Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design (Voices That Matter) [Paperback]

Khoi Vinh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 3, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0321703537 | ISBN-13: 978-0321703538 | Edition: 1

The grid has long been an invaluable tool for creating order out of chaos for designers of all kinds—from city planners to architects to typesetters and graphic artists. In recent years, web designers, too, have come to discover the remarkable power that grid-based design can afford in creating intuitive, immersive, and beautiful user experiences.

Ordering Disorder delivers a definitive take on grids and the Web. It provides both the big ideas and the brass-tacks techniques of grid-based design. Readers are sure to come away with a keen understanding of the power of grids, as well as the design tools needed to implement them for the World Wide Web.

Khoi Vinh is internationally recognized for bringing the tried-and-true principles of the typographic grid to the World Wide Web. He is the former Design Director for NYTimes.com, where he consolidated his reputation for superior user experience design. He writes and lectures widely on design, technology, and culture, and has published the popular blog Subtraction.com for over a decade.

More information at grids.subtraction.com

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the Back Cover

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Riders; 1 edition (December 3, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321703537
• ISBN-13: 978-0321703538
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 0.4 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #402,840 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Khoi Vinh is internationally recognized for bringing the tried and true principles of the typographic grid to the World Wide Web. He is the former Design Director for NYTimes.com, where he consolidated his reputation for superior user experience design. He writes and lectures widely on design, technology and culture, and has published the popular blog Subtraction.com for over a decade.

Follow Khoi on Twitter: @khoi
Khoi's blog: http://www.subtraction.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Feels Like a Chapter in a Bigger Book July 5, 2011

By A. Holzschuh

Format:Paperback

I was really excited when I picked up this book and flicked through it in the book store. I am always looking to broaden my perspective on design and incorporate techniques to make my work stronger. I knew right away that this book was conceptual and did not have instructions on how to actually incorporate the grids, this was fine with me. However I feel like the entire book is so bloated with repetition and irrelevancy that the small amount of information could have been present as a chapter in a web design book. Even with what the book does have printed it is incredibly short, if you remove the unneeded there would only be a few pages of useful information. I also feel like the font and formatting was obnoxious and difficult to read(I am young and I don't think I have said that before in my life).

Overall I think this book is an overpriced piece of fluff and your money is better spent elsewhere to improve your design aesthetic.

25 of 33 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Lots and lots of padding December 12, 2010

By orangekay VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm not a huge fan of Khoi's work, but I do respect his abilities enough to have had my interests piqued when I learned that he'd written a book on what it is he does. The entire point of titles like these is basically to watch how other people like to work so you can compare and contrast the solutions they arrive at against your own, and in that regard, it does not disappoint. Unfortunately, the bulk of the text is a lot of thoroughly irrelevant filler that talks down to its target audience as though they have no idea what designers do or how they do it. The first four chapters in particular are a complete waste of time, and even when you get to the good parts, there's a lot of over-explanation and exposition that doesn't need to be there. If you took out all the fluff, you'd basically have a really long blog post's worth of information, and I'm hard-pressed to justify the fact that I spent this much money on it.

And the font the entire thing is set in is just ridiculous. I know we're all really jazzed about the Tron sequel and all, but was this typographic homage to 80's era futurism really necessary?

Worth a look, but borrow someone else's copy if you can.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book that needs a demo website July 10, 2011

By Brian Pitts

Format:Paperback

This is a great book that takes you through the design process to construct a fictional website, Designery.us. Unfortunately, you can't go to this site to see how the layout works; a feature that would definitely help the learner. Additionally, I could not find references to sites like [...] where you can overlay a grid system to test your layouts or the 960 Grid System Site (960.gs) to generate CSS. Although not the focus of this book, it would be nice to actually see the code used to construct this site. HTML5 and CSS are sorely missing from this book.

Overall it is a good overview that I enjoyed reading and learned from.