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.

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.

Comments

Give me Edward Tufte

[Timesprout]

Anyday

Re:Give me Edward Tufte

[Doctor Memory]

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

[Billosaur]

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

[fbjon]

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:Give me Edward Tufte

[Anonymous Coward]

beautiful is always better than ugly.

But never better than useful, useable, clear, available, working - in fact, beauty is WAAAAAAAAY down the list

Tragically, this hasn't sunk in for most web designers.

Re:Give me Edward Tufte

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

Re:Give me Edward Tufte

[tigersha]

Amen. One of the main problem I have with Unix geeksis that they correctly claim that style over substance is a bad idea but then extrapolate that to the idea that all style is somehow bad or useless. MAybe its all the green screen terminals or something.

Style is good. And a little knowledge of typography can make your written publications (CV or report) WAAAAAY better than the competition that uses Arial because its all they know. Without adding too much flashiness.

Re:Give me Edward Tufte

[nidarus]

I'm sorry, but Debian's site has all of the elegance and simplicity of a program that has a single, 200,000-line function, two-character variable names, and no comments.

If they had some basic typographic sensitivity, sense of color, and some decision regarding hierarchy, the site could've been way simpler, comfortable, inviting, and yes, visually attractive.

Note that I didn't mention flash or any kind of graphics. Lots of annoying animation/images != good graphic design. On top of that, just about any website user survey that was made indicated that users hate slow loading flash sites with lots of sounds etc. Users love simple, attractive designs.

But I agree with your main point: when you're designing a site (or just about anything, for that matter) that you intend other people to use, you have to pay attention to what they want/like. Being an ignorant snob with regards to graphic design (as many programmers unfortunately are) helps no one.

Just to be fair

[spun]

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:Ah...That explains...

[PopeRatzo]

I'd say an artist could learn to become a great programmer much easier than a programmer could learn to become a great artist.

Both require a working brain, but only one requires a working soul.

The life I've lived, the things I've done and have not yet done, qualify me to make this statement.

What happened to web design?

[MeanderingMind]

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.

Re:What happened to web design?

[mblase]

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.

If you've spent any amount of time on MySpace, nobody's going to blame you.

Re:Ah...That explains...

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen! I'm getting tired of seeing all these comments about designers encroaching on the programmer's territory. Yet, what's the biggest complaint about F/OSS? Horribly designed UIs. Designers can become programmers. The converse is very rarely true, though.

It's not about you...

[theshowmecanuck]

...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:It's not about you...

[FLEB]

Visual beauty will only get you so far. The most visually beautiful site that lacks structure and informational layout would simply aggravate anyone who tried to use it. In fact, I would have to say that at least a small amount of interface design and structure is necessary for a site (or any other publication) to achieve beauty. The structured human mind finds beauty in geometry, structure, regularity, and ease. Now, wrap that with only as much graphic flashery as is needed, and you've got something respectable.

Actually, I find myself wary of the sites that are obvious templates, as those tend to be more fly-by-night. Decent layout, but peppered with irrelevant stock photos of power-businessfolk and boilerplate obtuse English phrases that should have been swapped before going live ("We are the company to make your success!"), and pointless Flash with flying dots and squares-- those are the ones to look out for.

Web design Graphic design

[Dracos]

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.

Re:Ah...That explains...

[mr_mischief]

Bullshit. Some people are great at both. Some people are great at design. Some are great at programming. Some suck at one or both. Some are mediocre at one or both.

Even within the art realm, some are great at design but not drawing or painting. Others can draw a picture really well but can't ever seem to do a print layout or web page. Some can do both.

Some people can act. Others can sing. Others dance. Some can do it all, and are the leads in musicals.

Some people can shoot. Some can blow stuff up. Some can swim really well. Some can skydive. Some are Navy Seals.

Some people act really well. Some people are really funny. Some people write really well. Some people are good improv comedy actors.

See a pattern? In short, any practitioner of one discipline saying that to shift to another discipline is much easier than the opposite is likely either in the wrong field to start or is just pumping up an ego like a balloon.

Misconceptions About Design

[Aqua OS X]

All in all, there are a lot of misconceptions about graphic and interaction design. Design is by no means intended to make something look cool for cool's sake. Graphic and interaction design are disciplines that dedicated toward developing effective communication solutions. Design SHOULD enhance communication and user experience. That is, without a doubt, the whole point of design.

That said, we live in a culture where people are constantly bombarded with visual media, do-it-yourself design books, and easily accessible desktop publishing solutions. As a result, the sheer volume of horrible "designers" greatly outweighs the modest amount of trained professionals who actually know what they're doing.

But as for the parent topic here... the industry is changing and Interaction design is really starting to be recognized as the next big design industry. In 10 years a web or software dev team is not going to consist of isolated designers and isolated developers. CS students are graduating school having visited the design department, and graphic designers are leaving school having visited the CS department. Moreover, collaborative development environments are starting to emerge that allow designers and engineers to work in the same room at the same time.

As a professional you're probably never going to learn it all... you'd be in school forever. However, we can develop environments where experts are effectively able to communicate, comprehend, and collaborate with other experts.

Ass Backwards!

[JAB Creations]

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.