40+ Useful Free Online Books for Web Designers
Today, Web site Design is a very important part of current Graphic Design. To keep up with the fast-paced web design industry you must look out self education sources, such as books, books are very important, helps us to build our spirit, give information, helps us to write and think better, help us to chose right or wrong. Books are widely available everywhere as there are non-stop supply of information out there for us web designers.
Books are keen to assist you indesigning for today’s landscape, rather than rooting you in the past. With modern designers having to cater for mobile browsers, tablets, netbooks and also massive widescreen displays, the concept of design that anticipates and responds to your users’ needs is key. Here are the list of free eBooks which you should find very useful.
Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Typography
Why settle for casual flirtation when looking for a long-lasting relationship? Finding the perfect match is easy if you know the rules. MEET YOUR TYPE will help you overcome common obstacles, and keep your heart thumping for your one true love.
20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web
What’s a cookie? How do I protect myself on the web? And most importantly: What happens if a truck runs over my laptop?
For things you’ve always wanted to know about the web but were afraid to ask, All of those answers you can find in this ebook.
Introduction to Good Usability
One of the most important things to remember when designing a site is that the wheel has already been invented. Odds are, even as an experienced designer, you will not be able to design a new sort of interface that actually works well. Not to say that it isn’t possible, but it highly unlikely. Being unique and standing out when it comes to interfaces are not always a good thing.
This guide is especially handy if you haven’t done a lot of webdesign yet or if you are involved in webdesign but don’t do any of the real work. It shed some light on some common interface elements and mistakes people often make with them.
Search User Interfaces
This book presents the state of the art of search interface design, based on both academic research and deployment in commercial systems.
Taking Your Talent to the Web
This book was written for print designers whose clients want websites, print art directors who’d like to move into full–time web and interaction design, homepage creators who are ready to turn pro, and professionals who seek to deepen their web skills and understanding.
Time Management for Creative People
This 32 page eBook offers a lot if you really want to know how to manage time. It give good insight on finding the method in your creative madness, Identifying and prioritising your most important work, Getting in the right state of mind for focused work, How to minimise interruptions and distractions. and much more.
Designing for the Web
Designing for the web is different than designing for any other medium. The breadth of skills required is sometimes daunting. The depth of experience required, seemingly unobtainable. Yet, the medium attracts designers from all spheres of design practice: from engineering and architecture, to product and graphic design.
This book aims to provide a snapshot of the current state of the medium, and our role as practitioners working within it.
Type Classification
This book written by Jacob Cass from Just Creative Design. This book has been made to help you learn the 10 broad classifications of type with a brief history as well as the key characteristics of each. These are the basic foundations of what you need to learn to learn typography and it is essential for any designer to know how to classify type.
The Design Funnel: A Manifesto for Meaningful Design
Salespeople have a roadmap of the sales process, often called the Sales Funnel. The Sales Funnel is a metaphor for the typical process, from contact with many potential customers to the eventual payment of a single customer. The same idea is behind The Design Funnel.
The Design Funnel doesn’t introduce any new tools. It’s simply a roadmap of when a designer can use which tools to stimulate better work. As a matter of fact, many successful creatives use similar processes on a daily basis.
Getting Real
Want to build a successful web app? Then it’s time to Get Real. Getting Real is a smaller, faster, better way to build software. Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.
Web Designer’s Success Guide
is the definitive guide to starting your own freelance Web design business. In this book he gives designers step-by-step instructions on how to achieve Transition from full-time to self-employment, Freelance on the side to make additional income, Find new clients and keep them coming back for more, Market your freelance business, Manage your projects professionally, and Price your services appropriately.
Principles of Web Design
Joel Sklar has written the definitive text for Web site design, PRINCIPLES OF WEB DESIGN, Fifth Edition guiding readers through the entire Web site creation process, while developing and enhancing your HTML, CSS, and visual design skills along the way. Now updated to include the latest Web design technologies and trends, this Fifth Edition features all-new sections on HTML5, CSS3, CSS page layouts, and enhanced navigation as well as technical updates and new screen shots throughout.
Bulletproof Web Design
No matter how visually appealing or content packed a web site may be, if it doesn’t reach the widest possible audience, it isn’t truly successful. In Bulletproof Web Design, Third Edition, bestselling author and web designer Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that can accommodate the myriad ways users choose to view the content. Each chapter starts out with an example of an unbulletproof approach–one that employs traditional HTML-based techniques–which Dan deconstructs, pointing out its limitations.
A Concise Guide to Archiving for Designers
Archiving is not the same as keeping. It is about identifying items of lasting value. This guide provides designers with the proper ways to store and describe their collections.
Head First Html With CSS & XHTML
With Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, you’ll avoid the embarrassment of thinking web-safe colors still matter, and the foolishness of slipping a font tag into your pages. Best of all, you’ll learn HTML and CSS in a way that won’t put you to sleep. If you’ve read a Head First book, you know what to expect: a visually-rich format designed for the way your brain works. Using the latest research in neurobiology, cognitive science, and learning theory, this book will load HTML, CSS, and XHTML into your brain in a way that sticks.
Access by Design
Access by Design Online offers guidelines for universal usability, along with examples and links to related articles and tutorials. Resources provides general information about universal usability resources and practitioners.
Design Your Imagination
Design Your Imagination is a complete and comprehensive guide on website design suitable for freshers and expert web designers. The book has been written by some of most seasoned professionals and is divided into 28 comprehensive chapters. Each chapter is on a specific topic with a number of examples for better understanding. The language is lucid, to-the-point and easy to understand.
Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design
Accessibility is designing products so that people with disabilities can use them. Accessibility makes user interfaces perceivable, operable, and understandable by people with a wide range of abilities, and people in a wide range of circumstances, environments, and conditions. This ebook provides The basics of including accessibility in design projects, Details on accessibility in each phase of the user-centered design process.
Practical PHP Programming
This book aimes of making the task of learning PHP something fun that you don’t have to worry about. As such, you will find lots of information for newcomers, even those who have not programmed much before. On the other end of the scale, This book had lots of information on advanced functionality in PHP – if you’re a veteran user looking to take your PHP skills above and beyond where they are right now.
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style is on many a designer’s bookshelf and is considered to be a classic in the field. Indeed the renowned typographer Hermann Zapf proclaims the book to be “a must for everybody in the graphic arts, and especially for our new friends entering the field.”
The Woork Handbook
The Woork Handbook is a free eBook about CSS, HTML, Ajax, web programming, Mootools, Scriptaculous and other topics about web design directly from Woork! This book is a miscellanea of articles woork wrote on his blog in the period form January to December 2008.
How To Be Creative
MacLeod, an advertising executive and popular blogger with a flair for the creative, gives his 26 tried-and-true tips for being truly creative. Each point illustrated by a cartoon drawn by the author himself.
If you’ve ever felt the draw to do something creative but just haven’t been able to pull it together, you’ll love this manifesto.
HTML & XHTML: the definitive guide
About.com Put everthing you need to know about HTML & XHTML at your fingertips. For nearly a decade, hundreds of thousands of web developers have turned to HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide to master standards-based web development.
This edition guides you through every element of HTML and XHTML in detail, explaining how each element works and how it interacts with other elements. You’ll also find detailed discussions of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which is intricately related to web page development.
Web Style Guide
“Web Style Guide” written for web site designers in corporations, government, nonprofit organizations, and academic institutions, the book explains established design principles and covers all aspects of web design—from planning to production to maintenance. The guide also shows how these principles apply in web design projects whose primary concerns are information design, interface design, and efficient search and navigation.
Faster, and More Secure Webfonts
Font embedding for the web is a great step in making the web look better and become more functional, but what about security and load times?
Bram Pitoyo’s slide deck takes the top layer off font embedding and shows us how things work, and ultimately how to improve performance and make it more secure.
Essential JavaScript And jQuery Design Patterns
This book is targeted at professional developers wishing to improve their knowledge of design patterns and how they can be applied to the JavaScript programming language.
Some of the concepts covered (closures, prototypal inheritance) will assume a level of basic prior knowledge and understanding. If you find yourself needing to read further about these topics, a list of suggested titles is provided for convenience.
jQuery Fundamentals
jQuery is fast becoming a must-have skill for front-end developers. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the jQuery JavaScript library; when you’re done with the book, you should be able to complete basic tasks using jQuery, and have a solid basis from which to continue your learning. This book was designed as material to be used in a classroom setting, but you may find it useful for individual study.
JavaScript Programming for the Absolute Beginner
This book not only teachers JavaScript – a great programming ‘gateway’ language – it also teaches readers the fundamental programming concepts they need to grasp in order to learn any computer language. Plus, it uses game creation as a teaching tool. The goal of the series is adaptive learning. Readers will be able to utilize these skills when learning their next programming language.
Eloquent JavaScript
Eloquent JavaScript is a book providing an introduction to the JavaScript programming language and programming in general.
Besides explaining JavaScript, this book tries to be an introduction to the basic principles of programming. Programming, it turns out, is hard. The fundamental rules are, most of the time, simple and clear. But programs, while built on top of these basic rules, tend to become complex enough to introduce their own rules, their own complexity. Because of this, programming is rarely simple or predictable. As Donald Knuth, who is something of a founding father of the field, says, it is an art.
JavaScript: The Good Parts
Most programming languages contain good and bad parts, but JavaScript has more than its share of the bad, having been developed and released in a hurry before it could be refined. This authoritative book scrapes away these bad features to reveal a subset of JavaScript that’s more reliable, readable, and maintainable than the language as a whole-a subset you can use to create truly extensible and efficient code.
HTML5 WTF?
From Simon Schoeters, the author: Yet another overview of the changes introduced by HTML5. How does it look like? What are the milestones?
A Dialect of Our Own Design
Note & Point alumni Simon Collison has created a simple and striking slide deck that aided his talk at the 2011 Interlink Conference held in Vancouver. Elegant black slides, simple illustrations and clean type are used to teach designers at the conference about making informed design decisions while being creative.
Pro Drupal Development
Widely praised for its in-depth coverage of Drupal internals, bestsellingPro Drupal Developmenthas been updated for Drupal 6 in this edition, and provides are even more tricks of the trade to help you further yourself as a professional Drupal developer. Assuming you already know how to install and bring a standard installation online,John K. VanDykgives you everything else you need to customize your Drupal installation however you see fit.Pro Drupal Development, Second Editiondelves deep into Drupal internals, showing you how to take full advantage of its powerful architecture.
KnockKnock
Seth Godin’s incomplete guide to building a web site that works.
HTML5 Quick Learning Guide
This guide introduces you to just the main elements of HTML5 that you’ll probably want to use right away. This guide is for those who want to get the basics figured out first, and worry about the finer details later on.
The Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
Throughout your Web design or redesign project, you should take advantage of what is already known about best practices for each step of the process. The Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines, compiled through an extensive process of research and review, bring you those best practices.
This book includes all the guidelines, the Background and Methodology, the Glossary, Appendices, Sources, and the Author Index.
Ruby Best Practices
This book introduces a map of best practices of the language as of 2009 written by Gregory Brown. Greg Brown compiled his knowledge into this book. he is an experienced Ruby developer who has contributed a lot of projects to the language, such as Ruport and Prawn.
Web Design in a Nutshell
Web Design in a Nutshell, is one of the first books to capture this new web landscape with an edition that’s been completely rewritten and expanded to reflect the state of the art. In addition to being an authoritative reference for (X)HTML and Cascading Style Sheets, this book also provides an overview of the unique requirements of designing for the Web and gets to the nitty-gritty of JavaScript and DOM Scripting, web graphics optimization, and multimedia production. It is an indispensable tool for web designers and developers of all levels.
Ajax Design Patterns
“Ajax Design Patterns” shows you best practices that can dramatically improve your web development projects. It investigates how others have successfully dealt with conflicting design principles in the past and then relays that information directly to you.
This book will also get you up to speed with core Ajax technologies, such as XMLHttpRequest, the DOM, and JSON. Technical discussions are followed by code examples so you can see for yourself just what is-and isn’t-possible with Ajax. This handy reference will help you to produce high-quality Ajax architectures, streamline web application performance, and improve the user experience.
Web Design Reference Guide
this guide provides a snapshot of everything Web design. The information in this guide includes reference, news, and access to the Web design community. All articles, except where noted, have been written by Meryl Evans, who now maintains the Web Design blog. The Guide is broken into several sections, like, Web Design Reference Guide, Articles and Sample Chapters, Books and E-books, and Online Resources.
The Web Design Reference Guide also has a series of articles that introduce you to markup, Web graphics, accessibility, legal issues, and more. You may see crossovers to other guides, in which you can get in-depth information on the topics of interest to you. This guide provides the 30,000-foot view of Web design topics, whereas others—such as Photoshop, XML, and Flash—give you the 100-foot view.
Mobile Design and Development
This book was written to have something for everyone interested in designing in developing for mobile devices, regardless of experience and regardless of the application. The first half is a crash course in the mobile ecosystem: how to develop a strategy, address the mobile context—even how to decide which of the multiple mobile application types is best for you, and finally, how to create a user experience for it. The second half is focused on using these principles to make a mobile website or web app.
RSS and Atom: Understanding and Implementing Content Feeds and Syndication
RSS and Atom are the most widely used of many content syndication formats that have developed over the last few years to address the need to distribute and receive streams of content from websites and applications. Sites syndicate content for a broad variety of reasons, from replacing email as a medium for outbound contact to updating satellite sites. Each format has evolved to meet the changing needs of its driving community. All the common formats use a specific XML vocabulary to structure a stream of content in an easily consumable format.
The book starts by analyzing the need to distribute content that RSS emerged to meet. It outlines in development of the various formats as way of understanding how the technology map of today came about. The current status of the leading formats is summarized succinctly.
Thanks for these will have to find time to go through them. Which ones would you recommend?
Nice resource list. I bet my web designer buddies will be thrilled to see this. Are these all e-books? I think the Java script books are useful but I’ll try to go through the rest too. Thanks!
Looks like some very informative reading for everyone from the beginner to the pro! I’m just starting out and saw several things that I want to read as soon as my school semester is over…Thanks.
From the list above, I want to have the Time Management For Creative People. There are lots of times when I am hindered from being productive because I don’t know how to manage my time properly. Most of the moments, I am hooked with social media sites like facebook that I often forgotten my work.
Thanks so much – this was helpful!
Good informative & helping one sharing thanks
Nice post, thank you for sharing. You have really imparted useful knowledge. A very useful post I must say. Awesome content. I bookmarked it for future reference.
A great list. Thanks for sharing it.
Some of the books in your list are just Google Books. It don’t have a full page but still a good thing to share all of them. I really need to read some information about web design. I am not a web designer but I really interested in them since I read many blogger can earn money from it.
Already share your post in all social media. Hope some of my friends will read these too….
I am very interested in your post. the information about the web development is very interesting and useful for the developers. Thanks for share this info.
Nice & informative post. thanks for sharing this.
Thanks for these will have to find time to go through them. Which ones would you recommend?
From the list of above, I read “”A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web”” book that’s relay useful book for any graphics design beginner.
And I also want to suggest book “”Web Style Guide, 3rd Edition””, that is also useful for designer.
Thanks for these will have to discover a chance to go through them. Which ones would you recommend?
Thank you for featuring my book! I hope people find it useful!
Nice post, thank you for sharing very useful
Thanks for sharing!
Pretty basic stuff, don’t you think lol. No but seriously, good resources for the beginner…
Nice read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he actually bought me lunch since I found it for him smile Thus let me rephrase that: Thank you for lunch!
Great write-up, I am regular visitor of one’s blog, maintain up the nice operate, and It is going to be a regular visitor for a lengthy time.
I’m really glad I have found this info. Nowadays bloggers publish only about gossips and internet and this is really irritating. A good web site with exciting content, that is what I need. Thanks for keeping this site, I’ll be visiting it. Do you do newsletters? Can’t find it.
very nice… i really like your blog…Usually I never comment on blogs but your article is so convincing that I never stop myself to say something about it. You’re doing a great job Man,Keep it up.
Hello Sir, Thank you for sharing the guide books. but some of the pages are not opened. May be any kind of technical issue. please sir shot out this error for which we will able to understand all the files.
but find yourself eating take-out too often? Do you have strong convictions about the self-efficacy of individuals, but work a job that doesn’t allow you
ompassion for many of us. This is created by parts of us that have felt self rejection and self abandonment from us over the years. There is a process o
Great list of books. Thanks for sharing
I read your post and I found it amazing. Your thought process is wonderful. The way you express yourself is awesome.
Hello,
This is a great post. Thanks for sharing such a great article.
At Ideal designs, we believe that design should not just look good. It should also work well; it should be memorable and it should connect with the end-user. The success of many a business today depends on how vital a role ‘good’ design plays in their business strategy. Design is often the first thing that the consumer comes in contact with, before you can meet the company representative, you see the Logo… and ‘good’ or ‘effective’ design has already started playing a vital role.