What is Web Design? by Nico Macdonald

This is a gem of a book. For once, a book that treats web design as just another field of Design endeavor and talks about it intelligently within the context of the wider world of graphic and communication design. Many books on this topic tend to get bogged down by issues involving current and changing technologies. This book takes a much more objective look at web design and is much more rewarding as a result.

The author describes the book so: “Web design has much in common with other areas of design and this book begins by establishing general design principles and applying them to the web… This book doesn't advocate absolute rules, as rules are specific to particular scenarios. Likewise it advocates a general model for the design process rather than an absolute approach. It doesn't address technical issues such as coding and programming, as these change from month to month and can be better learned online.”

For more information, see the companion web site, which contains updates and links. What is Web Design? is available at Amazon.co.uk for £13.99

HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS by Elizabeth Castro

Elizabeth Castro's book is an excellent start for HTML beginners. It assumes nothing and there is lots of context to help you understand how things work even before you start with HTML itself. This 5th edition has been completely rewritten and now treats CSS as an essential element in the HTML design process. The book also encourages readers to consider migrating to the latest XHTML standard. The introduction to the book gives a very persuasive and reasoned argument for a complete move to XHTML now.

The working sections of the book are simple and clear and slowly build to give the reader lots of confidence. Lots of good examples showing the (X)HTML code and the browser results help you make the conceptual link between the two. For more information, see the companion web site, which contains a full table of contents and a short extract. HTML for the World Wide Web is available at Amazon.co.uk for £8.49

Design Basics Index by Jim Krause

This book is the perfect graphic design primer for those who have never previously had to think about where and how objects should be placed on a page. The book is designed as a quick reference but can easily be read through from start to finish (recommended). It covers all of the basic components of graphic design such as colour, image, typography, and the grid but it also takes a detailed look at various concepts such as heirarchy, flow, grouping and proportion.

This is a comprehensive but compact and accessible book. It is written in a clear and informal style and along the way there are numerous exercises for the reader that help to create a better understanding of the topics being discussed. Needless to say, the book itself is beautifully designed. Everyone should read this book. Design Basics Index is available at Amazon.co.uk for £10.49

Web Style Guide by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton

The Web Style Guide (2nd Ed.) by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton is a relatively slim volume (just 223 pages) but it packs a lot in. The book is concise and clear and covers all the basic considerations of site and page design. In fact, this is the book you should read first if you are considering building a web site. It covers topics such as site hierarchy, page layout, typography and web graphics to name but a few. The book contains lots of example sites and explanatory diagrams, illustrated in full colour. This is another very important text for the Webpage Design course and it perfectly compliments “Web Design in a Nutshell” by covering the non-technical areas of the course.

This book is excellent and it's even available free on the web in a HTML version at www.webstyleguide.com. However, should you need a paper copy, you can buy it from Amazon.co.uk at £8.75

Web Design in a Nutshell by Jennifer Niederst

Web Design in a Nutshell (2nd Ed.) by Jennifer Niederst gives an very useful overview of all aspects of this course. If you buy no other book, buy this one. The book is in five parts:
“The Web Environment” covers browsers and basic design principles.
“Authoring”, the largest section of the book, covers HTML and CSS.
“Graphics” covers the various file formats and considers colour on the web.
“Multimedia and Interactivity” covers audio, video and the use of Flash.
“Advanced Technologies” gives an introduction to DHTML and JavaScript.
Although the book runs to over 600 pages, it does cover a massive amount of material and inevitably most topics are dealt with fairly concisely. What else would you expect from a book that calls itself “Web Design in a Nutshell”. Amazingly, it does a great job of covering almost everything. However, it is very much a reference book rather than a “how-to”. So, for example, although HTML is given good coverage, you may be better off with Elizabeth Castro's book if you need a “Quick Start”.

Web Design in a Nutshell is available from Amazon.co.uk at £14.66

Deep Sites: Intelligent Innovation in Contemporary Web Design by Max Bruinsma

Deep Sites is one of the better “showcase” books available. Max Bruinsma does a great job analysing over 100 websites in a cool and logical manner. The book includes sections on Interface, Typography, Animation, Community and Authoring, all illustrated in full colour. It is a great source of design inspiration and gives a great deal of insight into the development of many of the sites. The book is also careful to draw the distinction between functionality and entertainment, a pitfall that many other such titles have not managed to avoid.

Deep Sites is available from Amazon.co.uk at £13.26

Designing Web Graphics 4: How to Prepare Images & Media for the Web by Lynda Weinman

This book is described as “the most influential web design book ever written” by the publishers. While that may be overstating it a little, it is pretty good. In fact the title is a little misleading because although web graphics are discussed in detail (and are the obvious strength of this book), a great deal of other material is also covered from career guidance to web hosting and a great deal in between.

The book focuses on the “look-and-feel” of a website and describes the various techniques for achieving a particular effect such as image rollovers and image maps. However, site structure topics are also covered. Chapters on information architecture, navigation and accessibility issues give the book enough depth to make it an all round web design reference. As you would expect from such a book, the chapters on image file formats and colour issues are very good. An excellent book if you can afford it

Designing Web Graphics 4 is available from Amazon.co.uk at £30.09

Great Web Typography by Wendy Peck

Until quite recently, “web typography” would have been considered an oxymoron but the advent of cascading style sheets has changed all that. CSS now gives web designers control over just about every aspect of type and this book gives a through grounding in the use of CSS to control the appearance of type in the browser window. But it doesn't stop there. The book also has chapters on graphic type and the use of Flash type.

This book is both a technical reference and a design guide. It is illustrated throughout in full colour and is easily the best book available on this relatively new area of web design.

Great Web Typography is available from Amazon.co.uk at £18.16

www.colour: Effective Use of Colour for Web Page Design by Roger Pring

The use of colour on the web is an important and complicated area of study, which is often not well understood. However, Roger Pring starts with the basics and gives an excellent explanation of colour theory and how it applies to the web and computer monitors.

The book is in two parts. The first part focuses on colour theory and practice with very good coverage of image manipulation. The second part is a “showcase”. Over 100 web sites are considered and in each case, there is a short critique of the colours used.

One of the best book on colour for the web and a great source of inspiration, www.colour is available from Amazon.co.uk at £9.09

The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett

This is a relatively slim volume (at just under 200 pages) that delivers a single message but that message is very important. This book is based upon the concept of “user centred design” and sets out to define a website as a “user experience”. It does a masterful job of collating and analysing all of the parameters that a web designers and others must consider when building a site and designing a user interface. The book expands upon Garrett's own theory model, which divides the user experience into five layers or “planes”, namely Surface, Skeleton, Structure, Scope and Strategy. Each plane is dealt with in detail and the book touches upon many areas such as page layout, information architecture and the use of contrast and uniformity to name but a few.

The Elements of User Experience propounds an excellent method for web design and is available from Amazon.co.uk at £11.75

Simple Websites: Organizing Content Rich Web Sites into Simple Structures by Stefan Mumaw

This is a gem of a book. Stefan Mumaw has taken 24 websites and in each case, describes how they were designed. The book is illustrated not only with images of the finished websites but also with the original designers sketches, describing how site structures and page layouts came to be.

The chosen websites all have something in common - they are simple; that is to say, they all look simple. Each one has a very clean and clear interface but in many cases, the content is rich and complex. Here is the crux of the book. How do good web designers turn complex content into simple, easy to use websites that look great? Read the book.

In addition to helping you get inside the head of the designer, this book is a great source for design inspiration. In most cases, the chosen example sites are beautifully laid out, make great use of colour, typography and image, and use intuitive navigation.

Simple Websites: Organizing Content Rich Web Sites into Simple Structures is available at Amazon.co.uk for £19.25

DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web by Cranford Teague

DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web (3rd Ed.) by Jason Cranford Teague. This is another excellent Visual Quickstart Guide from Peachpit Press. The book starts off with an excellent introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (a fundamental aspect of modern web design), which is very clear and then goes on to introduce Dynamic HTML again in a clear and easy style. There are lots of examples to follow and the coding is clearly written and highlighted in red. The book covers all you would expect, including layers and demonstrates how to create drop-down menus.

Another great value title available from Amazon.co.uk for £8.49

JavaScript for the World Wide Web by Tom Negrino and Dory Smith

JavaScript for the World Wide Web (5th Ed.) by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith. This is a truly excellent book. First of all, it's light, readable and it's cheap. The book assumes a basic understanding of HTML but leads you very gently into what can sometimes be a relatively complicated scripting language. Where this book really scores is in it's approach. It assumes that you'll want to use JavaScript to actually do something. So rather than focusing on lots of gory detail, the book has you creating image rollovers before you know it.

JavaScript for the World Wide Web is available at Amazon.co.uk for £8.49 and is highly recommended.

PHP for the World Wide Web by Larry Ullman

PHP for the World Wide Web (2nd Ed.) by Larry Ullman. PHP is now the most widely used scripting language on the Web and this book is an excellent introduction to the topic. Unlike JavaScript (a client-side scripting language), PHP runs on a web server and is known as a "server-side" scripting language. Consequently, PHP is extremely powerful and can be used to build modular sites, which are easy to maintain as well as adding dynamic elements to your design. This book is for the PHP beginner but assumes a basic understanding of HTML and web design.

PHP for the World Wide Web is available at Amazon.co.uk for £11.89 and is highly recommended.

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 for Windows and Macintosh by J. Tarin Towers

Some Dreamweaver books start by introducing the reader to HTML. This book (a visual quickstart guide) assumes you are already familiar with HTML, CSS etc. and just focuses on working with Dreamweaver itself. Given this approach, the book does an excellent job. Newcomers to Dreamweaver will be up-and-running in no time and the book also acts as an excellent reference so you won't be throwing it out as soon as you have got to grips with the basics.

The book is rather more chunky than most of the visual quickstart titles, running to over 700 pages but that's because there is so much material covered. Once the basic functionality of the software is covered in the early chapters, the book goes on to consider strategies for implementing such things as CSS, frames, tables, forms, and layers and then goes on to cover the automation and customisation of Dreamweaver. Server-side technologies are not covered but under the circumstances that's entirely reasonable.

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX for Windows and Macintosh is available from Amazon.co.uk at £13.29

Photoshop CS Bible by Deke McClelland

Deke McClelland is probably one of the best known authors when it comes to Photoshop. His book is probably the best single volume you can buy on the subject. It's a good book for beginners because it covers all the basics in a simple and coherent way but it's also an excellent book to keep as a reference for more experienced users. The book comes with a full PDF version on CD, which makes searching for a specific command really easy.

The Photoshop CS Bible is available from Amazon.co.uk for £14.97 and if you only buy one Photoshop book, this should be the one.

An essential text and reference, buy it

A “must read” and nice to have if you can afford it

Useful titles that will help you develop your web design skills