Ask HN: A book/guide for hackers about desigining

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5301009

by _nato_ • 13 years ago

4 7 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

As a programmer, I want to start tackling the _full_ stack from making my own buttons in Illustrator/PS, to CSS, to fonts. Any must reads?

ataleb52• 13 years ago

Check this out: http://hackdesign.org/ They have a weekly set of "lessons" they send you and the reads are all really good.

_nato_• 13 years ago

This is a great start; I will commence tonight! Thanks!

illyism2• 13 years ago

This is pretty exciting. I'm stuck with reading 20 year old books about typography and design and it's not exciting me anymore. I think this will be a boost to my design knowledge.

illyism2• 13 years ago

In general, I would recommend learning about typography. The elements of typographic style by Robert Bringhurst is one that I liked as a typographic reference. I'm reading typographie by Emil Ruder and Display Typography by Erik K Bain right now and I would recommend the latter.

Design Thinking by Ellen Lupton will help with concept development, sketching, and research. I'm reading Graphic Design Process by Skolos & Wedell right now and I would recommend that too.

If you ever want to learn more about advertising, creative ideas, strategies and concept development, read The Advertising Concept Book by Pete Barry, it's surprisingly big.

hbien• 13 years ago

For a pragmatic overview the "Non Designer's Design Book" and "Bootstrapping Design" are great for developers. These cover the basics of layout, color, typography, contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity, and more.

Since you're interested in CSS, I assume this is geared towards the web. I'd recommend "Designing for the Web" by Mark Boulton which dives specifically into web design.

The above books gave a bird's eye view without implementation. I'd recommend reading "CSS Mastery" to learn how to actually implement a layout. If you decide to use CSS frameworks, usually the documentation is enough when you have a basic grasp of CSS.

Most Photoshop books I've found cover using it for editing photos, not for graphic design. You can read these and learn a lot from them still. "Photoshop Missing Manual" covers almost everything about Photoshop, but it's a long read. I'm a huge fan of Steve Caplin's books "How to Cheat in Photoshop", "Art and Design in Photoshop", and "100% Photoshop". Graphic editors are still used for patterns, but I'm noticing a trend towards using CSS more for buttons/shadows/gradients now.

merlinsbrain• 13 years ago

I'm in the same place you are, and this book is helping me out: Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty[1].

I'm mostly interesting in typography and color and this is a great read that covers all that and more.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Bea...

kadavy• 13 years ago

Hey, thanks for mentioning "Design for Hackers" (I wrote it!)

If anyone is looking for something beyond just the Kindle sample, there are some links to sample stuff at http://designforhackers.com

Ask HN: A book/guide for hackers about desigining

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