A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web

June 30th, 2009

Web is full of self-called designers without enough amount of skill to be called so. But how can we deserve a designer title without wasting time on getting a degree? Amazon and other online books store comes with help – we might found there insane amount of books – from the most boring titles to such great reads as Mark Boulton’s A Practical Guide for Designing for the Web.

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design.

As it’s design book, its design has to be great. It is. The cover hits us with beautiful yellow all over the spot and sexy bold typography. And inside is even better – perfectly measured leadings, mixing different styles, and chapter introducing pages covered in contrasting black. Combined with high quality paper, it’s a pleasure to read.

The book is in a big part mix of author’s articles published few years ago on his blog – like Five simple steps to better typography and others. It has been completely rewritten, though.

This book learnt me a lot of stuff, from layout techniques like The Rule of Thirds, through interesting uses of whitespace, getting user’s focus on certain elements to bringing it all together on De Standaard example. There is no way to point all design aspects regarded in this book, since there’s a lot of them – you just have to find out yourself, but I assure you, it’s worth it, however your interest in design is.

Although there’s a word practical in title, book also covers lot of theoretical aspects of designing (especially in Typography chapter – anatomy of typefaces, their classification, and lot of other stuff).
Mark has also entirely described the process of designing right from first contact with client to handing finished website to him – writing briefs, making research. Very helpful!

A Practical Guide for Designing for the Web gives solid piece of practical knowledge useful during creating websites. Even though it doesn’t give any advices about specific software, it is truly a must-read for every designer, or wannabe-designer around here.

Interested? You might buy the book on Five Simple Steps website, £12 for PDF and £29 for gorgeous paperback.