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Web Design Books | Overview for Beginners | Implementation Oriented Books | The Future of User Interface | Learning From Other Media | Future Scenarios | Science Fiction Books and Movies

Web Design Books Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen This books offers thoughtful reviews and helpful hints to improve your sight based on human factors engineering. If you are an established designer this book validates the good design principles we hope you are practicing.   Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (O'Reilly) The authors' emphasis is on the structure of the site and how to facilitate users' access to the information they need the most.   Designing Large-Scale Web Sites: A Visual Design Methodology, by Darrell Sano The major benefit of this book is it focuses on the design of the entire site as opposed to simply designing individual, disconnected pages.         Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design, by Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis The hardcopy version of Flander's celebrated website: less conceptual than Information Architecture but more fun. Truly, there are so many useless Web pages out there one can learn from reading these well-argued criticisms.     Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide, by Jared Spool and colleagues. The true value of the book comes from the observations of a large set of usability studies, telling you how people used eight different sites.   Understanding what real users do when faced with real Web pages is the most important input to Web design! Reading this book saves you from about a week's worth of running subjects through a battery of usablity testing.   Be sure to read the IBM usability manager outlines reasons to be cautious regarding the generalized guidelines in this book.   Designing Web Graphics.3 by Lynda Weinman Design with Weinman Designing Web Graphics.3, the update to Lynda Weinman's highly successful Designing Web Graphics series, addresses the new technologies related to Web site design. Follow this bestselling author and respected graphic designer's straightforward suggestions, and you'll be on your way to building an excellent portfolio in Web graphics.     Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom (The Jossey- Bass Higher and Adult Education Series) This book provides proven strategies for taking learning beyond the classroom and into the online environment, focusing on the critical task of creating a sense of community among learners. The authors share their experience and insight into what it takes to build foster feelings of safety and a sense of shared learning among students and faculty involved in computer-mediated distance education, in a systematic explanation of what they call a new "electronic pedagogy."   The McGraw-Hill Handbook of Distance Learning: A "How to Get Started Guide" for Trainers and Human Resources Professionals This book is for HR managers, trainers, and other who want to get started using distance learning technologies like videoconferencing and online multi-media training modules to slash the cost of training and reach everyone in the organization.   Distance Training: How Innovative Organizations Are Using Technology to Maximize Learning and Meet Business Objectives Through the use of fifteen lively case studies, Distance Training shows readers the innovative ways in which organizations have used various communications technologies to maximize employee learning and meet business objectives. Including a history of distance training and in-depth advice on instructional design, policy issues, organizational restructuring, and technical and electronic systems development, Distance Training gives practitioners and aspirants to the field a concrete, real-world look at how state-of-the-art distance learning can actually be achieved.     Overviews for Beginners Web Concept & Design: A Comprehensive Guide for Creating Effective Web Sites by Crystal Waters If you don't want to go too "deep" in thinking about Web design, then this book gives a quick and colorful overview of the main issues.     Yale Web Style Guide A principle-based or methodology-based book. And the online version of the Yale styleguide has for sure proven to be a classic over the years.       The Non-Designer Design Book by Robin Williams This is an excellent way to learn and understand basic design and typography principles. It gives you visual examples of weak design and what can be done to make the design better on nearly every page.   Implementation-Oriented Books Web Design in a Nutshell, by Jennifer Niederst (O'Reilly) If you don't know HTML there are a million books to learn from. This one is hardly a "nutshell", though, at almost 600 pages, but then the book does go beyond basic HTML 4.0 to explain CSS, graphics formats, and the differences between browsers. Cascading Style Sheets, Second Edition: Designing for the Web, by Håkon Lie and Bert Bos (Addison Wesley) Cascading style sheets are without a doubt the way to manage presentation design across any medium- or large-size website.       Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (second edition of Database Backed Web Sites: The Thinking Person's Guide to Web Publishing), by Philip Greenspun This is the book for you after you've learned basic HTML you'll need to understand the issues in running a large site (or, actually, any sites that do something). There is also a website you should check out! Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines This is the official style guide from Sun Microsystems. Don't invent your own weird interaction style when you can use proven ideas users know from other applets and applications.   By following the official rules, you ensure users with disabilities can use your interface. There are several other aspects of interaction design often overlooked in the heat of fast-moving Internet projects but are still important: following the guidelines keeps you honest and guards against such design mistakes.   The Future of User Interface Tog on Software Design, by Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini (Addison Wesley). Discusses the evolution computers will undergo in the coming decade and the impact these changes will have on society as a whole. Provides an easy read that's as accessible to lay computer users as it is to computer professionals.   Learning from Other Media Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud (Harper Perennial). Comics are a two-dimensional medium for communicating stories graphically. Hmmm, sounds like a computer screen.   This book clearly shows you why good comics work and much of the design and layout theory that has been developed over a hundred years or more of drawing comics. The book uses its own medium to illustrate the points: it's a comic book and actually quite entertaining. McCloud has his own website where you can buy his original art for the book and read his ventures into online comics.   Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making the Magic, by Wendy Lefkon and the Imagineers (Hyperion) Theme parks are one of the few non-computer interactive media types. This beautifully illustrated book takes you behind the scenes where you get a glimpse of the design process in the building of the most successful theme parks in the world. However, we can all learn from the best...but stay tuned for new and improved theme parks in the future. Computers as Theatre, by Brenda Laurel (Addison Wesley) Laurel is quite the scholar - she's got experience and learning in the fields of theater and human-computer activities. Her comparison of computers to theatrical production - a tremendous amount of action goes on "behind the scenes." As Laurel points out, dramatic expression is a type of virtual reality; anything we develop with computers has a very long heritage.   Future Scenarios Scenario planning is one of the best systematic approaches to futurism. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, by Peter Schwartz. Not about user interfaces but a general introduction to the scenario method for futurism.     Tips for Time Travelers, by Peter Cochrane. Very readable book with more than a hundred mini-scenarios describing future use of technology (each written in two pages or so). Cochrane is head of research for British Telecom and is an offbeat, visionary guy.   Science Fiction Science fiction movies and books are a "low-fidelity" form of user interface prototyping the author can invoke a futuristic user interface in the reader's mind. Also, since these movies and books are fiction, they tend to focus on how the system is used in the context of a story (or "scenario"). This is a good way of getting exposed to interface notions beyond the current conventions. True Names, by Vernor Vinge (St. Martins Press). In 1981, three years before publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer, Vernor Vinge's criticaly acclaimed novella "True Names" invented the concep t of cyberspace. This book is the first forum to explore the blossoming discoveries and groundbreaking applications, both current and future, on the new frontier of the Internet and all its subsets.   The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson (Bantam Books). The "young lady's primer" in this book is an interesting idea for a user interface that grows with the child and reflects her education.     Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (Spectra Books). Many interesting UIs, including a globe as interface to satellite and weather data and the use of electronic business cards. Virtual reality and avatars are well described even though I think we are being a little over-exposed to these ideas.   Neuromancer, by William Gibson (Ace Books). The book that launched the concept of cyberspace as a VRML-like navigational landscape.       Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card (Tor Books). Two interesting UI ideas: The use of immersive simulation games for training and the use of multi-level newsgroups where valued authors are promoted to have their postings distributed nationally.     Back to the Future II Although the movie leaves a little to be desired in entertaiment value, it is interesting to see what some believe would be a typical house in the year 2015.       Total Recall The science fiction movie has enough cleverness to rise above its excesses but the real value is the vision of the future. Can you see some gadgets and realities we might soon offer in our "real" world? This movie is an adaptation of the Philip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," The Matrix (1999) This science fiction movie provokes thought!

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