The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

Reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Introduction

“Tired of making web sites that work absolutely perfectly but just don’t, well, look very nice? Using The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, you’ll see just how easy it can be to create aesthetically pleasing and usable web site designs.”

In this book…

On the website it mentions that an RGB color card is included with The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird. My copy of the book did not, perhaps because I ordered it through O’Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/0975841963/index.html It can be ordered for an additional $7.95 USD from the SitePoint website. This is offset by the fact that there are Internet links sprinkled throughout the book both in the text and in the footers.

There are 5 chapters on layout and composition, color, texture, typography and imagery.

I marked areas that were helpful to me, such as multi-column navigation and layout configurations, information on color contrasts, special treatment regarding sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) where text can be seen in original fonts without resorting to graphics at http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr or http://www.wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr

I also learned about comparing screen type at http://typetester.maratz.com/ and HTML character entity references at http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp

On our website, depending on the browser, you may see the blue outline on a graph, usually the magazine cover that is linked to another page. I found through this book how to use multiple layered images to “hide” the link.

Conclusion

Besides being a tad overpriced for the amount of content, and being an advertisement for other Sitepoint books, this book does a great job introducing aesthetics to web design.

Recommendation

If you are interested in putting on a good image online, this book will help you get there.