The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

Trent Lucier writes "Fellow programmers, beware! Graphic designers have been invading our territory. A flood of books have been released aimed at artists who want to learn web development skills. Oh, it starts innocently enough, usually with CSS and XHTML. But soon they are learning JavaScript, PHP, and even SQL! What have we techies fought back with? What material is there for us to boost our artistic right-brain power? Sadly, our motley collection of Gimp tutorials alone will not win this battle. We need something stronger. We need to understand the principles of graphic design. But the shelves have been empty of books that make this topic accessible to tech-minded people. Well, empty until now." Read below for the rest of Trent's review.

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
author	Jason Beaird
pages	180
publisher	O'Reilly Media
rating	7
reviewer	Trent Lucier
ISBN	0975841963
summary	A book aimed at developers who want to learn how to make websites look more attractive

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird is aimed at developers who want to learn how to make websites look more attractive. The 5 chapters each cover one of the pillars of graphic design theory: Layout, Color, Texture, Typography, and Imagery. Full-color and packed with lots of great examples, the book contains screenshots from dozens of modern websites to illustrate graphic design principles. A cumulative case-study ends each chapter, where the author shows you how the theories he just explained can be applied to a real site he is developing for a client.

Except for some CSS sprinkled here and there, the book contains no code. Don't look for tips on creating 3-column layouts or other stylesheet wizardry, because you won't find it here. The author assumes that you know how to take an image mock-up and convert it into an HTML/CSS document. This is a strong point of the book, since the focus can remain on graphic design techniques and not unnecessary code listings Additionally, there isn't much discussion of tool usage. A few examples use Photoshop, but the book focuses mostly on theory and case studies, not step-by-step program tutorials.

The book starts with Layout and Composition. If you have ever wondered why some websites just look better organized than others, this chapter will explain why. Beaird discusses the concepts of grid theory, and how using the golden ratio to divide page elements can improve the visual appeal. Plenty of examples are given that illustrate the principles of balance, unity, and emphasis.

The Color chapter contains my favorite example, where Beaird uses different versions of the same drawing to describe monochromatic, analogous, and complementary colors. As with the previous chapter on layout, this part of the book does an excellent job of teaching you how to learn from attractive websites, instead of mindlessly imitating them. Color is a hard topic to understand, but there are some good tips here that teach readers how to create an appealing palette for a website.

Relying solely on solid colors and grid layouts can make a website look flat. The Texture chapter discusses ways to use style and make your designs much more eye catching. This chapter is probably the most "Web 2.0" chapter in the book. Gel buttons, gradients, and backgrounds are all discussed.

To the dismay of typophiles everywhere, font support on the web is very poor. There are very few "web safe" fonts that designers can safely assume are on all computers. The Typography section shows readers how to make the most out of this situation by understanding letter spacing, justification, and font usage. Beaird also discusses the sIFR technique (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), which uses Flash and Javascript to display fonts that may not be on the user's computer. The sIFR method is accessible and degrades gracefully. While the book does not discuss the specific implementation details of this method, just bringing it to my attention taught me something new.

Imagery is the subject of the final chapter, and the book ends on a disappointing note. Very little of this section is about the graphic design principles behind imagery. Rather, precious pages are dedicated to discussing various license agreements and tips on finding stock photos. This is useful information, but it should have been relegated to a sidebar at the most. The chapter focuses almost entirely on images as content and not as design elements. If you want to know how to make images in a blog post look pretty, there are some ideas here (drop-shadows, borders). But there is no information about how to work images into a page header or navigation menu. How do I determine if an image matches my color scheme? How can images spice up a design without going overboard? These were just some of the questions I had going into this chapter that were left unanswered. The Texture chapter hinted at these ideas with examples, but I wanted to see a deeper explanation of the underlying principles.

The book is a little short at 180 pages, but that's not as bad as it may seem. Those of us accustomed to reading 800-page tomes on programming tend to forget how much content can be packed into a book when the author doesn't have to waste 300 pages listing code, 200 pages on the API, and 150 pages on an index.

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design is a good book to kick start your graphic-design journey. The biggest benefit that I got from this book is the knowledge to learn from great designs as opposed to just admiring them in a state of awe. The book could have been a little longer, and some of the topics could have been discussed in more detail. This book won't teach you everything, but it's a good place to start and it will leave you excited about learning more.

Trent Lucier is a software engineer. He is the creator of ChessUp, a tool for creating chess diagrams online.

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You can purchase The Principles of Beautiful Web Design from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Give me Edward Tufte

Anyday

Re:Give me Edward Tufte

Tufte doesn't say squat about web design. He doesn't really get into page or content design at all. He's all about the presentation of data, and how to try to turn it into information. He'll tell you that you should stick to primary colors or simple textures, but he'd try to dissuade you from adding a drop shadow to your graphic (indeed, from even adding a graphic if it wasn't intimately related to the data set you were trying to present).

He's the man if you're trying to present data, but if you want to present text or other non-numeric information, he's not much help.

Re:Give me Edward Tufte

I would prefer a clear and informative website rather than someone elses interpretation of 'beautiful'...

Amen. If you want art, go to an art gallery. I want websites to be clean, functional, easy-to-navigate, and more importantly, I want to be able to find the information I'm looking for without having to hunt through and around annoying graphics and being subjected to vomit-inducing color schemes.

Re:Give me Edward Tufte

Humans share a lot of common points in their interpretations of beautiful. These can be learned, and exploited. Don't kid yourself, beautiful is always better than ugly.

Re: Eye of the Beholder

Wow! You're saying that I could get a +1 modifier to my Charisma if I carry a Beholder Eye in my knapsack? That's an extra use of Turn Undead per day!

It's not about you...

...not trying to sound cliche. Unless you are developing a web site for you to look at exclusively.

I do agree with you that a clear, easy to navigate site is important... who wouldn't agree with that? But at the same time, an overwhelming number of the average public are attracted more to graphics containing 'cool' looking web sites than 'Plain Jane' web sites. The web sites that are trying to sell or advertise a product or service to the general public need to appeal to the general public. That is one of the reasons why web sites are redesigned so often, to attract new people. It can't be 'cool' unless it is new and on the 'bleading edge'. As far as 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder': the people creating the site, if they really know what they are doing, know their target audience. They will appeal to what they know the majority of that group finds beautiful. But most people belong in that big general public demographic...

Another reason it needs to be fancy is that it shows the viewers that there is something behind the web site. They will assume that there are people willing to invest time (=money) in the site design, meaning they are looking at something that is likely to be more legitimate (we all make assumptions in life... we have to). When people see a product being advertised on a text only web page and an equivalent product on a 'cool' web site complete with good graphics, they will usually go for the product with a well designed graphics laden site. And I am not talking about some horrible mishmash of graphics put together by someone using their windows front page lite or whatever the hell windows comes with these days. It's basically like the reason you wear a suite or good clothes to a client's site. To make a good impression.

Re:Give me Edward Tufte

I would argue that functionality is also in the eye of the beholder. Our brains work differently, which is why we all have preferences in art, music, etc... including functionality. Certain sites, designed by very well paid people make absolutely no sense to me, I for one hate Amazon's interface, but that's me. Obviously they spent a lot of money and research time to develop a site that works for most people, to my eyes it pretty much sucks.

Re:Give me Edward Tufte

There are two approaches to setting usability goals. One goal is to make the system as easy as possible for someone who doesn't know what they're doing to use. This approach is best for transient users, such as customers buying big ticket items that won't frequently patronize the site. It's also best when you're presenting internal use stuff to executive clients, because they're usually far removed from the day to day operations of the company and will not be the "power users" of the software. Artists are usually more adept at designing for this goal, because the demands of their job require that they be more closely in tune with other people than the next person. The other goal is to make use of the system as efficient as possible for someone who has taken the time to learn it inside out. I think of it as "make it as easy as possible for someone who has already completed each task three times". This is the best approach for expert systems where the person can be expected to dedicate several hours of each day to using it as part of their job, and it's reasonable to expect them to work at learning. It's also best when you want to make it easy for frequently returning customers to be impulse-sold, like Amazon. Propeller heads are usually more adept at designing for this goal, because the demands of their job require that they be more closely in tune with the underlying system. Most cases end up with some degree of compromise between the two goals, some duplication of user interface into "Expert Mode" and "Novice Mode", and some clutter in the interface to bridge the gap. That would be Amazon.

Slashdot is

a great example....

Maybe we'll finally see...

...some Cubist web pages.

http://www.satirewire.com/charts/cubist.shtml [satirewire.com]

Re:Maybe we'll finally see...

...some Cubist web pages.

We already have this one page [timecube.com] about cube stuff. We don't need a single more, you dog brain student.

Don't feel too threatened

Foruntately, artists are too busy creating art to consider either the user interface or usability. In fact, head to the nearest art show and it's practically the opposite. I think most art majors think the plan is to make the whackiest thing you can and then laugh at the viewers who don't get it...

Non-Designer's Design Book

'Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,
    but rather when there is nothing more to take away'. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

as a technical writer for ten years, i've found the best book on the subject
for people who aren't designers is: Robin William's Non-Designer's Design Book [amazon.com].

it covers the four basic principles of Design:

1) Proximity: Make sure than when you Poke button X, status indicator Y is PROXIMATE to X.

2) Alignment: Don't start things out on a new Arbitrary Visual Margin, reuse existing Bounding Rectangles to ALIGN things to each other.

3) Repetition: Don't use a different icon for the same thing; consistently use the same Motif throughout.

4) Contrast: If two elements are not exactly the same, make them distinguishably different.

all the best,
j [earthlink.net]

Re:Non-Designer's Design Book

I found the book by Robin Williams to be a great resource as well.

But I specifically remember her listing the design principles in a different and purposeful order:

Contrast
Repetition
Alignment
Proximity

...and I have never forgotten them! :-)

hmm...so what?

a lot of "techies" don't have artistic ability, but would you really want an artist to design your perl scripts? a plumber can go to his local library and learn about prescription drugs, but you take his medical advice? people are good at different things. no artist is going to replace a techie's job unless they're also geeks, in which case calling them "artist" does not imply "not geek".

yeah

Oh, it starts innocently enough, usually with CSS and XHTML. But soon they are learning JavaScript, PHP, and even SQL!

I always knew Java was a gateway drug.

Re:yeah

1. Build timemachine
2. Set machine from 1. to 1995
3. Silence the Netscape jerk that coined the JavaScript name
4. Party like its 1999!

A true story about JavaScript.

You know why it was called that? Because Netscape thought Java was going to be the future. JavaScript was a way to glue HTML page elements (forms, mouse clicks, page loads, images, links) to an embedded java applet in the page that would do the "heavy lifting" or allow you to control the java applet using native-looking controls couched in action-less forms. And LiveConnect was the magic glue that made it possible. JavaScript used to be called "LiveScript" for just that reason.

And now we have this crazy confusion about JavaScript Java, when they now have little to do with each other.

Let's just call it ECMAScript so no one gets confused.

Aesthetic sense cannot be taught

Aesthetic sense, "good taste", whatever you want to call it, is something which you either have intrinsically or you do not. Most people do not and will not no matter whose "set of guiding principles" are employed.

Just look at the average geek's wardrobe LOL, if it was like math or language we'd all have it down by HS graduation, wouldn't we?

Graphics!?

I use links you insensitive clod! http://links.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Really...

who needs the right brain anyway..

Best Solution

Of course the best solution would almost completely abstract the presentation from the data. That would allow the programmers and designers to work independently and do what each does best. However, I have yet to find a method of developing web pages with this level of abstraction. Many people say "simply combine a, b, c, d, e, f...", but that always feels like a hack and never produces pleasant results.

Some related websites...

http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/ [webdesignfromscratch.com] - covers pretty much everything web design related

http://www.sheriftariq.org/design/index.html [sheriftariq.org] - articles on some design elements

http://www.adampolselli.com/getthelook/ [adampolselli.com] - guides that basically hold your hand to achieve various styles

http://webtypography.net/intro/ [webtypography.net] - typography applied to the web

http://www.alvit.de/handbook/ [alvit.de] - list of links related to web design/graphic design/etc.

You can also try enrolling in a class at a community college or something...that way you can learn, practice, and receive feedback from a teacher/peers.

When Graphics Designers attack code...

...I respond with my own watercolors. Horrible watercolors. Of clowns. Its the only poetry I have found that can convey the nuances of how horrible their code design is in the language an artist can understand.

Discount Web Design!

When in doubt:
- add more popups
- blinky lights are exciting
- if your page loads in less then 10 seconds, it must not be very interesting

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
http://www.bitworksmusic.com/ [bitworksmusic.com]

What happened to web design?

This is the first time I've heard mention of Web Design since the 90s. Maybe I'm oblivious, but I was beginning to think people forgot it existed.

Back in the days of tiling backgrounds, embedded Midi files, and blue/red hyperlinks there was a term coined. "Web Design" was a buzzword for anyone who knew how to take a few gifs, some HTML, and make a crappy website. I even had a webpage dedicated to Chocobos from Final Fantasy, each page with it's own Chocobo Midi and prominent image, background a tiling of starry gifs.

At first, Web Design was a skill anyone who knew how to move beyond grey background, black text, and web rings could claim to have. Before long, it became pretty evident what constituted a well designed webpage and what didn't. 56k was the name of the game, which severely limited how much crap you could throw on a page before it simply took forever to load.

Whether by skill or by the 56k barrier, web pages were much simpler then than now.

Somewhere towards the end of the 90s we forgot about Web Design. We knew how to make web pages, there wasn't a point in talking about it anymore unless it was your job. There were no more secrets, only skill and good aestetic sense.

Then came broadband and dynamic content.

Something about these things has created the burgeoning hordes of extremely poorly designed web pages. I've seen this all before 15 years ago, people cramming far too much into websites, distilling purpose and functionality in a sea of confusion. Only this time, load times hardly suffer thanks to cable and DSL. Apparently we have goldfish like minds, forgetting the past all too easily.

Or maybe it's just that the internet has grown so quickly that the people persent for the horrors of the 90s are a minority. With a new generation of internet addicts, the lessons of the past are buried.

Perhaps I'm just an old geezer at age 23 ranting and raving about the kids no my lawn, but I'm trying to figure out why web pages like Google are the exception and not the rule. Why Slashdot is better organized than ebay and Amazon. Why keeping your customers lost in a swampy morass of a website is good.

It seems to me the message is there. Every web designer worth their salt knows simplicity is paramount, that extraneous options and features only clutter, that 20 equally flashy and complicated things will only bewilder. Somehow, this message is being ignored.

Perhaps it's that management has finally stopped assuming web designers know what they're doing and are going "hands on". Maybe web designers no longer know what they're doing, coming out of lackluster art or cs majors with only a little skill and a lot of "education". Maybe I'm just picky.

In any case, I think I'd take missarranged Beatles Midis over some of the crappy websites we're force fed these days.

There's a...

...Myspace joke in here somewhere, I just KNOW it!

Usability vs. Visibility

I've been somebody who, for many years, has loved web design from both the visual and technical sides of things. How well a website works is obviously important, but just as important is how it looks. There are many people out there who disagree, and say that usefulness is key and how "pretty" a page is isn't important, but they're completely wrong. (In my opinion, of course.)

The reason they're wrong is that web design isn't either/or, no matter what some may say. There are obvious examples of design over use - countless, countless examples - but that doesn't mean that making a website visually attractive kills the chance to also make it work like a charm.

For me personally, one of my favorite projects web design wise has been my personal forums, where I've put just as much important on how they look as well as how they work. Forum design is, to put it bluntly, god-awful across the internet. If message forums don't just stick with the defaul theme, they slightly modify it to make it look average AND ugly.

Message forums are about reading the posts presented there, but they're also about the community, so the design of the forums should reflect that. Here's a screenshot of the new theme I have in progress [photobucket.com] - it's far, far from done, but gives an idea of my kind of sense of forum style. First off, avatars are 600x150; a bit larger than the previous 600x120 avatars we were running. Some see that kind of thing as a waste, but our large avatars were one of the things that made our forums stand out, be remembered, and the way the board was coded, you could turn off avatars and still have the forum work perfectly and look very nice. Users will be able to select their own background color for their posts; it makes things more colorful, and personal, but it also then lets a user quickly scan a thread and find their own posts, due to knowing what color they're looking for. Items such as thread title, page navigation, and search box will be part of a bottom-of-the-window-pinned navigation bar, extending on the previous navigaion bar we had; this helps to reduce the clutter in layouts, and give the forum another unique visual aspect, but it also presents important navigation and UI items in one consistant, always available on-screen location, instead of scrolling up and down the page to hunt them down every time.

Not that I'm trying to toot my own horn here - my point is that with just a bit of thought, web design can be both visually appealing and enhance the user experience, but that idea seems to be lost on people far too often. And, obviously, the same design elements and planning I'm using for my new forum skin wouldn't work for other types of websites, but we need to better understand what each type of website needs and requires, and work from there. Nobody would make sense in saying that every type of website needs to be visually stunning, but those saying that sites don't need to be fancy or appealing are just as wrong. A website being visually unique, pleasing to look at, providing quality design at the same time it presents quality UI, those are all important factors that too often go overlooked.

I HATE it when that happens ....

To the dismay of typophiles everywhere, font support on the web is very poor. There are very few "web safe" fonts that designers can safely assume are on all computers. The Typography section shows readers how to make the most out of this situation by understanding letter spacing, justification, and font usage. Beaird also discusses the sIFR technique (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), which uses Flash and Javascript to display fonts that may not be on the user's computer. The sIFR method is accessible and degrades gracefully. While the book does not discuss the specific implementation details of this method, just bringing it to my attention taught me something new.

And to the dismay of people who want to actually READ these pages, now long is it going to take some of you people to realise that not everybody can read your gorgeous 8 pt font, because we have a) crappy monitors, b) bi-focals, c) big monitors with large type, etc?

I'm sorry, folks. I don't care what graphic design principals you're following. Overriding the users font settings when there is no overriding reason for it (and there seldom is), just because it "looks purdy", makes it a bad design. Period.

And I swear that if I EVER get my hands on the idiot that started this trend to black type on gray/colour backgrounds, or white text on a black background .............

That's one fine article about amateurs

We need something stronger. We need to understand the principles of graphic design.

No, we don't. At least not if "we" are supposed to be IT professionals.

May be the statement is true for small teams working on internal projects (intranet applications). But seriously, the article has a very hobbyist ring to it.

Everybody working on larger web-based applications is used to cooperating with external designers. There may be different views on who has to produce CSS/HTML (or whatever markup code) from photoshop designs (same issue with who does the "usability"), but in general there is not too much danger that graphic designers somehow take over anything apart from trivial programming tasks (e.g. writing markup code). Unless of course they are looking for a complete carreer change. I've seen that happen. But after being accepted as full-fledged developers, they somehow never got to do any designing any more.
Anyhow, any sufficiently large project will involve a 50-page layout spec, corporate identity definition or a bunch of obnoxious product managers who will see to it, that you - the develevoper - won't get too much say in where anything is located on the screen. And that is okay by me, as division of labor has proven to be a pretty succesful concept over the last, say, ten-thousand years.
I find the whole idea of "graphics designers somehow at war with IT people" a little strange. In the projects I work in/have worked in graphics designers are fellow-suppliers who have to handle the same basic problems of budget & time-constraints that we have. At the end of the proverbial day they usually make good companions for discussing the idiosyncracies of the current project over a few beers.

Programmers? What programmers?

I'm sorry, but a web designer is not a "programmer". Just because you can sling around a bit of PHP and SQL still doesn't make you a programmer. The problem is that many people suffer from the delusion this would be enough. Unless you know quite a bit beyond that (the equivalent of at least 2-3 years of CS), you're not a programmer.

Meh...

I'll browse this if I happen across it on my journey to Borders or similar, but I don't see myself buying it. I do this junk for a living, and - owing to my environment - I use graphics less and less and have begun to apply a more austere design sensibility to the sites that I work on. Of course, I'm doing it in corporate environment whose primary concerns are less oriented around 'flashy' than they are around 'substantive, intuitive and compliant'.

Admittedly, I do spend a good portion of my free time working on graphics with a variety of programs, and I have a very firm grasp on the concept of an attractive presentation, but to what end? I've seen a number of very pretty, very alluring sites that failed miserably on a variety of compliance checks (that's not even counting something like WAI or sec508), because these artists don't have a full understanding of what it is and what it takes to be a professional web designer (developer, et al).

I'm rambling now, and I can't remember what my original point had been...so I'll just say that you either 'got it' or you don't.

Web design Graphic design

One thing for anyone to remember is that Web design is about much more than layout, fonts, and purty pictures. The web is interactive, and therefore user interface principles come into play also. Sadly, most "web designers" and many "web developers" have little more than tangential knowledge of this subject.

The web is not inherently a graphical medium. All "web designers" out there should put a post-it note in their workspace reminding them that HTTP and HTML both contain text in their definitions: not images, video, or Flash.

In my experience, the worst web designers can be divided into two groups: non-artistic people (called programmers in TFA) and print designers.

Programmers I can excuse because they normally don't claim to be experts at any type of visual design.

Print people on the other hand, insist that their artistic training translates intact to the web: it doesn't. The web is interactive and involves many more unknowns (operating system, hardware platform, screen resolution, font size preferences, window size, to name a few) than designing for a X by Y piece of paper. Web pages cannot be treated as a canvas to be painted on. HTML has technical rules, best practices, conventions and "gotchas" that go far beyond what print people learned in their traditional design school. Without a doubt, the least feasable (but sometimes most visually appealing) web designs I've had to deal with were all produced by print people masquerading as web designers.

Html is a Great Starting Point

As a classics major in collage, I had the need to set up a small but informative website circa 1996. I had no one to help me, so through the use of view source I figured out how to make a very basic website (it even used frames). From there I learned Javascript, CSS, XHTML, XML, Java, C#, C, and SQL. So, the article is right - Html skills can lead to real software skills. I apologize for never learning/using any LAMP except MySQL but I've always been given Win boxes as servers to work with.

Seperate people

I have found on my site http://www.grapheety.com [grapheety.com] that we have had the most success seperating these tasks all together. Even though I come from a usability background, when I am coding I have a hard time doing it 'the hard way'. We have a designer who works on this project full-time who does all designs graphically, then we compromise on how to implement them. It has been a great relationship.

Graphic Design and good websites...

I'd say good design is more about controlling the presentation of your message, and has very little to do with the "graphics". In my experience there is one driving element to good design in print and online: legibility. If your message can be understood by great use of type, then you achieve getting the message across. This applies to both print and web. I don't think flashy graphics help, and can sometimes distract. When we're designing ads for clients, or doing page layout, we stay away from the real flashy stuff and use the type to control the message. You also need to be weary of reader tendencies in how you approach putting the type elements on a page. If you do this one simple thing you may find your stuff looks way more polished. Wanna see awesome type layout online? http://alistapart.com/ [alistapart.com] That's a classy website.

Good

As somebody with a vague technical leaning, I picked up MySQL and PHP and cobbled together a nice functional site a while back.
I'm proud of it, people seem to like it - but it is DOG ugly.... well maybe not actively ugly, but well minimalist in the extreme.
But I digress. Point I was wanting to make is that form must follow function for the design - but once you've nailed function, you're really going to want to go back and give it a good polishing.

web design

a lot of "techies" don't have artistic ability, but would you really want an artist to design
your perl scripts? a plumber can go to his local library and learn about
prescription drugs, but you take his medical advice? people are good at different things. no artist is going to replace a techie's job unless they're also geeks, in which case calling
them "artist" does not imply "not geek".

http://webdesign.about.com/ [about.com] ozgur uksal

Ass Backwards!

No, it's GRAPHICS people who threaten web design. ALL Flash pages?! Photoshop slices?! Might I remind people America is not #1 but the 18th in the world for broadband adoption! How many sites are over 300KB in size that will take a minute or more to load on dialup? Web font support is sketchy but CSS is not! You can specify a hundred various web font's if need be and you can even use the * selector for all elements if you're looking to minimize your code. Need to override the * selector? Just adjust the fonts AFTER (below) the * selector. Why are we talking about Flash again? Flash, nothing is more obnoxious then hidden music and long pointless movies when I'm looking for resources online. If you can make nice looking graphics or movies great, go to Hollywood or YouTube or something but that stuff disorganizes a website. Flash can only be good when it's PART of a website. Let's talk XHTML 1.1, application/xhtml+xml (plus editing XML Schemas (to give attributes ill removed items such as tabindex on divisible elements), CSS, JavaScript, JavaScript + Flash interaction, AJAX, accessibilities, and a little PHP and MySQL. THAT is a well rounded Web Design book.

Kraus "Design Basics Index"

I spent years trying to find a good overview of and reference for graphic design that I could apply to web design in particular. There are thousands of (mostly expensive) books out there, and they're all useless for this. Then I found this one. It doesn't focus on web design, though it covers it and everything in it is applicable. It's inexpensive and incredibly useful, and tech-accessible.

* Krause, Jim. Design Basics Index: A Graphic Designer's Guide to Designing Effective Compositions, Selecting Dynamic Components & Developing Creative Content [amazon.com]. How to Design Books 2004. 359pp.

This is the only book I've seen that covers all the different aspects of graphic design. The book itself is a great example of all the demonstrated principles, which makes it a fun and informative read. Despite the great breadth and depth of what is covered here, each particular concept is presented clearly, concisely, and always in a way that inspires. Not only is this incredibly useful, but but it totally gets you going creatively. For web designers who are not artists, there is surprising little out there that will help us learn what we need to know about the graphic art side of web design. While it's not specifically about that, this book will does the trick well.

dev vs design: so sick of this discussion

What bothers me the most about the design vs/ developer discussion is that devs tend to think that there is little transferrable process/logic behind the presentation of information, branding, color, etc. Bullshit -- it's real, it's evolved, and is learnable.

There are phenomenal design programs out there that teach logic and creativity as the core of design, not "creative" alone. Programs that heavily emphasize typograhy tend to focus more on logic -- not "art." The Bauhaus, Ulm, and the Schule für Gestaltung Basel are the foundations of modern design education. Grids, typeface development and usage, color, form, flow are all trainable (in good design programs). Sure, these kinds of things are important to "art" -- but they're more important to information conveyance, be it in the form of a website, software interface, or anything else visual.

HTML is not a programming language

Could the web "programmers" please get over themselves? HTML and CSS are not programming languages. I don't know why this misconception is so widespread (you'll often see resumés of computer science graduates with HTML, CSS and XML listed under "Programming Languages"), but HTML and CSS aren't programming or scripting languages. HTML is a markup language, hence the "ML" part of the acronym. You can't implement algorithms in them, so knowing them doesn't make you a programmer. It makes you a guy who knows a markup/layout language.

And by the way, SQL isn't a programming language either. It's a query language, hence the "QL". Knowing it doesn't make you a programmer; it makes you a guy who knows a query language.

JavaScript is a scripting language, but the differentiation between programming and scripting these days is getting pretty blurry. But chances are that if you're writing JavaScript, you're writing indecipherable code, since so many JavaScript programmers don't actually have any formal education in computer science; they're over-worked guys who know markup, layout and query languages.

Thanks, Jason!

I mean... "Trent"

Welcome to 1999

>Fellow programmers, beware! Graphic designers have been invading our territory.

Oh really?

Web design is not programming.

If someone who by your description is not technically inclined can sit there and become a better web designer than you after reading a book or two, and by your review's splash it would appear that you are a formally trained techie, then you are not programming, nor are you a formally-trained techie.

This book is strictly 101 material

On the strength of this review, I recently bought a copy of this book and read it. While I will grant that it's a perfectly adequate book, and might help some people, it definitely did not work for me, for the following reasons:

1. It is extremely basic. If you know anything *at all* about graphic design or web design you will find little here to enlighten you. I've read just a little bit about graphic design, and a little about color theory, and know my way around fonts, and so those chapters imparted no new information to me. Similarly, I didn't need to be told what jpg, gif, and png mean, or what the difference between a 2-column layout and a 3-column layout is.

2. The coverage on every topic is relatively shallow. For $40 (though it's true that you can get it more cheaply on Amazon), I would like to get a bit more than these 160 pages with loads of images and remarkably little text.

3. The author, while doubtless a great guy, is clearly very young and not by any stretch of the imagination an expert in the field. His writing is a mix of collegey triteness and Dummies-guide goofery that ends up saying very little and reads like he's talking down to the reader. Which is unfortunate, because if his intended audience is people who design "web sites that work absolutely perfectly but just don't, well, look very nice", then his target audience is probably people who are way smarter than him and would really appreciate more useful info and fewer embarrassing photos of the author and his own web site.

4. The quality of the images in the book itself is low enough that the illustrations intended to support the points he's making often fail to do so. The paper quality being what it is, many areas that are supposed to illustrate fine use of patterns and shading just look like smudgy abysses.

All that said, I don't want to pan the book completely. The author does know what he's talking about, even though it's essentially all first-semester stuff. And there are lots of nice examples of other people's sites that illustrate design principles. There are lots of tips for using Photoshop that, assuming you own Photoshop but don't know how to use it, might be useful to you. But all in all, I would say this is a book for a rank beginner in designing web pages. If that's you, you might get a lot out of it. It just wasn't me.

Re:sIFR is annoying

How about a method that uses images and PHP? [alistapart.com]

Re:Ah...That explains...

That's right. Coders will be called in sooner or later to fix up the abortions that web designers create.

Just to be fair

Web designers will be called in sooner or later to fix the artistic abortions that coders create. And then user-interface designers will be called in to fix the usability mistakes of both.

Re:sIFR is annoying

If sIFR is what is used on the 123-Reg [123-reg.co.uk] website, then it's total pants. On Firefox on Ubuntu, it just slows everything down and doesn't always render correctly anyway.

Re:A few things...

Instead of writing pages of snide remarks, perhaps you could admit that while this won't turn a programmer into a graphic artist, it might help the programmer avoid some glaring (and apparently common) blunders. It's not about making programmers create award-winning design, it's about making programmers think about design as a necessary element to a project and giving them a concise set of guidelines to follow to avoid bad design.

Re:sIFR is annoying

Actually, sIFR really doesn't work very well. Text typically looks different in different browsers, perhaps appearing in odd locations. And making new faces does NOT work by the directions (they make it sound like you just open the flash file and double click in the box but it usually takes two double-clicks and you have to be sure to get the insertion point out of the box or it shows up on your page.

Re:Amazon's got it cheaper

Hmmm... it looks to me like the review already had a link to Amazon, too. So 363636-20 is not just a spammer but a liar too.

books on design - nonesense

Color is a hard topic to understand, but there are some good tips here that teach readers how to create an appealing palette for a website.

like red color makes your website happier or black color makes your site look ugly and etc.? One more thing that irritates me in design is many designers, good designers, create very beautiful things - like different beautiful images, because they do it really good, but they lack of design sense and those beautiful images don't suit the specific website and they easily loose their value. That's why such books on design don't worth killing time.

Re:AWESOaME FP

you're not even trying anymore :(

Re:What's this "WE" shit?

Name a single thing essential to good web site design that is impossible, or significantly more difficult to do in Gimp, but can be done in Photoshop.

I am sure, you can't because you know absolutely nothing about Gimp in the first place, and just spouting second-hand bullshit to make excuses for using your pirated copy of Photoshop.