That Norwegian Guy

Designing for the Web won’t teach you anything about HTML5, CSS3 or anything else the cool kids are talking about these days. Quite the opposite. And this is why you should read it. Actually, you should buy it for yourself, because Mark Boulton has gone through the extra trouble of creating his own independent publishing house because the big distributors weren’t any fun to play with. But primarly you should buy it so you can read it once, then read it again.

Designing for the Web is a web design book that will still be valid next year, which is a novelty in the genre. This is because it is not about code examples, glossy buttons or Javascript GUI-animations.

It takes a look back at the roots of graphic design and shows us why we shouldn’t throw all that knowledge away, even though “the web is not print”. Mark Boulton has a background from art- and design school, which he uses to explain the academics of typography, layout, colour theory and grids. For each theory he shows when and how this applies to the web, and even when to be crazy and break the rules to make it even better. Just make sure you learn the rules before you break them.

I really like this read since I’m already comfortable with the ins and outs of the typical front-end coding and web standards, but I have literately no education on the graphic design/art side of web design. I’ve leafed through a lot of books on the subject, even started reading a few, but none have had any connection to web design.

I recommend this book to anyone who touches any part of the design process. That includes you too, code-monkeys!

Tags:   book · Review · webdesignNo Comments