Good intro to Design?

Can anyone recommend any good books on design, particularly in relation to web design, for a design novice? I don't want books on techie web design stuff like CSS etc, I can do techie myself, I'd like to learn about graphic design principles, typography, layout etc.

Michael.

 

My advice (as a designer 20 years) is to look at websites and magazines, ask which are the best and why. The problem with books is usually the principles of design are from one persons ideas and there are many different styles.
Typography is an art (I think I have ) and again the same principals as above apply, a well regarded typographer who has a few books out is nevile brody. One of my favourite designers is a guy called Vaughn Oliver who designed all the covers for 4AD (cocteao twins, throwing musses, pixies etc) his typography is also inspirational.
What are you trying to produce? I'm happy to cast my eye over it for you to help you avoid any glaring errors.

Rob

 

Thanks for the tips Rob. I think I have a fairly good eye for what constitutes "good" design and I certainly know what I like, what I don't, and why but I just thought I perhaps needed to learn the alphabet before writing a novel...

At the moment not trying to do anything specific but I'm starting up a web design business. I know all the technical stuff but I'm lacking the design experience. I'm good at copying/adapting ideas I've seen done by others, less good at coming with original design ideas myself...

Michael.

 

Michael, I was in the web site design business for a few years before I went back to speakers. I would say that there are three areas and that the last is the most often ignored and possibly the most valuable for potential clients:

1. Techie stuff
2. Graphic design
3. Web marketing.

One aspect of web marketing is designing the web site to feature well in the search engines (practically Google and Yahoo) on well chosen key phrases (that people actually type).

There are a few simple guidelines here and they are well worth following. Ideally, 'search engine friendliness' is built into a site from the beginning rather than added as an afterthought.

Another aspect of web marketing is designing layout and copy that SELLS.

There are many excellent graphic designers out there and good techies are two a penny these days. However, relatively few web site designers really understand that their clients generally have web sites to sell or market something. Clients tend to love those who do.

Just thought I'd bring it to your attention.

 

Thanks Steve - I'm inclined to agree with you

Michael.

 

Other way round for me perhapse we should set up a partnership? Designers (like me) don't tend to be techy and techys don't tend to be good with design and layout.

I could get loads of web work but avoid it as my technical skills need to be sharper. I can design great websites (and marketing is a speciality) but can't produce them, so the web work I do tends to be simple, however I believe a well designed simple site is better than a technically brilliant site that is poorly designed or hard to navigate. people need to find what they are looking for and the site has to sell or its useless. There are too many people putting sites together that have no creative content, are ugly, hard to navigate and have no sales pich or marketing strategy - what a waste!

I can do the html stuff and wnow about making sites perform well with search engines using both the front and back of the site to attract the robots.

 

a few for you on amazon:
e.g.

asin = 0735710627

for inspiration, maybe look at the books edited by rick poyner, such as "typography now". though these are not necessarily directly applicable to web design.

 

There's more that are far from excellent, and you do get what you pay for. have a flick through yellow pages and its easy to see who took the free artwork option. People spend so much for ad space but waste their money by not spending a little more because their ad is ignored in favour of one that invites the eye and then sells.

 

Actually an excellent book is for learning about typography is 'stop stealing sheep.' I read it years ago and each page (from memory) has three sets of type, catering for beginer to advanced.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos...7930/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_26_2/202-3674356-7426229

 

Of course. I was being a little bit flip to emphasize the importance of marketing and how it's so often under-valued. Your point about good graphic design attracting the eye and then selling is also a good one.

In reality good graphic designers are few and far between (as are good techies).

In fact, I will soon find this to my cost as I'm no graphic designer myself and I've got a number of graphic design tasks coming up - such as a web site redesign to reflect new products and cosmetic design on some new speakers.

 

What I tend do is look at other sites which are competitors, so in the case of say a speaker company, look at KEF, Mission etc, what are their strengths and weaknesses? If a site works then you can copy for layout do a certain degree, but not rip it off.

One of my modules was all about design I learn't a lot about typograthy and graphic designs, one of the main conlcusions from it was to look at other print material/websites and see what works.

The main problem with graphics is you need creativity, I know Photoshop inside and out, but I lack the creativity to create a masterpeice.

Also don't treat a website as a print material. One of the biggest mistake graphics developers and web designers make is they think a designing a website is the same as designing a moster so you end up with this:

As a poster this is fine

http://www.5thavenuemanchester.com/

As a website it has loads of fundemental problems, basicialy if I was to carry out some usability engineering on it I would probably give it a very low usability score, it has too much graphics, things which should be text is done in graphics, so blind people have no chance of reading the website.

One of the points of the world wide web is its multimedia, by this I mean you can seperate text elements from graphics, with CSS you can design posters.

This might give you an idea, my boss designed the template but I developed most of the site, this is a classic example of a CSS poster I made

http://www.manchesterfa.co.uk/pswc/news/news012.htm

Annoying it is not displaying properly now, but its been edited by the client since I have produced it.

So its perfectly ok to use graphics as longs as its done properly. A blind person can listen to that poste so they get most the information a sighted person can see.

 

Good advice but you missed out (but hinted at) numbers 4 and 5

4. Understanding who your potential users/customers are and what their information requirements (what do they want to find out from your site) and functional requirements (what do they want to do on your site) are. A good understanding of this will inform your Information Architecture design (ie the structure of your website) and is easily as important as the previous 3. The principal here is to tell your customers what they want to know rather than simply what you want to tell them.

5. Copywriting. Well written copy, written specifically for use on the web (not the same as for the written page) and informed by 4.

 

For point four a good book is called Usability Engineering by Jackob Nielsen, he has a site called

www.useit.com

It applies to all computer user interfaces and it really teaches you a lot about ensuring that people can easily use your application and site.

A lot of it is common sense but there will be totaly new things you would never have thought of.

 

I saw this book at Books Etc. today and was very impressed. Will almost certainly buy it. I gave the Amazon.com (instead of .co.uk) link because the .co.uk entry seems to be buggered (they have the wrong title and wrong author!!).

It struck a chord with me because I've seen way too many OTT sites and don't even get me started on Flash (Macromedia Flash) . Flash seems to be a tool used by designers to create sites without having to learn HTML, CSS, Javascript etc.

Lots of useful info in your posts guys, thanks! Will start looking stuff up....I feel a big Amazon order coming on......

Michael.

 

I managed to produce my final year project site which is fairly complex and looks professional without using a single HTML table or a single line of JavaScript (its all done Serverside).

Simple JavaScript is ok but more complex problems is often only tested in IE so won't work in Firefox, the job centre site is a classic example.

As for flash well its good for animations but when used in websites it bastardises everything that Tim Burners Lee set out to with the world wide web. Most people hate flash sites becuase they are slow, but there is also usability and accessability issues with it.

What the company I work for tend to is subcontract the graphics stuff, so they do all the CSS/HTML and create the templates, do all the content management then if there is any complex graphics an external graphics designer does it, but they have had bad experience with graphic designers so I think they try and do everything in house now.

 

I use DreamWeaver (I'm still on version 3) and I find it very good. I do the odd thing every now and again using HTML or a JavaScript routine that I find somewhere.

 

The problem I find with early versions of Dreamweaver is it has no support for CSS, the only version of it I find any good for CSS is MX 2004 and its not cheap.

I just tend to use the none WYSWYG HTML/CSS editors for the syntax highlighting it makes righting PHP code much easier.

 

I have Dreamweaver 3 but I'm almost certainly going to spring for the latest MX version. It's not cheap but if does look like the dogs danglies.

AT, using server side scripting (like PHP) is no substitute for good use of CSS and/or Javascript. The great thing about CSS is that it allows you to separate content from presentation which is always a good idea and one of the real problems with early HTML was that content and presentation were always joined at the hip. Well written DHTML (XHTML, XML, CSS, Javascript) will work properly on all (recent) browsers.

You can still use server side scripting to dynamically serve up the CSS and HTML if you want.

Michael.

 

Yeah that is what I have mean't, the site is done in CSS, with HTML only being used to hold the CSS elements. The problem with JavaScript validation is security, the client can turn it off.

This site was done in ASP.NET, the .NET code just connects to the database and processes the users choices, i.e its only used for the back end.

The only mistake I used is to use HTML rather than XHTML. A good guide is to view a site with CSS turned off, it should look very simple with little graphics, but you should easily be able to seperate the components and it should still be usable - this basicialy as you say seperating content to presentation.

I might try and make my personal site WAI AAA standard when I redesign it in the summer, that is somthing which is quite hard to do.

 

But not how to spell it

I use dreamweaver MX and Flash MX pretty much industry standard, I also have adobe go live which is much easier to use but less powerful.

Amazingtrade makes a good point about websites being different to posters and printed media. One major point to me is people put too much lext on their sites IMO if visitors need to scroll you've failed, get the navigation right and your half way there, as I said before a good simple site is better than a technical masterpiece that doesn't communicate or is impossible to navigate.

People have either an accademic OR creative bent, the web was created by the techies so creatives struggle in their world. But techies are not designers. There are of course exceptions to the rule, but they are few and far between, if you need proof of this ask yourself why all the big manufacturers make visual edditors?