Customer Reviews

Distinctive Design: A Practical Guide to a Useful, Beautiful Web

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'll keep this short and sweet...

The book is simply overwritten for the concepts that it attempts to demystify. Although the concepts explored in the book are simple to understand, the way in which they are explained is far from it. Reading this book is like reading a book on Physics written by a tenured professor. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who is just cutting their teeth in the field of web design and usability or perhaps even for intermediate designers.

The book would be far better if written on a level that even the entry-level and intermediate designer can understand. No one wants to read a book that you have to have a companion dictionary to read and understand. Books are easier to digest and retain knowledge from when then are written in simple, old-fashioned English. Period.

Although it claims to be an applicable book for someone already studying design, or web designers who already know how to code, the material covered in this book should either be common sense or self-explanatory for designers or web developers. For example, one "tip" found in Chapter 2 is, "Perhaps one reason paper remains popular is that it offers accuracy and immediacy. No waiting, no apps, no learning curve; you just apply the pencil to the paper and create something that gives an impression." Thanks, now I know why people sketch and take notes! There's plenty of similar extraneous text to be found here. Another problem with Distinctive Design is that the depth of theory and design principles covered is very shallow. This could make the material difficult for some readers to apply to real world situations, of which there are no examples. Without seeing examples of these theories actually operating in web design, the book does not make me trust that the author actually has experience with what he is talking about at a professional level (even though he supposedly does). After looking at the author's personal homepage, I was still unable to find solid, working examples of "distinctive designs" which worried me further. Based on the description of this book, I expected much more.

I was hoping this would be a good accompaniment to other books I have purchased for the purpose of teaching myself better practices in web design, but it seems to be just a nice cover with a clever title. If your purposes are similar to mine, you'll probably find more use in "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug (which it's obvious he has read and is citing) and "Thinking With Type" by Ellen Lupton (while this is strictly about typography and predominately print, it goes into much more detail about the history and theories, and has an entire section about the grid that uses web examples). Both of those titles use real-world examples and point you towards other reading they have found useful.

I think maybe if he took Steve Krug's advice and removed half of the content, and then removed half of what was left over, this might be a more worthwhile read, rather than an annoying and kind of insulting read.

Having had my own website for a few years I am always looking for ways to improve it by making it more user friendly and beautiful to visit at the same time. I was hoping to gain some insight into "distinctive design" by reading this book. Unfortunately, I did not find anything useful for my needs.

Much of the book read as a textbook based on theory, rather than application. After reading the table of contents I couldn't wait to read each chapter...expecting to read the book and come away with all sorts of practical ways to improve my site. Instead I found that most theories discussed were common sense, or not explored to the depth I would have liked. I also found that the examples and even the graphics contained within the book were rudimentary.

I would only recommend this book for someone who is starting to design websites and has more technical experience rather than design experience. This will not teach you how to create good design, just what is considered to be good design in theory.

Distinctive Design was not at all what I was expecting and frankly I came away with absolutely nothing that I felt would improve my own site. It may be great for a classroom discussion, but not for real world application in my opinion.

The purpose of this book is to discuss what makes for good web designs. Much of it is closely related to material on design principles for other media, such as the printed page as for most cases, good design is good design. The author takes another step with respect to web design and discusses topics particular to the web, though, such as how a page appears in different browsers, the effect of add-ins and third party applications, and also spends a good amount of time discussing web design for the latest devices such as mobile, smaller screens, etc.

The topics/chapters are well laid out, the book is easy to read, and the author does a great job at covering the various principles and concepts of good design. Is there unique content to the book? Not really; there are lots of other good books on design out there but this compares favorably with them. It is a good all-in-one reference and I felt it is a useful and practical read - for laymen like me it has a bunch of good ideas. I've read most of them before but it is always good to have a refresher, and just reading the text gives me pointers and reminders of things to make sure I incorporate.

There is an emphasis on making pages user-friendly and ensuring you convey the proper message of the page. It's a practical book. As I mentioned before, the author also emphasizes designing for the latest devices - smart phones, etc., which have a more limited screen space and you have to make sure your message is effective and communicates properly. As another reviewer stated, this is not a book with ready-made templates to try out, or stuff that gets you started right away on a ready-to-go web site. It is a book filled with concepts and principles of good design, applied to the web and as such, the author has written a very useful book.

Different people react differently to different books. In my case, going through this book, I often had this out of phase feeling. The book was sort of there but not quite, almost tangential to what I was expecting to find.

Making this worse was probably the publisher (?) selecting a title that did not match the contents of the book. Practical is not what you use to describe a book that is mostly theory. When publishers try to manipulate book titles to increase book sales things can backfire.

What the book is good for is to suggest what you need to know and what you need to learn in order to produce nicely designed websites. However, there is very little how. And this is where the promise of "Practical" in the title mostly fails.

On the nitpicking front, for a book that specializes in design, the font size is probably a size too small.

Having said all that, there is a lot of useful material in this book, but do not buy it thinking it is a practical or how-to book.

I agree with the reviewer who describes this book as "overwritten." An astonishing amount of ink is used to explain very simple concepts. It also suffers from a dearth of real examples. It would be nice to see more than just wireframes.

The book's grammar is atrocious, sometimes on the order of several errors per page! I found this very distracting. I can forgive Mr. Dawson: grammar is not everyone's strong suit. I cannot forgive Wiley's copy editors. A little quality control, please.

As an amateur self-taught blog designer, I originally picked up this book because I thought it could help me learn more about the principles of design. Unfortunately, this book just didn't connect with me and I lost interest quickly. This book is definitely LOADED with information, but visually it is pretty stark with no photos of actual web pages to illustrate points, just a lot of diagrams and tables, charts, and graphs. It would have been very helpful to have a section illustrating practical application of the points.

Here is a list of the different chapter headings, which you may find helpful:

~ The Distinction of Web Design

~ Designing for Different Devices

~Principles of Information Design

~ Design Concepts and Theories

~Introducing Design Psychology

~Sculpting a User Interface

~Promoting User Interaction

~The Foundations of User Experience

~The Construct of Usability

~ Focusing Facets of Findability

That's a nice long list, but I wasn't able to stick with it long enough to learn any of it. I don't consider myself a newbie, as I have had a blog and business website for years, but I had trouble finding much that pertained to me and I didn't enjoy the text-book feeling of this book. If you are already a professional web designer, I imagine this book would have much more relevancy for you; however, it's not for the amateur, and therefore it wasn't for me.

Have you ever used a website and thought, "Someone really needs to redesign this because it's really difficult to use?" I have. In fact, I've MADE websites like these. I know the basics of HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, but I don't really have an eye for design. Web development is not the same as web design. So, I was hoping to find a book that would help me develop my undestanding of design, by giving me some fundamental design principles, and some practical tips for implementing those principles.

The subtitle of this book is "A Practical Guide to a Useful, Beautiful Web". However, I must say that I did not find it at all practical. Here are a couple reasons you might want to look elsewhere for a book on website design:

1) This book does not show websites. I expected that a book on web design would include some examples of websites. Most of the images in the book are close-ups of hypotetheical buttons, login boxes, scroll bars, fonts...but no practical examples of actual websites. And, of the images that are in the book, many are just not "practical". Too many of the images are cute "infographics" that convey very little useful information. Don't take my word for it: Amazon let's you look at samples of the book...see for yourself.)

2) Sometimes, the authors manage to use a lot of prose to say very little about web design. Consider the far-from-practical advice from page 74: "When you apply text to the screen, give your readers something meaningful to take away from that experience. Making your content speak volumes in as little space as possible complies with distinctive reductionism and minimalism as related to any visual flourish. Think of where various websites would be if their value was entirely attributed to the design and not content." What exactly am I to take away from this advice? There are far too many paragraphs that are filled with "general principles" and then few or no examples to make the advice practical.

To be fair, there are some sections of the book I liked (sections about color and font selection stand out). But overall, this book is likely to collect dust as I begin the search for a much more practical guide to web design.

If you're reading this review, chances are that you have many questions about this book that you need answered. I'll attempt to answer at least some of those questions.

As it is clear from the title, this book covers all aspects of web design, including designing for the multiple devices. It does not go into the development (or coding) of a website. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. This book will surely pop many ideas in your mind if you are serious about the architecture or design aspect of your web site.

If, however, you are looking for a turn-key solution book that provides you with some ready-to-use templates, this book is not for you. If, on the other hand, you have the broad web architecture on mind for your existing or new web site, this is the perfect book to get.

If you are already designing web sites and want to get some new ideas or improve your web site's usability for newer mobile devices, this book can be a great resource too.

Honestly, I cannot think of anything that the author did not cover. From content, to typography, to color and even design psychology - this book covers it all. This is, indeed, one of the best books I have read on web design - on par with another great book on this topic: Don't Make Me Think. I think if you're going to like this book, if you liked "Don't Make Me Think".

If I were to look for this book, I would not be looking for it where it's currently listed on Amazon:

Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Graphics & Multimedia

I think the correct category for this title should be:

Books > Computers & Internet > Web Development > Website Architecture & Usability

This book exceeded my expectations for a web design book. It clearly delivers on what it promises and much more. I highly recommend this book. This is from an author who may not have a long list of titles but definitely understands what constitutes great web design and has a great way of communicating those concepts through this book. Definitely, a 5-star book!

It's an ok book. I like it. Not really sure on how to apply it to my design skills yet though. I'll just keep reading :)