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The Design of Sites, Second Edition
Joe Kauzlarich writes "The 'pattern' book has become a familiar genre for frequent readers of
technical manuals. The idea is to sift through mountains of
architectural or design schemes and then to categorize and catalogue
the most frequent ideas and present their strengths and
weaknesses. This type of book has been a success in software
engineering, but can it translate to website design, where designers
have everyday and frequent access to other designs? At worst, these
books provide a common industry vocabulary (assuming it was read by
everyone in the industry). How many people knew what a factory method
referred to before Erich Gamma's Design Patterns was released? At
best, as in the case of that 'original' software design patterns book,
mountains of complex ideas are archived into a single reference and
will sit within arm's reach for the rest of your life. So, is the web
design discipline full of patterns that evade common sense?" Read below for the rest of Joe's review.
The Design of Sites, Second Edition
author
Douglas K. Van Duyne; James A. Landay; Jason I. Hong
pages
982 Pages
publisher
Prentice Hall
rating
6/10
reviewer
Joe Kauzlarich
ISBN
0131345559
summary
Catalogue of Website Design Patterns
Initially, I was amazed by the sheer scope and the amount of work that must've been put into this book. Almost 1000 pages — and not just a bunch of screenshots either. Most of the book is well-organized text. The screenshots are full-color, as is everything else in the book. Each section has a different-colored bleed, making it easy to locate the chapter you're looking for. Furthermore, the patterns are extensively cross-referenced throughout the book, and references appear in colored marginal bullets. Even the table of contents has descriptive section headings and a small summary of each section. The design of the book itself gets an eleven out of ten. The book itself is a living catalogue of technical reference design patterns. Kudos to the book's designer on this one.
As far as content, the book describes 117 distinct patterns in 13 categories. This includes patterns related to marginal topics such as mobile devices, accessibility and content creation (i.e. copywriting 101). Like most pattern books, it's a good idea to initially browse the book before using it as a reference so that you'll know what to look for when you need to pick it up again. On my initial browsing, it seemed to contain nothing particularly surprising — this has been the case with many great pattern books such as Martin Fowler's Refactoring or another of his books, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, so I was not going to discredit it on this basis alone: a pattern book's true value shows itself when you're stuck on a problem and turn to it for a moment of shining clarity. Let's see if The Design of Sites lives up to this promise...
Trial #1: a business website that is not e-commerce, but a 'glorified yellow pages' type of site. I have a lot of information that needs to be accessed not only in its hierarchical organization, which can go to three levels deep, but should also guide the reader on what should be read next: a separate 'linked-list' that 'jumps' branches in the original hierarchy.
Given this amount of content and this double-organization, we wanted each page to present access to the site's information without overwhelming the reader. I open up the book to Part A, 'Site Genres', to locate the particular genre of website I'm working on. I find it: 'Valuable Company Sites.' I read some good information on layout. I see a paragraph titled 'other patterns to consider,' which points me to pattern B1, 'Multiple Ways to Navigate.' A-ha! The book's exceptional design allows me to locate pattern B1 in 3 seconds flat. It is hear I realize the true value of the book: there are no 'right' answers in design, only guidelines:
" ...we have identified two things that drive customers to action: intention and impulse (these can be thought of as goal and trigger, or need and desire). Neither intentional nor impulsive behavior is inherently good or bad, but a site that omits intention-based navigation might feel shallow and quirky, and one that omits impulse-based navigation might seem boring."
Good advice. Though I already have a hierarchical organization (intentional browsing) and recommended organization (impulse browsing), which gives users options on what to read next, I now have an idea of what sort of balance I want in the areas of navigation.
This was not exactly a mind-blowing discovery, but it did give me some confidence in the choices I eventually made and, furthermore, gave me valid reasons for making those choices, in case the client or a team-member were to question those choices later on.
Trial #2: Working on a website for a freelance graphic designer, I encounter a problem whereby each image in the portfolio can be categorized either by project/campaign or by design-type. For example, a logo, a business card, poster and website are all part of a single campaign, but we also want the ability to list all logos from separate campaigns. Again we have an organizational dilemma, but this time for a different type of site and a fundamentally different type of dilemma.
Again, I turn to the first section 'Site Genres' to locate the type of site I'm working on. It's not exactly a business site, but more of an on-line portfolio. The closest seems to be pattern A9, 'Stimulating Arts and Entertainment.' When I turn to it, I discover I was correct: the authors discuss the 'art gallery' site, though it doesn't exactly cover the aspect that I'm looking for. So I've encountered the book's first notable omission: nothing along the lines of an 'online portfolio' or 'interactive resume' genre of site design, which would encompass all creative freelancer sites as well as the usual rock band websites, etc. They differ from the 'Valuable Company Website' in that personal expression and design creativity take center stage. These sites have a general similarity in aesthetic in that they purposely avoid the business-like design. You won't see many pull-down or left-side navigation menus on a standard band website. The menus are typically integrated into a central graphic of some sort and this puts heavy constraints on the web designer while trying to effectively organize information without sacrificing the expressive purposes of the site.
The book offers no obvious guidelines for dealing with this sort of problem and here's why: it doesn't take into account the various constraints imposed by the client nor does it attempt to offer reconciliations between the design and the underlying organization of the data.
In my trial #2 we had the thumbnail images organized in two ways, either by design-type (poster, logo, business card) or by campaign ("Going Out of Business Sale", "Grand Opening", "Johnson's Automotive Website"), both organization-types having fairly equal weight. How do we allow the user to switch between organization types and keep the site consistent? The book doesn't touch these types of questions in a direct way.
The book offers a comprehensive aggregate of guidelines for user-interface patterns, User-centered, and 'psychological' perspectives. It covers most of the bases: content creation, page layout, organization of component elements, web application design, hints of 'Web 2.0' patterns, and ideas for functional pages such as searching, content submission, 'Marginal' topics like localization and accessibility that you may not want to buy a separate book for but, nonetheless, need to know about. It has a great overall design, easy to use as a reference and easy on the eyes, a long and detailed exposition on the utility of polling and seeking advice from your target audience, including sample forms to present them with. It is overall, very well-written and hardly a sentence wasted.
While 99% of the patterns themselves are common knowledge to most users of the internet and to most decent web designers, it is the expository text that forms the real meat of the book and contains the wealth of insight. This is by far the book's value. Posing as a patterns book is misleading; this book is really just a very good general guide to web design. As a pattern book, it's flawed, because almost every 'pattern' is just a guideline for effectively presenting information, not an elusive insight or 'trick of the trade' in itself, such what as Erich Gamma's (et al) original 'Design Patterns' brought us. There are mountains of outstanding tips and bits of advice throughout the book, but if you've already achieved a decent level of competency in design, then you're not going to be using the book very often and when you do, you might not get the depth of advice you're seeking.
On the other hand, the book gives beginner-to-intermediate-level designers everything they need to get started or fill in the gaps. The Design of Sites would also make an outstanding text book and is likely to be one of the best general guides to web design on the market.
I'll give it a 6 out of 10, judging a book on its utility as a design patterns books (just as you would give The Illiad a possible 2 out of 10 if Homer presented it to me as a historical text and I expected as much). As an introduction to web design, it easily deserves at least 9 points out of 10.
You can purchase The Design of Sites, Second Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Initially, I was amazed by the sheer scope and the amount of work that must've been put into this book. Almost 1000 pages — and not just a bunch of screenshots either. Most of the book is well-organized text. The screenshots are full-color, as is everything else in the book. Each section has a different-colored bleed, making it easy to locate the chapter you're looking for. Furthermore, the patterns are extensively cross-referenced throughout the book, and references appear in colored marginal bullets. Even the table of contents has descriptive section headings and a small summary of each section. The design of the book itself gets an eleven out of ten. The book itself is a living catalogue of technical reference design patterns. Kudos to the book's designer on this one.
As far as content, the book describes 117 distinct patterns in 13 categories. This includes patterns related to marginal topics such as mobile devices, accessibility and content creation (i.e. copywriting 101). Like most pattern books, it's a good idea to initially browse the book before using it as a reference so that you'll know what to look for when you need to pick it up again. On my initial browsing, it seemed to contain nothing particularly surprising — this has been the case with many great pattern books such as Martin Fowler's Refactoring or another of his books, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, so I was not going to discredit it on this basis alone: a pattern book's true value shows itself when you're stuck on a problem and turn to it for a moment of shining clarity. Let's see if The Design of Sites lives up to this promise...
Trial #1: a business website that is not e-commerce, but a 'glorified yellow pages' type of site. I have a lot of information that needs to be accessed not only in its hierarchical organization, which can go to three levels deep, but should also guide the reader on what should be read next: a separate 'linked-list' that 'jumps' branches in the original hierarchy.
Given this amount of content and this double-organization, we wanted each page to present access to the site's information without overwhelming the reader. I open up the book to Part A, 'Site Genres', to locate the particular genre of website I'm working on. I find it: 'Valuable Company Sites.' I read some good information on layout. I see a paragraph titled 'other patterns to consider,' which points me to pattern B1, 'Multiple Ways to Navigate.' A-ha! The book's exceptional design allows me to locate pattern B1 in 3 seconds flat. It is hear I realize the true value of the book: there are no 'right' answers in design, only guidelines:
" ...we have identified two things that drive customers to action: intention and impulse (these can be thought of as goal and trigger, or need and desire). Neither intentional nor impulsive behavior is inherently good or bad, but a site that omits intention-based navigation might feel shallow and quirky, and one that omits impulse-based navigation might seem boring."
Good advice. Though I already have a hierarchical organization (intentional browsing) and recommended organization (impulse browsing), which gives users options on what to read next, I now have an idea of what sort of balance I want in the areas of navigation.
This was not exactly a mind-blowing discovery, but it did give me some confidence in the choices I eventually made and, furthermore, gave me valid reasons for making those choices, in case the client or a team-member were to question those choices later on.
Trial #2: Working on a website for a freelance graphic designer, I encounter a problem whereby each image in the portfolio can be categorized either by project/campaign or by design-type. For example, a logo, a business card, poster and website are all part of a single campaign, but we also want the ability to list all logos from separate campaigns. Again we have an organizational dilemma, but this time for a different type of site and a fundamentally different type of dilemma.
Again, I turn to the first section 'Site Genres' to locate the type of site I'm working on. It's not exactly a business site, but more of an on-line portfolio. The closest seems to be pattern A9, 'Stimulating Arts and Entertainment.' When I turn to it, I discover I was correct: the authors discuss the 'art gallery' site, though it doesn't exactly cover the aspect that I'm looking for. So I've encountered the book's first notable omission: nothing along the lines of an 'online portfolio' or 'interactive resume' genre of site design, which would encompass all creative freelancer sites as well as the usual rock band websites, etc. They differ from the 'Valuable Company Website' in that personal expression and design creativity take center stage. These sites have a general similarity in aesthetic in that they purposely avoid the business-like design. You won't see many pull-down or left-side navigation menus on a standard band website. The menus are typically integrated into a central graphic of some sort and this puts heavy constraints on the web designer while trying to effectively organize information without sacrificing the expressive purposes of the site.
The book offers no obvious guidelines for dealing with this sort of problem and here's why: it doesn't take into account the various constraints imposed by the client nor does it attempt to offer reconciliations between the design and the underlying organization of the data.
In my trial #2 we had the thumbnail images organized in two ways, either by design-type (poster, logo, business card) or by campaign ("Going Out of Business Sale", "Grand Opening", "Johnson's Automotive Website"), both organization-types having fairly equal weight. How do we allow the user to switch between organization types and keep the site consistent? The book doesn't touch these types of questions in a direct way.
The book offers a comprehensive aggregate of guidelines for user-interface patterns, User-centered, and 'psychological' perspectives. It covers most of the bases: content creation, page layout, organization of component elements, web application design, hints of 'Web 2.0' patterns, and ideas for functional pages such as searching, content submission, 'Marginal' topics like localization and accessibility that you may not want to buy a separate book for but, nonetheless, need to know about. It has a great overall design, easy to use as a reference and easy on the eyes, a long and detailed exposition on the utility of polling and seeking advice from your target audience, including sample forms to present them with. It is overall, very well-written and hardly a sentence wasted.
While 99% of the patterns themselves are common knowledge to most users of the internet and to most decent web designers, it is the expository text that forms the real meat of the book and contains the wealth of insight. This is by far the book's value. Posing as a patterns book is misleading; this book is really just a very good general guide to web design. As a pattern book, it's flawed, because almost every 'pattern' is just a guideline for effectively presenting information, not an elusive insight or 'trick of the trade' in itself, such what as Erich Gamma's (et al) original 'Design Patterns' brought us. There are mountains of outstanding tips and bits of advice throughout the book, but if you've already achieved a decent level of competency in design, then you're not going to be using the book very often and when you do, you might not get the depth of advice you're seeking.
On the other hand, the book gives beginner-to-intermediate-level designers everything they need to get started or fill in the gaps. The Design of Sites would also make an outstanding text book and is likely to be one of the best general guides to web design on the market.
I'll give it a 6 out of 10, judging a book on its utility as a design patterns books (just as you would give The Illiad a possible 2 out of 10 if Homer presented it to me as a historical text and I expected as much). As an introduction to web design, it easily deserves at least 9 points out of 10.
You can purchase The Design of Sites, Second Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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It worked for me, Donny Most!@!!!~`~!
I had Ben and David squat on a table in the nude facing each and do their poo each onto a pair of mummy's panties laid underneath their pretty little plopping organs. While they were giving birth to their big sexy bottomsausages, they were tonguekissing each other, and JJ & co and I were urinating in a big pyrex bowl on the table beside the children. The pretty Duncan boys did a lot of poos out of their big bottycunts and, when they'd finished plopping onto mummy's knickers, I made them sit down on their piles of poomeat to squish it around all over their bottycheeks and into their fuckcracks whilst continuing to lick each other's tongues. Next they were made to stand side by side on the table and Kate and Lucy wiped their elder sister's panties, sticky with boybottomspunk, on the little blond girlyboys' pretty faces. Meanwhile, Ginny was forced to wipe her babies' fat sexy bottybumbums using toilet paper. She was required to get all of the brown bottomslime off their cheeks and out of their lovecracks, even from deep inside their starfish loveholes. When each piece of toilet paper got caked in boypoo, Ginny had to drop it into the bowl of urine which was by now thick with coagulating sperm as we all spunked off into it, one by one. Once I was satisfied that the cunnnyboys had clean bumsexcunts, I ordered Ginny to lick all the bottomslime from her spunkchildren's pretty faces. Lucy and Kate were ordered to push the pair of Ginny's pooey panties into each other's mouths and suck the lovemeat out of the them. After tonguecleaning her little spermbabyboys' facecunts, Ginny was ordered to sit on the table with her legs wide open and to fish out every piece of the dirty toilet paper floating in the weewee-cum mixture and push it deep inside her own slimy vagina. With all the toilet paper, soaking wet with weewee and cum and sticky with her little boys' plopplops, inside Ginny's whore thing, Kate and Lucy were made to suck it all out, alternately, mouthfull by mouthfull and kiss it into Ginny's mouth. I made her masticate the disgusting mess and then eat it.
A couple of weeks ago we decided to cruise out to Ryan's Steakhouse for dinner. It was a Wednesday night which means that macaroni and beef was on the hot bar, indeed the only night of the week that it is served. Wednesday night is also kid's night at Ryan's, complete with Dizzy the Clown wandering from table to table entertaining the little bastards. It may seem that the events about to be told have little connection to those two circumstances, but all will be clear in a moment.
We went through the line and placed our orders for the all-you-can-eat hot bar then sat down as far away from the front of the restaurant as possible in order to keep the density of kids down a bit. Then I started my move to the hot bar. Plate after plate of macaroni and beef were consumed that evening, I tell you-in all, four heaping plates of the pseudo-Italian ambrosia were shoved into my belly. I was sated. Perhaps a bit too much, however.
I had not really been feeling well all day, what with a bit of gas and such. By the time I had eaten four overwhelmed plates of food, I was in real trouble. There was so much pressure on my diaphragm that I was having trouble breathing. At the same time, the downward pressure was building. At first, I thought it was only gas which could have been passed in batches right at the table without to much concern. Unfortunately, that was not to be. After a minute or so it was clear that I was dealing with explosive diarrhea. It's amazing how grease can make its way through your intestines far faster than the food which spawned the grease to begin with, but I digress...
I got up from the table and made my way to the bathroom. Upon entering, I saw two sinks immediately inside the door, two urinals just to the right of the sinks, and two toilet stalls against the back wall. One of them was a handicapped bathroom. Now, normally I would have gone to the handicapped stall since I like to stretch out a bit when I take a good shit, but in this case, the door lock was broken and the only thing I hate worse than my wife telling me to stop cutting my toenails with a pair of diagonal wirecutters is having someone walk in on me while I am taking a shit. I went to the normal stall.
In retrospect, I probably should have gone to the large, handicapped stall even though the door would not lock because that bit of time lost in making the stall switch proved to be a bit too long under the circumstances. By the time I had walked into the regular stall, the pressure on my ass was reaching Biblical proportions.
I began "The Move."
For those women who may be reading this, let me take a moment to explain "The Move." Men know exactly what their bowels are up to at any given second. And when the time comes to empty the cache, a sequence of physiological events occur that can not be stopped under any circumstances. There is a move men make that involves simultaneously approaching the toilet, beginning the body turn to position ones ass toward said toilet, hooking ones fingers into ones waistline, and pulling down the pants while beginning the squat at the same time. It is a very fluid motion that, when performed properly, results in the flawless expulsion of shit at the exact same second that ones ass is properly placed on the toilet seat. Done properly, it even assures that the choad is properly inserted into the front rim of the toilet in the event that the piss stream lets loose at the same time; it is truly a picture of coordination rivaling that of a skilled ballet dancer.
I was about half-way into "The Move" when I looked down at the floor and saw a pile of vomit that had been previously expelled by one of those little bastards attending kids night; it was mounded up in the corner so I did not notice it when I had first walked into the stall. Normally, I would not have been bothered by such a thing, but I had eaten so much and the pressure upward was so intense, that I hit a rarely experienced gag reflex. And once that reflex started, combined with the intense pres