Book Review: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, Published by Sitepoint is one of the newest web design principles books. As the name says, it is about designing for the web. The content itself is very up to date with references to the latest design trends and websites, keeping in mind the classical design principles.

The book has been so popular that it was sold out very soon after its release, and it was already in a second reprint by the time I received a copy.

And it shows. The book is an absolute delight to read with information which ranges from the obvious to the sometimes obscure but sensible from a design perspective. The content itself is divided into 5 logical chapters focusing on layout, color, texture and depth (more on this interesting chapter later), typography and lastly but thoroughly images and graphics.

In layout and composition, the author, Jason talks about the various design layouts, their pros and cons. The chapter also uses terms from print typesetting to make it comfortable for designers moving from paper to the web. It also talks about the principles of arranging the content, balance, white space management. While talking about the latest design trends, Jason talks about single, two and three columnar layouts so popular currently. Finally to correlate all these techniques with a real world example, he takes up a real world project undertaken by him.

While talking about color, Jason covers the psychology of colors on people and how that should affect a designers choice of colors depending on the content and the target audience. The various color theories and models (RGB, CMYK etc.) are given a detailed treatment followed by tips on how to create or choose an appropriate color scheme.

One of the most interesting chapters is on using texture and creating a sense of depth for a web site. Texture covers the various graphic elements like points, lines etc. Further Jason describes the use of patterns and background patterns to lay emphasis on or complement the color scheme chosen for the design. To take the concept of texture one step further, he details how concepts of perspective (in images), proportion and shadows enhance the look of the design.

Once the look of the site is complete, we need to put in the content - text and images. Starting of with fonts and font families for the web, the chapter progresses to techniques showing text in fonts not available in a browser. It then goes into the anatomy of the alphabets, the parts of a letter, spacing between letters and text alignment. Further on after a detailed discussion of font typefaces, a very nice list of sites to download free fonts is provided based on your requirement.

A site without images would be quite bland and dull to use. But to use images, we need to obtain relevant images. There are numerous sites which provide stock images under a variety of license. What these are, their pros and cons is all covered in the final chapter. But all images cannot be directly used in a design. Almost all of them must be modified by cropping, color adjustment or some other effect. Jason covers this by giving a mini-tutorial on how to get these effects in Adobe Photoshop. And finally how layouts can be achieved through CSS.

So is the book perfect? Not quite. Personally I did not prefer the extensive use of Photoshop in the images chapter and in one of the earlier ones. And while Jason recommends several books for more information on some topics, he only recommends Sitepoint books. But I guess that is a publisher's expectation, so it's not his fault.

However, the book is an excellent resource both for novice and pro designers with a very easy flowing and well explained content structure. I liked the book so much that I had to read it again before I wrote this review.

I give this book a 9/10.