From the category archives:

Interactive

Designing Web Interfaces

Designing Web Interfaces

Review by David Little
Theresa Neil’s and Bill Scott’s Designing Web Interfaces (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) catalogues and describes seventy five design patterns – solutions to common problems – for building rich interactions on the Web. Not a book about visual design or particular technologies but rather about the whys and hows of interaction design for the Web; or maybe [...]

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Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories

Card Sorting

Review by Matthew Sanders
Donna Spencer’s debut Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories (Amazon US) distills several years experience applying card sorting techniques to web projects into a highly practical guide on card sorting.
Some information architecture books take a general approach and cover a large range of topics in a single book. These books serve an [...]

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The Designful Company

The Designful Company

Review by David Sherwin
“If you wanna innovate, you gotta design. – Marty Neumeier
From the airy confines of interior design to the tailored minutae of the type designer, the varied disciplines of our profession continue to rush outwards like galaxies fleeing the Big Bang. And the force that drives our profession’s expansion? The universal process we [...]

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A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web

(Guest Review by Shannon Smith)
Mark Boulton just saved me a ton of money on design school.
His new book, A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web, is meant to help Web designers who haven’t been to design school “learn the basics of graphic design and apply them to their Web designs—producing more effective, polished, [...]

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The Advertising Concept Book

The Advertising Concept Book

What makes a good ad? What makes an award-winning creative idea? These days its easy to get distracted by fancy art direction and technological novelties, but when you strip all that away, does the idea still stand up?
This is the essence of Pete Barry’s The Advertising Concept Book (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) in which you won’t see [...]

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Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web

Blueprints cover

(Guest review by Steve ‘Doc’ Baty)
For people who approached information architecture via Rosenfeld & Morville’s “Polar Bear” book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, there was a gap left between an understanding of what was meant by information architecture versus how to actually do information architecture. The knowledge about IA failed to provide a [...]

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Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World

Thumbnail image for Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World

(Guest Review by David Sherwin
Underwhelmed.
We’ve all had this reaction when encountering a product or service that just didn’t cut it.
Take, for example, the alarm clock next to my bed. There are two alarm switches side by side: one for me, and one for my wife. Invariably, every morning I hit the wrong switch and the [...]

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Tangible: High Touch Visuals

Tangible

“Remember the small, cheeky, hand-scribbled notes that were reproduced on a photo or poster design? Those with the simple message: “I was here!” Indicating that someone actually worked with the photo and that these are their thoughts.” – from the Preface to Tangible: High Touch Visuals.
In such a digitally dominant world, Gestalten’s new book, Tangible: [...]

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Designing Gestural Interfaces

Designing Gestural Interfaces Cover

Dan Saffer has a knack for writing the right book at the right time. His first book, Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices pulled together various disparate approaches and aspects to interaction design into one volume.
“In general, the response has been positive and it is being used by universities and others to [...]

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Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

Web Form Design

I hate forms. Germany is full of bureaucrats that love them, but their forms are amongst some of the most poorly designed I have ever encountered. The ones lying under the book in the picture above have been sitting on my desk for a year waiting to find someone who can understand them. A year! [...]

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