Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty [Paperback]

David Kadavy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 6, 2011 | ISBN-10: 1119998956 | ISBN-13: 978-1119998952 | Edition: 1

The smash hit introductory design book that debuted at #18 on Amazon
Hackers are able to accomplish so much in so little time because they come from a community that's built upon sharing knowledge. When it comes to programming, they can learn whatever they need to learn by reading manuals, or simply typing in a Google search. But learning design isn't so simple.

Many design books try to teach design through lists of "do's" and "don'ts." But hackers know you need a deeper understanding of something to really do it well. Design for Hackers takes apart design by "reverse-engineering" Impressionist painting, Renaissance sculpture, the Mac OS X Aqua interface, Twitter's web interface, and much more. You'll learn about color theory, typography, proportions, and design principles. This theoretical advice is mixed with concrete, actionable advice such as suggestions for color scheme tools, and a chart of "all of the fonts you'll ever need."

By the end of the book, you'll be seeing design through new eyes.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"David Kadavy is the Malcom Gladwell of web design"
-Noah Kagan, Founder, AppSumo.com

"Kadavy's book does an excellent job of linking the theoretical to the practical in a very readable format."
-Brad Feld, Co-Founder, TechStars

"clear yet engaging and comprehensive"
-Vitaly Friedman, Smashing Magazine

"those coding [our world's] software and user interfaces and threading the web should all learn what this book has to teach"
-Gareth Branwyn, MAKE Magazine

From the Back Cover

"If you want to learn to create great design yourself...there simply is no way to do so with lists of rules. Instead, I want to provide you with a new set of eyes through which you can see the world anew." -David Kadavy

Why did Monet never use the color black on his paintings?
Why is the golden ratio not all it's cracked up to be?
Why is Comic Sans such a hated font?

It's amazing what you can learn about great web design by asking questions like these. Award-winning designer David Kadavy uses this "reverse-engineering" process in Design for Hackers to deconstruct classical design principles and techniques for web designers. Using an eclectic array of reverse-engineered examples, ranging from Twitter's latest redesign, to Target's red shopping carts, and ancient graffiti from the walls of Pompeii, he explains:

• Color Theory: How can you enliven your designs by understanding how colors interact?
• Proportion and Geometry: How can you establish a grid that is suitable for the device on which your design with be displayed?
• Size and Scale: How can you create clean design just by choosing the right type sizes?
• White Space: How can you use it elegantly to communicate clearly?
• Composition and Design Principles: How can you use them to make your designs more compelling?
• Typographic Etiquette: What tiny typographic details can make a huge difference in what you're communicating?

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (September 6, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1119998956
• ISBN-13: 978-1119998952
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 0.7 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,616 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Computers & Technology > Internet & Web Culture > Hacking
  • #10 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Graphics & Multimedia
  • #14 in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development & Design > Web Design

More About the Author

Aside from having been obsessed with design since I could hold a pencil (seriously, I once conducted experiments in "white space" using the words from the side of a deodorant bottle), I also understand the unique challenges of designing great products in the fast-paced world of startups. I founded the design departments of two startups, founded my own startup, worked with startups as a freelance designer, and continue to mentor startups around the world.

While I'm practically-minded enough to understand the need to get things done quickly, I don't take any shortcuts when it comes to dissecting design. With my writing I aim to entertain the reader, while explaining in such detail that even an expert will learn something new.

If you want to create great design in 10 minutes, I'm not your guy (and if you find someone, let me know who they are!). But, if you're willing to invest a few hours of patient study of my book in exchange for the benefits of a lifetime of truly understanding design, I think we'll get along well.

If you'd like to read some samples of my writing, or get a free PDF sample of the "All of the fonts you'll ever need" graphic from my book, visit designforhackers.com. If you ever have any questions or comments, I'm very active on Twitter at @kadavy.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Strong work! November 21, 2011

By Devon Ostendorf

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

As a developer who routinely agonizes over which colors and fonts to use for my projects, "Design for Hackers" provided me both with reassurance that I wasn't too far off in my choices and with confidence to try out some new approaches in future endeavors.

I wasn't expecting a step-by-step recipe book - this is not a "Teach Yourself Web Design in 24 Hours" book. Design is a creative process after all and super-subjective. However, it is tremendously helpful, IMHO, to have some guidance, and this book does a stellar job of presenting a solid explanation of why it is that some things just look right while others don't quite work.

Though I enjoyed parts of each chapter, I found the following sections particularly valuable:

* The discussion of proportion, the golden ratio, and the case study involving the MailChimp logo breakdown (Chapter 5).

* The demonstration of how effectively one can establish visual hierarchy, even while using only a single font, by varying
type size and weight, and using white space strategically (Chapter 7).

* The entire color science chapter (Chapter 8), but most notably the tips for how to mentally navigate the hexadecimal
cube to rapidly fine-tune colors.

* The suggestion to limit the number of fonts you use to only two and, further, restricting them to those shown in the
provided chart (which also shows which pairs well with what, both for print and the web) (Appendix A).

Bottom line, if every developer read this book, the web would be a lot more aesthetically pleasing (and usable, too, for that matter).

Well done!

101 of 120 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Hit or miss September 25, 2011

By J. McAnally

Format:Paperback

I was extremely excited for this book. I know a lot of programmers who feel like they can futz around with Photoshop or HTML or what not, but don't really know why they're doing what they're doing or how to approach design problems. They always bemoan the lack of background knowledge of design concepts. So, when I saw this book was being released, I rushed out to my local B&N and grabbed it (Amazon was backordered for weeks, which spoke to how good I thought this would be!).

I thought I'd get a really good introduction to design concepts, accompanied by really solid, cohesive examples of either how to use this in a design or examples of the concept in action and why it's a good use of it. What I got instead was a scattershot of sort of interesting concepts, a few examples, and a bunch of other random stuff. Maybe I'm more persnickety about books than the other reviewers, but if we're reading the same book, we must have totally different definitions of a good teaching book.

Most of the information in there just struck me as weird and disjointed. I won't cover all the my issues with the book (some of them are just simply pedantic...), but I'll share a few examples. There's a (by page count) huge amount of space spent on Roman/Greek typography (something the author spent a lot of time researching in school as we're told in his back cover bio, inside bio, introduction, first chapter, and a few other times), but a tiny bit of information on selecting fonts for designs, type proportion, and so on. There's also a long rant on why Comic Sans is a bad font (even going so far as presenting a number of really technical arguments as to why it sucks), but completely neglects the most important point about font choice which is context. He bizarrely somewhat indicts the font being used on things like a teacher's party invitation, which seems like a perfect application of a whimsical font like that. Yes, it sucks for body text because of its design and proportions, but he doesn't say that. What he says instead is about 4 pages of technical design jargon that my programmer friends are going to gloss over. He totally missed his audience.

Then there's a whole 10 or so page section on search engine optimization. I get that it's also part of design considerations when working on the web, but in a book that's supposed to cover background design concepts to shore up a programmer's understanding of design fundamentals, it seems like a weird choice to spend 2% of the book's mass on. Plus, 10 pages is rather poor coverage of a pretty sticky topic.

The last one I'll point is the chapter on color. It does have a good bit more useful information in it than others (especially with regards to color math; really useful when working in HTML), but it also has a lot of page-filling fluff. He spends a ton of pages showing the various types of color schemes (tetradic, triadic, analogous, etc.), but he puts one per page with no context. Basically it's just "Here's the way it works, OK moving on."

And that's basically my big issue with this book. He points to a lot of interesting stuff, but doesn't tie very much of it back to actually doing things with it. He rarely even points to where this stuff is useful past a passing mention or a hastily introduced bullet point list.

I don't really blame the author for my issues with this book. Of course, he's not blameless, but I think all the information it's lacking is in his brain. He obviously knows a lot about design and is *almost* there with relaying it really well to developers. I fault his development editor for doing a terrible job of asking the right questions and getting the right answers when he was reading the drafts of the book. A good editor would have caught the audience issues and constantly been asking "How does this chapter make our readers more awesome at design as programmers?" Instead, it seems they were taking a nap or something.

Again, I was really excited and maybe that skewed my expectations. I'm just pretty disappointed with it.

29 of 33 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Missed his Audience December 8, 2011

By Jeremy Blanchard

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I was on David Kadavy's mailing list for Design for Hackers since January 2011. I had huge hopes for this book. I sent him encouragement over email. I love the blog posts he wrote (especially "the only fonts you'll ever need"). All of those facts made me really excited for this book. I was thrilled the day it showed up in the mail.

And I'm sad to say that it didn't meet my expectations at all.

I'm in the early stages of building a web app and startup business. I was looking for a book that would introduce me to web design principles, not the technical side. This book seemed like it would be a perfect fit.

The most succinct way I can explain why this book doesn't live up to it's promises is this: It feels like they released the first draft. There are two points that I'll go into here.

1) Most importantly, the book doesn't meet the market it claims to be designed for. When designing good software, you always have to ask "how is this feature going to serve my ideal end user that I'm building this for." I think the same applies to books and I'm certain that the question "How does this section help hackers have a framework to start designing better sites and apps?" was not asked enough while this book was being written and edited. Like another reviewer, I blame the editors more than the author for this problem. The book dives into theoretical and historical underpinnings of typography and color that seem really fascinating to David, but are many levels too deep for a hacker trying to bring some quality design to his or her application.

2) The book is extremely "rough around the edges." There are many grammar mistakes and awkward sentences/paragraphs. The most glaring issue is that the book doesn't even have a conclusion. It just ends (after suggesting Adobe Kuler for finding color pallets). I rarely read more than two pages without being confused by awkward sentences. There were also many sections that felt like someone misplaced in the book because they didn't relate to any of the nearby content. It was very incoherent overall and lacked a flow throughout.

There were some good parts to the book. Primarily, the parts that had already been published on his blog/newsletter. They were fantastic blog posts! They just didn't translate well into a coherent structure. If you do read it, I suggest the chapters on proportion and visual hierarchy. They will stick with me the most.

I walked away form this book with a couple interesting (but irrelevant) bits of history/theory, a handful of important tools that I will continue to use for designing in the future, and a lot of disappointment. I don't feel that the tools that I do have are nearly enough to get me started to actually start designing something. Two books have been suggested to me that are currently sitting on my desk: Non-Designer's Design Book, The (3rd Edition) and Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web & Mobile Application Design (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter). I hope those fulfill the missed promise of this book.

I hope David writes another book some day. I think he got a crappy deal from this publisher where they didn't give him good editors and rushed it out the door to turn a profit instead of giving it the time and attention it deserved.