundational concepts of design, and are a great introduction for adults as well. There is very little text, but it is all exactly on point and the illustrations do an excellent job of actually illustrating the concepts presented.
Plus, there’s a certain humor in the presentation of the concepts that I really enjoyed. I thought the books were useful, but I was also grinning the whole time I read them. I highly recommend them.
Biblio-therapy 
Oh, these sound really fun. I am not visual at all and have negative design skills, but I love reading about it. These books might be right at my level.
In a semi-related note: have you seen the awesome redesign of the terrible NSA PRISM slides?
http://mashable.com/2013/06/11/designer-remakes-nsas-awful-prism-slideshow/?utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29&utm_cid=Mash-Product-RSS-Pheedo-All-Partial&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner
Ooh, I had not seen the re-design. That’s awesome! They do a lovely job of it (and make wonderful use of a golden advertising opportunity.)
That redesign of the NSA PRISM slides is beautiful! I’m following Edward Tufte on twitter, and he had several ranty tweets about the original slides.
Rebecca gave me a copy of A Book About Design when I was at RIT, and it was kind of amazing how the author managed to encapsulate the main general theories of design in a children’s book.