

Ask HN: A book/guide for hackers about desigining - _nato_

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?
======
hbien
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
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-
Beauty/dp/1119998956)

~~~
kadavy
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>

------
illyism
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.

------
ataleb52
Check this out: <http://hackdesign.org/> They have a weekly set of "lessons"
they send you and the reads are all really good.

~~~
illyism
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.

