Once Upon a Bookshelf

The Story

Smashing Magazine is, imo, one of the best online magazines for web designers and developers. They have awesome articles, inspirational gallery posts, showcase great fonts and icons, and are just generally all-around useful and a fabulous resource. I’m subscribed to the RSS feed, and I go through the older posts on an almost daily basis for help with what I’m working on at that point in time.

The authors of Smashing Magazine decided (with the help of their readers) to put together a more in-depth book covering some of the big topics for successful websites. The book covers topics that anyone who is even remotely involved with website creation would find useful. The book covers user interface design, basic CSS layouts, typography, usability, colour, optimization, conversion rates and branding. It also has interviews with some of the better known web people, and the story behind Smashing Magazine.

The Review

First, the good: this book does go in depth into these topics. It’s not just some brief overview or a couple of pointers for great websites. It explains what things mean and why you should do things certain ways – for example, it explains that you don’t want to open links in new windows because it takes control away from the user, it makes the website operate in a way that they don’t expect, and it can basically make a user unhappy. And an unhappy user is a user who doesn’t stick around on your website. (I so want to lend this book to an old boss just for that chapter, as he has a bit of a penchant for opening every single link in a new window.)

Another good thing is that there are a lot of images involved to illustrate what they are talking about – especially helpful for the chapters on colour, conversion rates and branding. It’s especially nice that the images were high quality and that they were printed in colour &ndash not all books would do this, as it can be more expensive for printing, but it was definitely highly appreciated.

A fair amount of information I have read before, but it was a good refresher. And there were some things that I have marked off that I have already started putting into practice on my work’s website.

Now for the not-so-good: because the book was written by so many people it didn’t read all the same. Which wasn’t bad for a lot of it, but when there are multiple authors for certain chapters, and each section of the chapters read differently, it was a little distracting. For example, in the usability chapter the section on web forms gives stats on what is used how often, but the section on dropdown menus gave examples of why each option is good or bad. I would’ve liked to hear pros and cons for forms, or stats for dropdown menus, as well, just to keep it consistent.

The other not-so-good thing was that, while it’s awesome there were so many images, the images weren’t always near the text that was talking about it. In the chapter about branding, there were a number of times when the screencaps of websites described were a whole double page spread away from the text about it. Or, if the images couldn’t be closer, a URL to the website that was being spoken about would have been most helpful.

The Bottom Line

This book isn’t necessarily a must-have for web developers and designers – the majority, if not all, of the content covered in the book can be found online. That said, even if you’ve read the content before, it definitely is a good refresher, and there are parts that would come in handy if you prefer to get your info from a quick flip through to the right chapter as opposed to searching on the internet for what you’re looking for. Would recommend it as a read to those who are involved with creating websites – whether it’s the front end or the back end.

Other Reviews

Have you reviewed this book on your blog? Let me know and I’ll add your link.

This has been sitting on my TBR shelf for… I don’t even know HOW long. And it was on the TBR list for even longer. I should’ve read it much sooner because it was so quick to get through. 100 Habits of Successful Graphic Designers is exactly what it says it is – a collection of habits that people who are successful graphic designers practice. The 100 habits are separated into 8 chapters: self-promotion, working with clients, workflow and in-house dynamics, continuing education and professional development, community involvement, technology, personal growth and keeping creativity alive, and partnerships and strategic synergies. With the help of a number of contributors, this book lays out 100 suggestions of what you can to do keep creative this field, and to further your business. Each habit was given one to four pages to give a explanation as to why this habit is good, and to display work done by the contributor that talks about that habit.

Some of the contributors included people from Why Not Associates, Chase Design Group, Wieden+Kennedy (both Tokyo and New York offices) and Miles Murray Sorrel FUEL. It includes people who are involved with design art shows, design books, people who were involved in the Seattle Grunge scene, and people involved in education. There is such a vast range of experience in this book. My only problem (and it wasn’t really a PROBLEM per se, but more like a bit of a disappointment) with the contributors is that most people were at agencies, and the others were educators or freelancers. There are a lot of designers that don’t work in agencies, and there are a lot of companies that do design in-house. It would’ve been nice to hear from someone who DOES work for a company that does their design work in-house instead of hiring an agency or studio to do the work.

As far as the content goes, though… some of these habits don’t make sense to me. Some of them are contradictory (one tells you to grow through teaching, one tells you to never teach), but that’s to be expected when you’re getting advice from a handful of different designers – they’re all going to have different ideas of what works best and what doesn’t work at all. But the examples of work that has been done by these designers? Some of them are GORGEOUS. And brilliant! Some of the examples didn’t work too well for the medium (frames of commercials doesn’t translate too well to a book), but the ads, pictures of spreads of books, pictures of sculptures, oh goodness! That in itself was rather inspiring.

If you’re looking for a book with a lot of stuff to read and is more like a guide to becoming more successful, as opposed to highlighting examples of how successful graphic designers have used these habits, then this probably isn’t the book for you.

This book was published by Rockport Publishers, one of my favourite publishers of graphic design books. If I could, I would own all of their graphic design books… but sadly, there are so many other books out there that I want to own as well. But they are just All So Pretty!

The Bottom Line: I would have to say that this I recommended for graphic designers just for some of the examples of awesome design included in the book. The 100 habits aren’t always the best, and a lot of them you’ve probably heard before, but personally I’m going to come back to this book again and again just to flip through it whenever I need inspiration.

I’ve found the Logo Lounge books and website to be one of my favourite resources when doing logo work. Catharine Fishel, one of the co-authors of the books and an editor for LogoLounge.com, also wrote How to Grow as a Graphic Designer.

Each chapter in this book (and they are all quite short – only a few pages each) talks about a different Graphic Designer and works in a bit of advice that the designer is giving. A lot of the advice this book presents could be applied to any career, really. What I really did like about how this book was presented was that it took people from so many different areas of expertise in the Graphic Design field. Fishel also made it feel like you were sitting down with the Graphic Designer the chapter is about and having a conversation with them, instead of writing the book so it was just spouting out advice at you.

Of course, there were chapters I enjoyed better and got more out of than others. The ones that stick out particularly in my mind are those about Diti Katona of Concrete, Noreen Morioka of AdamsMorioka, Michael Bierut of Pentagram and Terry Marks of Terry Marks Design.

I probably would have retained more of what it said if I had only read a small bit at a time, but it’s arranged in an easy to navigate way so that if I need to go back at some point in time, I’ll be able to find what I’m looking for easily. Even now, after reading through it so quickly and not getting as much from it as I probably could have, I’ve put some of the advice it has given to good use – mainly making a list of goals and where I want to be a few years from now. Hopefully, I will have the motivation to actually work towards these goals.