Designinterviews

45 web design-related books that would help you improve, broaden and polish your web design knowledge and skills!

Reading books is a good way to advance your skills. Why? Because they give consistent and thorough knowledge. It's easier to concentrate and therefore contemplate when reading a printed book, while one ussually gets disctructed by various messengers, emails, and news feeds while reading online.

But choosing specialized literature is hard, because you can easily get lost in the variety of it avaiable, or get frustrated by unsuitable contents.

Fortunately, you can always ask 'seniors'. Having said that, we asked about 30 professional web designers to list 5 web design books they would recommend reading to beginning web designers.

Below is the the top-10 books professional web designers recommend, in decreasing order based on a number of times mentioned in designers' lists (al least 5). Then come the books that got no more than 2 voices each. Some of the books are signed with comments by designers who felt like substansiate their choice.

Altogether - 45 web design-related books that would help you improve, broaden and polish your web design knowledge and skills!

Note that if a designer for a reason suggested his/her own book, that voice didn't count.

Thanks to everybody who contributed!

TOP-10

1. 'Don't Make Me Think' by Steve Krug

"A classic that should be read by every last person who ever even thinks about working on a web site." /Robert Hoekman, Jr./

"A no-nonsense look at simple, smart usability testing to benefit your users." /Dan Mall/

2.'Designing with Web Standards' by Jeffrey Zeldman

"An absolute must-read for anyone interested in designing for the web. It goes through the theory best practices and proper techniques, as well as how to apply them." /Dan Mall/

"The web allows its information's recipients to receive it in the manner they choose. Make sure your design is a partner to that ideology and not an obstruction." /Rob Weychert/

3. 'MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer' by Hillman Curtis

"A truly inspirational book that almost works like an oracle book. Open any page, read it, and walk away with a new perspective and hopefully a good idea." /Robert Hoekman, Jr./

"A really insightful story at how to communicate through digital media." /Dan Mall/

4. 'Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook' by Dan Cederholm

"A very thorough beginner to advanced walkthrough for writing smart HTML and CSS." /Dan Mall/

5. 'Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop' by Timothy Samara

6. 'Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks' by Luke Wroblewski

7. 'Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning' by Dan Brown

8. 'Building Accessible Websites' by Joe Clark

"The content is, admittedly, a bit out of date. However, it's still the best written book on accessibility available, and the over-arching concepts are sound." /Joe Dolson/

9. 'Web Standards Creativity' by Andy Budd, Andy Clarke, Ian Lloyd, Cameron Adams, Rob Weychert, Ethan Marcotte, Dan Rubin, Jeff Croft, Mark Boulton, Simon Collison, Derek Featherstone

10. 'The Non-Designer's Design Book' by Robin Williams

"If you're a programmer getting into design, this is a must-read to teach the fundamentals of producing an attractive and interesting page without creating any dependency on fancy graphics. A back-to-basics read for designers, too!" /Joe Dolson/

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'Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices' by Dan Saffer

"An intro/crash course on what interaction design is all about and how it's done" /Robert Hoekman, Jr./

'Universal Principles of Design' by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler

"A must-have reference guide of extremely valuable design principles." /Robert Hoekman, Jr./

'Design Accessible Web Sites: 36 Keys to Creating Content for All Audiences and Platforms' by Jeremy Sydik

"This book covers the information in a much more easily comprehensible manner than you might find elsewhere." /Joe Dolson/

'Mobile Web Design' by Cameron Moll

"Alongside the need for accessibility you'll frequently find an interest in the mobile web. Cameron Moll's book helps lead the way towards understanding design for mobile devices and the possibilities for the medium." /Joe Dolson/

'The Art & Science of CSS' by Jonathan Snook, Steve Smith, Jina Bolton, Cameron Adams, David Johnson

'The Elements of Typographic Style' by Robert Bringhurst

"Phonetic language is a fundamental form of communication, and no self-respecting designer can ignore the typography that shapes it." /Rob Weychert/

'Grid Systems in Graphic Design' by Josef Müller-Brockmann

"A big part of web design is page layout, and a big part of page layout is a carefully reasoned approach to proportions." /Rob Weychert/

'Art of Looking Sideways' by Alan Fletcher

'Web Analytics: An Hour a Day' by Avinash Kaushik

"If you're going to spend time with web sites, you should have at least a passing comprehension of measuring statistics on the web. Knowing how to measure the data and how to use the statistics will help you in developing easily-measurable resources." /Joe Dolson/

'Megg's History of Graphic Design' by Philip B. Meggs, Alston W. Purvis]

"You can't take design to new places if you don't know where it's been. Simple as that." /Rob Weychert/

'Web ReDesign Workflow that Works: How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points' by Kelly Goto, Emily Cotler

'Bulletproof Web Design' by Dan Cederholm

'Defensive Design for the Web' by 37signals

'Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design' by Robert Hoekman, Jr.

'Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability' by Luke Wroblewski

'The Principles of Beautiful Web Design' by Jason Beaird

'CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions' by Andy Budd

'Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS' by Ian Lloyd

'What is a Designer: Things, Places, Messages' by Norman Potter

'Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior' by Indi Young

"Methodologies for understanding your users and their motivations." /Dan Mall/

'The Elements of Style' by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White

"A good designer relies on skills in both visual and phonetic language." /Rob Weychert/

'The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web' by Jesse James Garrett

'Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics' by Jennifer Robbins

'DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model' by Jeremy Keith

'Web Design in a Nutshell' by Jennifer Robbins

'The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web' by Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag

'Envisioning Information' by Edward Tufte

'How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built' by Stewart Brand

'Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance' by Jim Thatcher, Andrew Kirkpatrick, Mark Urban, Bruce Lawson, Shawn Lawton Henry, Michael R. Burks, Cynthia Waddell, Christian Heilmann, Richard Rutter, Bob Regan, Patrick H. Lauke