The role of the web designer is partially situated around user-centered design. As a designer we need to provide functionality that makes a good user experience.

Sarah Horton, author of the book Access By Design - A guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers (2005) perhaps deliberately mixes up accessibility and usability here.

Official book site: universalusability.com

This book is a primer - a simple and concise introduction to the fundamentals and basic principles about designing accessible and usable websites. S. Horton says:

Do not take control of aspects of the user interface […] that belong in the domain of the user.

The fundamentals are design simple, design for keyboard access and design for transformation. The book is written from a practical point of view full of website screenshots to illustrate best practices and guidelines. In each chapter (document structure, text, images, forms,tables, lists, color, data tables,…) you get a philosophical and meaningful explanation on how to design with usability and accessibility in mind. The last chapters deal with audio and video, page lay-out,interactivity and editorial style. The key message: the Web is a universal medium where appropriate design decisions benefit both visual and non-visual users.

Improving readability using structural markup providing alternate textual content (e.g. for video, audio) or text-to-speech alternate content coding accessible websites that can be read by screen reader softwaredesign fluid lay-out to cater for small and wide screens. Orientation cues for easy to find your way in a website.

In a recent interview in Digital Magazine (Sept. ‘05), the author says:

I think of “access by design” as sort of a philosophical approach to Web design, so it’s just deciding that theprimary goal for your design decision-making is going to be to provide access. And the universal usability part is a kind of practical application of that methodology and philosophy that the decisions you make are always going to be the ones that most favor universal usability of your Web sites.

These are all perfect examples of forward and simple design principles in favor of the end-user.

What you wont find in the book are technical in-depth solutions.There are some redundant chapters on putting efforts on making table-based websites or frame-based websites more accessible or usable for that matter. For the entire book, the emphasis is on using structural markup and CSS anyway. Added the lack of coding examples makes it hard to put the ideas presented in practice.

What I do like about the book: the many real-world examples that illustrate good design and concise and forward explanations on how to design usable and accessible websites. The book is aimed to get you warmed up, and get you thinking. But nothing more than that. Like theillustration of the front cover, it opens the door but leaves a lot of questions to be answered.

The entire book is on-line in a HTML format. As Sarah Horton says:

The answer is simple: I write books so people will read them, and having the book online means more people can access the content.

You'd think that any book selling itself as "a common sense approach to web application design" in 2007 would feature serious consideration of accessibility. After all there's been major legislation in just about every country in the western world in the past year covering accessibility, and plenty of publicity about inaccessible sites like Target.

But there's not a single mention of accessibility in this book, and worse still many of the examples given are actually *bad* practice. Like locating error messages after form controls, for example, using placeholder text in form controls, or using javascript for essential functionality.

Even without this oversight the book can't be recommended. At times it felt like the author was trying to impress the reader with how much he knows, going into irrelevant detail about a lot of the theory, pretty much ignoring his own advice about keeping things as simple as possible.

If you want to learn about web usability buy Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and if you want to learn about getting a web application to market go visit http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ and read Getting Real for free.

Aimed primarily at Web developers and programmers who want to expand their knowledge of design and the design process, Jason Beaird's Principles of Beautiful Web Design is a great entry point for those wanting to know what it is exactly designers do and why one's own websites often look, well, a bit pedestrian.

Over five chapters Beaird explains the basics of design theory as well as what he sees to be the key principles of beautiful Web design. Much of the first three chapters concerning layout and composition, colour and texture is reasonably generic and is informative about the design process as a whole. Only the last two chapters are technical in the sense of talking specifically about CSS and Photoshop, so even non-techies shouldn't be too put off.

As someone who's worked with the Web for a number of years I was a little concerned that at best this book would underline what I already knew or at worst encourage people into bad habits, elevating aesthetics over standards, usability and accessibility. Neither was the case I'm glad to say; actually it showed me how little I actually knew about Web design and coming from the Sitepoint stable I should have known there would be a clear commitment to promoting web standards and stressing the centrality of content. Design is placed in context as one of the factors which make a successful website.

I found the definition and explanation of design terms and concepts particularly enlightening; Beaird gives an overview of concepts such as the rule of thirds and the "divine proportion" which produce aesthetically pleasing results when applied to artistic composition. Chapter two's dip into colour theory was also very interesting. In addition to learning about colour wheels and additive and subtractive colour models, I now know the difference between a shade and a tint. Working out which colours go well together can sometimes appear intuitive but it's a great advantage to know why they work and what other colours you can also use to build up your palette.

Beaird discusses current trends as well as general principles For instance, I'm glad he makes the case for right hand navigation; I've always found it slightly more intuitive. The thorny issue of fixed versus liquid layouts is also discussed. Views on this seem to change with the weather, although fixed widths seem to be the odds on favourites at the moment; not least I suspect because they are still easier to build in CSS in addition to giving the designer more control. The "variable fixed width" layout might be an emerging compromise: a design which has its layout determined by the user's browser size.

Of course, no contemporary book on Web design could escape discussing rounded corners.There are pointers to various methods on the Web, ranging from the horrific (in terms of semantic HTML) to the more acceptable.Typography on the Web is still very limited; nonetheless we get an entire chapter dedicated to it. In addition to covering the commonly available font families and contemporary techniques such as sIFR, we also get an in depth description of the anatomy of a font. This is clearly one of the author's favourite areas. I imagine that coders will already be familiar with the less esoteric sections of this chapter as they will with parts of the last chapter, "Imagery". Imagery? Is this really what he means? Surely, "images" would have been a more suitable title.

Pedantry aside, this chapter will probably be of most use to the uninitiated in its discussion of where to obtain images. I now have a list of stock photography sites to investigate for my next design project (which looks it will be my own site now I know what I've done wrong). We're also told what not to do; i.e. don't steal others' work, or worse link to files on their site ("Google ganking"). Beaird also gives us a short Photoshop tutorial on creating borders and edges and discusses CSS effects that can be applied.I'd be hard pushed to find any real criticisms of this book. One thing that made me baulk slightly was the suggestion that you use the blockquote element to create emphasis on a page (p.22) when really the only justified use of this is to mark up quotations. Secondly I would have found some information on how designers create graphics interesting; but this is probably beyond the scope of the book.

At under 165 pages, this book can only serve as an introduction to Web design. It also won't make you a designer, although it will at least give you some ideas of what works and why it works, and what doesn't. It's an inspiring book however, and it left me really wanting to try out some of the ideas. It's also very encouraging in that it doesn't just tell you to watch and learn from the professionals but to use your own personality and background.

Specialisation is something that has been taking hold of the Web in the last few years with a clear attempt to draw lines between programmers, front-end coders and designers. As anyone who works in the area will know, in reality it is hard to enforce these divisions; designers need to know their HTML and CSS (as does clearly the author of this book); front-end coders can make good layout designers and can benefit from understanding back-end code and how web servers work; back-end programmers need to know their front-end code and understand design, especially if they are to avoid the horrors of what I refer to as "programmer's HTML", that nasty mess of unseemly and unsemantic code that they so often produce if left unsupervised, not to mention some of the crimes against design decency they can be responsible for. In this respect, any book that helps to inform the blurs round the edges should be welcomed.

Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke literally ‘transcends’ other CSS books that I have read. Now, to bring that into context — the other books I have read were incredible books, this one just takes CSS from a different perspective than the others (so you should still read the other books too). The writing style of this book was different from other CSS books which were very instructional. Along with a different writing style came a different design. This book is designed beautifully from front cover to back. The full color photos, original artwork, sidebars, quotes, and even the way he slips in photos from other developers into newspaper articles makes this book visually pleasing.

Mr. Clarke goes down a different path and calls for true progressive enhancement. Ideally this book would not be one for beginners (and he makes this claim), but I do believe it has some great inspiration throughout. He makes a good point when he questions how progressive enhancement could be progressive if we haven’t really moved anywhere in the past few years? As web developers we have many hurdles to jump when creating sites that function well across all platforms and browsers. There are certain browsers that are worse than others. However, do we simply let them hold us back or do we move forward with the browsers that are proactive and support standards. This is not to say forget the older browsers, but it does call for a higher standard of quality available to use in standards compliant browsers.

The book is divided into 4 sections:

Discovery. This chapter instantly jumps into the ‘transcendent CSS’ approach and discusses some of the different selectors and options. Most sections are brief, but get right to the point. This chapter is devoted to seeing markup in everything that you do. He advocated a ‘content-out’ approach to your designs, where you start with a solid foundation and structure with your content and build from there. This chapter was fun as there were little ‘quizzes’ of how you would markup different sections in a given photograph. It stretches you to really see the markup and structure first and foremost.

Process. Just like the first chapter, each section was touched on briefly — but was right to the point. This chapter discusses the many processes available to building your website. Starting with content and moving to things like wireframes, The Grey Box Method, and Interactive Prototyping. He discusses best practices as you work through these processes. This chapter came to a close with a little practice session (just to get your feet wet).

Inspiration. This was probably my favorite chapter of the entire book. I found that this chapter was very rich with artwork, photographs, and screenshots — oh, and some text, too. He challenges you to look beyond the web for your inspirations and designs. He brings examples to the table, as well as in-depth discussion of using a Grid in your designs. This chapter really encompassed The Fine Art of Web Design.

Transcendence. This was a perfect way to bring this book to a close. This chapter looks to CSS3 and all of its possibilities. CSS3 may seem like a long stretch away, but it is very important to be aware of what will be available and to begin thinking creatively — prepared for what is to come. This chapter was rich with examples and screenshots of the possibilities.

As I stated earlier, this may not be a book for beginners — but it sure is full of inspiration. There are some books that you read and think ‘Wow, this book is going to transform the way we think about CSS’ — and this book is just that. CSS Zen Garden had the same feel to it, but this is more updated. Not that you don’t need other CSS books — but this book is a must read as we move forward into 2007 and years to come.