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Title: Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques by Kevin Mullet, Darrell Sano ISBN: 0-13-303389-9 Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR Pub. Date: 05 December, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $57.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.45 (20 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the top five books in GUI design
Comment: This is a great book if you know how to use it. Its not for people looking for cookbook approaches. Rather, it provides well argued information about the underlying principles of visual design. The authors ilustrate their points about grids, layout, typography, and color by showing examples of top notch efforts by some of the best information designers in the world.
Classic examples like the London subway maps and the National Park Service brochures are illustrated, along with excellent explanations of the design principles that make these particular design so successful.
The aurthors then go on to show how these examples can be applied to GUI design. And they are very gutsy as they show actual examples from actual software products that are "design failures". In fairness, they also show examples of well designed software, with explanations of why the design works so well.
This book is for a person who's willing to invest some time to learn about things like information hierarchies and information design. Like playing a piano, this isn't something one can master over night, but also like playing a piano, it has its own vast rewards.
Rating: 5
Summary: First-Rate Introduction to Principles of Interface Design
Comment: This is not a list of rules; it's a look at the underlying principles of interface design. Mullet and Sano take a point-by-point tour of the basic principles of visual design, bringing in good examples from a wide range of real-world products. Their examples range from computer interfaces to street signs. The authors do a fantastic job of illustrating these basic ideas; even the layout of the book is its own example. By itself, this book won't give you the recipe to program a good UI, but it will give you a starting point from which to build *great* UIs. Everyone involved in programming and designing software should read this book several times.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent, graphics oriented treatment
Comment: This book should certainly not be your first book on GUI design. You might want to check out Alan Cooper "About Face", Johnson "GUI Bloopers" or a similar one which focuses in a broad way specifically on GUIs. If you are interested in Web design you might prefer the excellent "Don't make me thing" from Steve Krug. Even if you want to look at GUI design with a strong graphics bias you might first want to read the beautiful books of Tufte.
Having said that and you still make it to this book. You get an excellent treatment of the graphic aspects of design in general and at many places with special applications to GUIs. Examples are posters, maps, public transportation information, different GUIs including the NextStep. If you like Piet Mondrian, the Bauhaus ... then you enjoy the positive examples a lot. The book gives some theoretical background and tries to help build our taste by showing good and bad solutions to design problems.
The pictures are well reproduced (mostly black and white) and of good quality. The cover of the book is somewhat horrid (on line order saved me here from not buying it). Also it is extremely soft cover - way too soft for such a valuable book.
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Title: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman ISBN: 0465067107 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 17 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug ISBN: 0789723107 Publisher: New Riders Pub. Date: 13 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert M. Reimann ISBN: 0764526413 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 17 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design by Deborah Mayhew, Deborah J. Mayhew ISBN: 1558605614 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Pub. Date: 15 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $57.95 |
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Title: The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett ISBN: 0735712026 Publisher: New Riders Pub. Date: 11 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
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