Books that make you a better designer
Every professional need to improve his skills. Most affordable way to do this is reading books. Unfortunately, there is harder and harder to find a good book about web design. Last one I read was The Principles of Good Web Design by Jason Beaird (didn’t know his site before read that book). From reviews found in Amazon I though this could be worth to read because there is chapters like Typography, Color theory etc. But I was disappointed very much. There is some very basic theory about this stuff. Honestly, there is a lot of facts what I didn’t know, but I don’t think this can make someone a better designer. I think more suitable name for that book could be “Getting in to Web design”. So, if you don’t know anything about design than go for it. Cite.
“When I was a kid, my favorite color was blue. Not just any blue, but Crayola Crayon cerulean blue, shown in Figure 2.5. Yeah, I was a weird kid. On the touchy-feely level, blue symbolizes openness, intelligence, and faith. Physiologically, blue has been found to calm people down, but it can also reduce appetite “
The problem is that good designers earn with their works but average want to make money in some other way. Good designers simple dont have a time to write more than a blog post time to time and maybe even don’t want to share with knowledge they have. In marketing, copy-writing and even in advertising this is different. These professionals write books to advertise them selves, but do web designers need to advertise them selves to other designers?
Things not so bad at all. There is plenty of good books what can make you a better designer. For example this one - Designing interfaces. But again, this is like Swiss knife. Suitable to do any function but badder than single tool. The solution could be that book could be written by multiple authors or concentrate on single aspect - like forms. Every book should be written like this one - Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience.
But maybe problem is in Publishing companies, because there is small number so called Experts and Gurus and this make hard to gain money with so small audience.
Simply testing comments.