Rating this book is difficult. After finishing it, I would have given it 5 stars. I was impressed. I learned a lot about typography, SEO, proportions, composition, and color. It gave me a lot of reference points to use for making design decisions in those areas in the future. But something in my gut told me to hold off on reviewing this until I tried to design something and see how this book changed my process.
This led me to confusion. I opened photoshop to design a website I already had plans for. This book gave me a reference for which fonts to use, what color schemes would work well with the message of the site, and that everything — the fonts, the images, the boxes — should be proportional to each other. The book taught me to use all these things to create a hierarchy to show the reader what’s most important. But I still felt unsure about some critical design decisions: whats a good width layout to use for a website? I use a 5K monitor, and I see a lot of well designed sites that either expand to take up the whole width of the screen or expand to a maximum width and then stop. What goes in to making that decision? What about adjusting for mobile? But then I remembered that Kadavy said at the end of the introduction, “After reading this book, you still may not be totally satisfied with the very next design that you create.” He also brushes off the importance of giving you concrete rules to follow and instead wants you to know the more abstract principles that go into design.
So am I wrong to want to critique him for not doing something that he said he wasn’t going to do in the book? He did a great job at what he said he was going to do in the introduction. This is a beautiful and well written book.
Could it be that I misinterpreted the purpose of the book? He clearly states it’s about understanding the principles that go into design and not a how-to manual for web design. But the title “Design for Hackers” and the subtitle “reverse-engineering beauty” imply that he’s going to go over concrete examples of beautiful designs. It even states that’s what he’s going to do on the back of the book for web design. Could it be that I missed these examples in the book? No. I read his section on reverse-engineering Twitter. It’s six pages. He mentions it uses the golden ratio for proportions (which he says later is not all its cracked up to be), and then offers user personas, use cases, and wireframes for the Twitter design. Those last three things he never mentions again in the book (I checked the index). The bit on Target isn’t even about web design. It just talks about the power of the color red.
Maybe Kadavy didn’t write the back of the book. Or come up with the title. It doesn’t match the message of the book and it’s great advertising for persuading readers to buy the book. The title grabs the attention of any engineer who wants to learn design by speaking their language. The back of the book asks questions that you want to know the answers to, and you’ll get them if you buy the book. Or maybe he’s just a great salesman and wrote it himself. Either way, what he’s selling on the cover is a subtle bait-and-switch from what he’s selling in the intro — which he fulfills greatly.
My theory is that Kadavy wanted to write a book on the principles of design that are used on the web (which he does a great job of in the book), but for some reason felt like it would sell better if he promised to “reverse-engineer beauty”, which he half-heartedly attempts to do. I think it’s a great book for introducing the principles of web/graphic design, but the title, blurb, and back of the book duped me into thinking I would be ready to design a beautiful website after reading it. So since you’ve read this far, you’ve been warned.
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Great resource for theories on web design.
Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2019
This is a useful book, filled with theories of design principles to be used by web designers. I found the book easy to read and understand, but it can be difficult to put the theories into your actual web design practices. As you can see from the table of contents, this book contains a LOT of information. This book is a good starting point, but more information would be needed to create successful web design. Please mark if you find my review helpful. Thank you so much!
Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2019
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