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Comment by stiff | Hacker News Reader

Good books, but not particularly good for hackers. I have the "The Elements of Typography Style" for example, it is certainly a classic, but it is written for people already familiar with typography to some extent, is very long and most of it isn't very relevant to web design.

A good design book for hackers, would have less than 200 pages and deal with the essentials, basic typography, using whitespace productively, grids, color theory etc. in a systematic way. If anyone has any recommendations for that kind of book, I would love to hear them.

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Agreed. These are great books, but "design for hackers" implies that these book will help you "hack" design, which they won't.

These books will help you get a better understanding of the principles of good design at root level, but they won't do much if you're just looking to make your app look or work better.

On the other hand, these books are much more practical:

http://bootstrappingdesign.com/

http://designforhackers.com/

http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/

And I also wrote a design eBook myself (not as good as the three above, but it's also a lot cheaper):

http://sachagreif.com/ebook

agreed. sacha's books above are really practical and go the next level.

Absolutely. I just finished reading Jarrod' Bootstrapping Design and it certainly is a great book to consider for web design.

The most compact book on design is only 46 pages, called "Notes on Graphic Design And Visual Communication." It's IMHO the best book on design even though it's a compact overview of the concepts and terminology... It's handwritten and probably the only handwritten book you'll ever read. It's worth buying just to own it.

I have met AIGA award designers and Internet design celebrities who don't know some of the basics laid out in this short book.

http://www.amazon.com/Crisp-Graphic-Design-Visual-Communicat....

I guess that main point of this post isn't about visual/graphical design - it's about ways of thinking and about design approaches to problem solving. It's good to find some new ideas (which could be useful in software development, like idea of Software Designs Patterns has been derived from Architecture formerly) to try think by different way.

The problem is not with the book, TETS, but rather then web is only now becoming able to deal with some of the advanced typographic treatments that physical books have been using for 100's of years.

The book opened my eyes, and has certainly affected my ebooks and the css I created to style them.

hey stiff, there is an excellent book (for web) that covers the essentials in a simple and very clear way. Really good. Might be more what you are looking for. http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/a-practical-guide-to...

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