Design books

Your web site is a business—design it like one.
Billions of dollars in spending decisions are influenced by web sites. So why aren't businesses laser-focused on designing their sites to maximize their Return on Investment (ROI)?
Web design can do more than make a site look good—it can be a powerful strategic weapon that enhances financial returns and creates competitive advantage.
It's time to make web sites accountable. It's time to make design decisions based on metrics and business goals. It's time for Web Design for ROI.
In this book you'll learn:

• Why so many organizations think about web design the wrong way

• How small design changes can have a big impact on your bottom line

• Simple tips to increase web sales/leads by 10% – 50% (or more)

• Concrete design guidelines for:

• Landing pages
• Home pages
• Category pages
• Detail pages
• Forms
• Checkout processes

Learn how to use typography on the web
Typography has long been an invaluable tool for communicating ideas and information. Words and characters once impressed in clay, written on papyrus, and printed with ink are now manifest in pixels of light. Today's web typographers can help their readers find, understand, and connect with the words, ideas, and information they seek.
Thus, legibility and readability are the foundations for the typographic theories and practice covered in Typographic Web Design. You'll learn how to choose fonts, organize information, create a system of hierarchy, work with tabular information, create a grid, apply a typographic system across multiple pages, and build a font library.

Each chapter provides time-tested typography rules to follow (modified for the web), explains why they work, when to break them, and offers the opportunity to test the rules with hands-on exercises in HTML and CSS. If you don't know HTML and CSS, Typographic Web Design provides a walk-through for each lesson, showing you how to plan and write syntax. Readers are sure to come away with an understanding of typographic principles, as well as the HTML and CSS skills needed to implement them on the web.

Typographic Web Design
•Applies decades of typographic theory and practice (e.g., how to choose a font) directly to web design (e.g., how to use the @font-face property in CSS).
•Clearly explains all typographic rules presented, providing examples that contrast successful and less successful typographic solutions.
•Is written for visual thinkers. The book is supported by a web site with solutions, critiques, and revisions for each lesson.

Laura Franz is an Associate Professor of Design at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she has taught web typography for 12 years. She has presented lectures and workshops on Typographic Web Design, and has written a course on the topic for Lynda.com.

WEB DESIGN: INTRODUCTORY, 4th Edition explains the connection between a detailed design plan that considers audience expectations, sound design principles and various technical considerations to create successful Web sites.

No matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be, if it's not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn't really succeeding. In Bulletproof Web Desing, author and Web designer extraordinaire, Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control--key components of every sucessful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of an unbulletproof site one that employs a traditional HTML-based approach which Dan then deconstructs, pointing out its limitations. He then gives the site a make-over using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you can see how to replace bloated code with lean markup and CSS for fast-loading sites that are accessible to all users. Finally, he covers several popular fluid and elastic-width layout techniques and pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template.

This third edition explains the connection between a detailed design plan that considers audience needs, site purpose, and various technical issues of a successful Web site. Written for an introductory course, the text offers a variety of challenging written and hands-on activities at the end of each chapter that test comprehension, build Web research skills and design awareness, and provoke thought regarding current issues in technology. Web Design, Third Edition reveals useful design concepts and techniques typically not addressed in HTML or Web authoring texts, and is written in a style that makes the concepts presented easy to understand.

The mechanics of Web design made easy for visual learners

An effective Web site combines good graphic design principles with a functional user interface. This colorful, step-by-step guide shows visual learners how to plan, develop, and publish a site, all with easy-to-follow lessons. Each task is illustrated with screen shots accompanied by numbered steps. You’ll learn all the tools and techniques for creating great-looking Web sites that users will love.

• Good Web design incorporates basic graphic design principles as well as the techniques required to make a site easy to navigate and user-friendly
• Those who learn best when someone shows them how will quickly get up to speed with the full-color screen shots and step-by-step illustrations in this visual guide
• Covers planning a site, creating eye-popping content with popular Adobe tools, building in functionality with HTML and CSS, testing the site, taking it live, and keeping it up to date
• Companion Web site features code and design examples for experimentation

If you find learning easier when someone shows you how to do something, you’ll quickly learn to build Web sites with Teach Yourself VISUALLY Web Design.

There are millions of websites on the Internet, but most of them fail to make a lasting impression on readers and web surfers. Creating a site that is both appealing and financially remunerative can seem challenging, but this invaluable tool makes the process both simple and fun. As with every book in the popular series of computer books, this one walks readers through every step of the process. From design planning to search engine promotion, each step of the process is thoroughly explained in clear, jargon-free English. Full-color graphics, including numerous screenshots, add further support and clarification. Written by the designer of the website for the In Easy Steps series, this book contains all the information needed to create a website that looks good and makes money. This updated edition adds more value by covering HTML and CSS.

With this second edition of the popular DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model comes a modern revision to update best practices and guidelines. It includes full coverage of HTML5 in a new, dedicated chapter, and details on JavaScript libraries and how they can help your scripting.
The book provides everything you'll need to start using JavaScript and the Document Object Model to enhance your web pages with client-side dynamic effects and user-controlled animation. It shows how JavaScript, HTML5, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) work together to create usable, standards-compliant web designs. We'll also cover cross-browser compatibility with DOM scripts and how to make sure they degrade gracefully when JavaScript isn't available.
DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model focuses on JavaScript for adding dynamic effects and manipulating page structure on the fly using the Document Object Model. You'll start with a crash course in JavaScript and the DOM, then move on to several real-world examples that you'll build from scratch, including dynamic image galleries and dynamic menus. You'll also learn how to manipulate web page styles using the CSS DOM, and create markup on the fly.
If you want to create websites that are beautiful, dynamic, accessible, and standards-compliant, this is the book for you!

• Apply dynamic behavior to your pages without inserting JavaScript in your markup
• Write scripts that degrade gracefully when JavaScript isn’t available
• Use web standards to ensure cross-browser compatibility
• Harness the power of the DOM to create user-controlled animation
• Also includes an introduction to Ajax

This book is for web developers wanting to expand their knowledge of the DOM to add interactivity and functionality to their web pages.

1. A Brief History of JavaScript
2. JavaScript Syntax
3. The Document Object Model
4. A JavaScript Image Gallery
5. Best Practices
6. The Image Gallery Revisited
7. Creating Markup on the Fly
8. Enhancing Content
9. CSS-DOM
10. An Animated Slideshow
11. HTML5
12. Putting It All Together
13. DOM Scripting Libraries

Sexy Web Design is an easy-to-follow guide that reveals the secrets of how to build your own breathtaking web interfaces from scratch. You'll be guided through the entire process of creating a gorgeous, usable web site by applying the timeless principles of user-centered design.

Even if you're short on design skills, with this book you'll be creating your own stunning web sites in no time at all.

Throughout, the focus is on simple and practical techniques that anyone can use - you don't need to have gone to art school or have artistic flair to create stunning designs using the methods outlined in this book.

The book's full-color layout and large format (8" x 10") make Sexy Web Design a pleasure to read.

• Master key web interface design principles
• Design amazing web interfaces from scratch
• Create beautiful, yet functional, web sites
• Unleash your artistic talents
• And much more

Who should read this book?

Whether you're completely new to web design, a seasoned pro looking for inspiration, or a developer wanting to improve your sites' aesthetics, there's something for everyone here.

How? Because instead of trying to cover every possible area of creating a web site, we've focused purely on the design stage; that is, everything that happens before a single line of code is written.

However, great design is more than just aesthetics. Long before we open our graphics program of choice, we'll be conducting research, dealing with clients, responding to briefs, sketching out sitemaps, planning information architecture, moving from doodles to diagrams, exploring different ways of interactivity, and building upon design traditions.

But ultimately, you'll be finding out how to create web sites that look drop-dead gorgeous.

The grid has long been an invaluable tool for creating order out of chaos for designers of all kinds—from city planners to architects to typesetters and graphic artists. In recent years, web designers, too, have come to discover the remarkable power that grid-based design can afford in creating intuitive, immersive, and beautiful user experiences.
Ordering Disorder delivers a definitive take on grids and the Web. It provides both the big ideas and the brass-tacks techniques of grid-based design. Readers are sure to come away with a keen understanding of the power of grids, as well as the design tools needed to implement them for the World Wide Web.
Khoi Vinh is internationally recognized for bringing the tried-and-true principles of the typographic grid to the World Wide Web. He is the former Design Director for NYTimes.com, where he consolidated his reputation for superior user experience design. He writes and lectures widely on design, technology, and culture, and has published the popular blog Subtraction.com for over a decade.
More information at grids.subtraction.com