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Design Books Every Hacker Should Read

davidmckinney.com

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Re: Design Books Every Hacker Should Read

#61

Post by strobe »

stiff wrote: post #31

Good books, but not particularly good for hackers. I have the "The Elements of Typography Style" for example, it is certainly a classic, but it is written for people already familiar with typography to some extent, is very long and most of it isn't very relevant to web design. A good design book for hackers, would have less than 200 pages and deal with the essentials, basic typography, using whitespace productively,…

I guess that main point of this post isn't about visual/graphical design - it's about ways of thinking and about design approaches to problem solving. It's good to find some new ideas (which could be useful in software development, like idea of Software Designs Patterns has been derived from Architecture formerly) to try think by different way.

Re: Design Books Every Hacker Should Read

#62

Post by derp42 »

I would also recommend "Designing with the Mind in mind" by Jeff Johnson.

Less generic that what has been listed in this article since it focuses more on user interfaces, it's a great overview of basic design principles, with clever illustrated examples.

http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Mind-Simple-Understanding-In...

Re: Design Books Every Hacker Should Read

#64

Post by riffraff »

timc3 wrote: post #55
shmerl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't cover just visual design, but design in general. While visual interfaces are most commonly associated with design, design is actually related to many other areas as well.

Exactly like discoverability of APIs, or the documentation of a library.

Latin is related to many things, but surely we can agree it's not a "must learn" for someone designing a device driver.

Something as general as "don't make me think" may make sense for API design, but honestly I doubt the applicability of "The Elements of Typographic Style" or "Grid Systems" to library documentation and API discoverability.

Re: Design Books Every Hacker Should Read

#65

Post by rcgs »

zalew wrote: post #45
rplacd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry about being intimidated - there's nothing inherently complex that'll stop you from intellectually appreciating the subject - there are quite a few abstractions and moving parts, but treat those like an API - "pages have margins and text blocks, and text blocks have leadings and..." The more important part is the intuition (or "taste in design") that lets you combine those parts together - and Bringhurst a…

I'm not intimidated, and the things you mentioned aren't that complicated. what I don't get is all those stuff about what makes a font good. I can spot out flaws in ux, recognize a good ui solution from a bad one, and I see when something falls off the grid, ohter than those technical sides I like photography, illustration and many other forms of visual art, etc., I enjoy looking at good type, but with all of that I…

Typography is hard, if only because it's quite subtle until you really start paying attention to it (in everything). How good or bad a typeface may be is irrelevant beyond a minimum quality, e.g. it's kerned well, it has been pixel hinted. It's simply a question of appropriateness.

The reason Arial is often, arguably inappropriately, slated as a bad font is because it stacks up poorly against other fonts in the situations where it's appropriate. Helvetica is more sterile, balanced, and tasteful — it does most of the things Arial does, but better. The only advantage Arial has over Helvetica is at smaller sizes on the web, where the head of the t, tail of the g, and terminal of a help to make the characters more distinguishable (in theory).

So beyond quality, it's about what's more appropriate. Then of course you've got to set it well, but that's practice.

Re: Design Books Every Hacker Should Read

#66

Post by soren_dahl »

azharcs wrote: post #49

All these books are great but they are theoretical in their approach. It's good to be knowledgeable about Golden Ration or Fitts Law but it wouldn't be of immediate help on your next project. The books for Hackers should be pragmatic in their approach and not very theoretical. The books I recommend are: Non-Designers Design Book by Robin Williams. It focuses on topics like Consistency, Alignment, Proximity, and Contr…

"All these books are great but they are theoretical in their approach."

You've never read them then, as they all use real world examples. Don Norman's has 3 Mile Island for example.

"It's good to be knowledgeable about Golden Ration or Fitts Law but it wouldn't be of immediate help on your next project."

The Golden Ratio is one ratio, there are many. Some more, some less, aesthetically pleasing. Fitt's Law is basically about the metrics of completing any action involving your hand and a target, say a button or a link.

Consider an HTML pag with no graphical embellishments beyond a white body colour and a dark gray text colour, the proportions and spacing allocated to each bit of content will decide if people find it beautiful or not, and the ease with which they can interact with buttons and links will decide if they find it usable.

Re: Design Books Every Hacker Should Read

#67

Post by jerrya »

I don't want to seem snarky, but that first picture you have there, the one of a collection of books where I have to tilt my head to read them and that book on the left is called "Design of Everyday Things" and talks about designing things so that ... for instance... people don't have to tilt their heads to read them.

Why don't you rotate that picture, 90 degrees counter-clockwise?

Re: Design Books Every Hacker Should Read

#68

Post by franze »

riffraff wrote: post #48
franze wrote: post #46

the one book these lists always forget: "Understanding Comics" http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/index.html in my opinion, it's at par with "don't make me think". i recommend reading them both at once.

can you expand on why you think it would be a good resource about design ? I read "understanding comics" a couple of years ago and while I think it's an awesome book I am not sure of why you think it's a good resource for designing stuff that is not "sequential art".

websites are sequential art i.e.: the github (logged in) start page http://replycam.com/i/GitHub-20130115-111913.png (left to right), your standard responsive (corporate) website http://mobiletest.me/#d=iphone4&u=http://www.fullstackop... (top to bottom)

and also: you can't separate text from design (like in comics) a point that "understanding comics" makes quite clear.

and user interaction: changing from one state to the next, from one webpage to the follow up webpage is a transition, a transition like form one page to the next, also from one panel to the next - and you can determine how the users experiences the transition, like in comics you can go from one detail to the next detail, from moment to moment, from one aspect to another aspect, or from boring to surprise (or, you can even go completely dada).

"understanding comics" is not a 1:1 analogy for website/webpages, but it helps you to really understand your pages, your design and how the users experiences them.

Re: Design Books Every Hacker Should Read

#69

Post by mattmanser »

discovr wrote: post #23
tricolon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your base font size is at 12px. I think that's really, really small. I find it much easier to read when it's at 18px instead. Here's a comparison: http://imgur.com/O7F5N,zCyyz#0 Now, anyone can zoom in with their browser... but your entire layout changes width when I do that: http://i.imgur.com/U96Py.png

good article about body text size here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body-co...

That's actually a terrible article about body text. Maybe it has the right conclusion, but it might be wildly wrong.

This seems the most trivially easy thing to A/B test. Does anything less the 16pt cost you revenue?

Simple question, yes/no.

Actual data is so much better than someone's untested opinion which has been shown time and time again to be worthless in real life.

Re: Design Books Every Hacker Should Read

#70

Post by Jare »

sgdesign wrote: post #36
geoka9 wrote: post #7

Another web design site, another page that's almost impossible to read due to washed out text. Guys, do you test your sites on anything other than Macs with "retina" displays? For example, I maxed out the brightness setting on my Thinkpad x60 and the text is still barely legible. Granted, this TP has a very average display, but do you really want to limit your audience to Mac users?

It's possible that the text color has been changed since you wrote this, but it's now at #333333. If you have trouble reading that on a white background, then the problem is with your screen, not with the page.

Really uncomfortable reading here (regular PC in a regular office environment) and according to Chrome's inspector it's #777. If I remove the "proxima nova" font it improves a bit because of Helvetica's added weight.

Really unfortunate design for an article about design, and blaming the users' browsers, operating systems, lighting conditions or etc. is NOT the correct approach.

On a more useful note, I enjoyed Fred Brooks' "The Design of Design", on the process of design rather than on visual design.

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