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1. Never stop learning

Learning is never too much. You can never master everything, but at least you can try. Don’t limit yourself with just one direction. It’s always more advantageous to master for example Photoshop and Illustrator than just Photoshop. Nowadays there are tutorials and articles all over the internet. Try not just to look at the tutorial’s pictures, but try it as well. Make a new folder on your computer and try out some tutorials. You’ll be surprised that the things you saw as easy aren’t so easy at all. Accomplish yourself; you’ll be agreeably surprised about the results.

2. Read about design

It doesn’t matter if it’s a blog, a book or magazine. Stay up to date and read about things you’re interested in. You’ll find a lot of tutorials, articles and inspiration in blogs. Find time to really read something, not just run over the pictures.

30 Must Have WebDesign Books In Your Christmas Wishlist

3. See something good? Bookmark it!

Probably every day you see something good on the internet. A Tutorial, article or some inspiration. Bookmark all of them. After couple of months you’ll have a great reading material for late nights. It doesn’t apply just on the internet.

Have a great idea? Write it down.

Little by little collect thing in your mind, because it will be with you everywhere. Enrich your inside world.

4. Stay organized

Organize your life and your work. Arrange your bookmarks in folders as well as your work. Create sub folders in your work folder, so you could quickly find everything you need. If you are using someone’s stock images bookmark them in separate folder. “Useful articles”, “Photoshop resources”, “Inspiration” – those are some of my bookmark folders. Follow example and create something similar. You’ll be able to find thing you need much faster. Maybe you’re interested in using Delicious.

Plan Your Daily Schedule: Useful Resources

5. Use social networks

You can find tons of useful information about your interesting direction. Use the opportunity, visit social networking sites often, so you would be able to keep up. But don’t be just a monotonous posting machine. If you use a social network, for example, twitter then really use it. Don’t just sit there and post from twitterfeed. It’s not so hard sometimes to tell what are you doing, how are you feeling or something like that. People will know you better and maybe you could even get some potential clients.

6. Don’t be afraid to differ

People always tend to follow the crowd. Maybe somewhere it’s working, but definitely not in design. You have to differ from the others, have something unique just to you.

Don’t be afraid to express yourself.

Don’t believe silly charts like this. Develop your own style and stay cool.

7. Show off yourself

If you want to be known you have to show the world who you are. Use sites like http://www.deviantart.com/ and http://www.behance.net/ to show off your work. Take part in discussions and forums. Maybe you even want to create yourself a portfolio or a personal blog. Promote your works using social networks. But, please, don’t post everything on internet. That’s a typical mistake lots of people make. Only reason they’re creating art is to put it on internet as fast as possible. Don’t hurry. Here’s a quick tip. Always try to imagine what your actions influence is in future and is it worth trying. For example you are almost done with awesome design, but you feel that something’s missing. Don’t give it up and end the work. Push it aside and do something else till you again have inspiration. Then do some final checks and only then show it off. You won’t remember hard work spent on the work, but you will feel comments and praises. The same applies on physical exercises.

You won’t remember your sweat during the training, but you will see the result.

So, sometimes it’s really worth to try harder.

8. Make some money

If you’re doing something with which you can earn, then why don’t?

This is pretty conflicting tip, because a lot of people are doing this because they just love it. I totally agree with that, I’m considering myself as this type of people too. But extra money is always good. For example you can work as a freelancer. If you don’t like it you can write tutorials, guest posts or something like that. You can easily do thing you like and earn at the same time. Great thing is so called passive earnings. That means that you create your work just once and it can be on sale for months. I suggest you check out Envato marketplaces like http://graphicriver.net/. It’s really worth trying.

9. Do some sports

Don’t spend so much time with computer. It may come in conflict, because you’re a designer – you spend pretty much time working, learning and possibly dealing with clients. But care about your health.

You don’t want to be blind, with crooked back and with “computer” tan in your nearest future. Find yourself a hobby, do some sports, spend time with friends or just do something at home.

Believe me, people won’t be as impressed if you can create a working website from scratch, as they would be if you could, for example, sing karaoke very well. Find something you’re interested in and do it. You’ll renew your working capacity, feel better and maybe make some new friends.

10. Work less

You’re a bit shocked after reading headline right?

But working less means working more productive.

If you just don’t feel like working then don’t do it. If you aren’t able to work good just don’t do it. Instead of sitting there, trying to do something, stressing, go outside and blow the cobwebs away.

What Can You Do When You Have No Internet Connection?

11. Live not just exist

Step away from your everyday routine and enjoy life.

There’s no worse thing in life than having no friends.

Go outside, have fun, spend time with your friends, travel.

You live just once and maybe the only things you’ll have in your old age will be your memories.

Probably you will not want to remember your spent hours with computer, but something unique. Your graduation, first kiss or something wild you’ve done. Life’s much more than design. I hope you got the message told in last three tips and maybe I motivated you to change something.

Hope you’ll enjoy my tips, maybe you can add something here – you’re more than welcome to do that in comments!

In this article you’ll find books teaching you how to create great websites, get ideas, learn CSS,HTML, usability, typography, be aware about user experience, web standards,markup and much much more! Check for yourself!

Enjoy this collection, create your own wishlist and keep coming back – I will continue soon with article showcasing the most popular free webdesign and development books available as well! And again – if you wish to contribute and create better this website for everyone, just contact me and check contribute section to see what I can offer in exchange. Maybe you are capable on writing good review about some of these books? It would be extremely useful as well!

1. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

By Steve Krug

Visit Website: http://www.sensible.com/

Usability design is one of the most important–yet often least attractive–tasks for a Web developer. In Don’t Make Me Think, author Steve Krug lightens up the subject with good humor and excellent, to-the-point examples.

The title of the book is its chief personal design premise. All of the tips, techniques, and examples presented revolve around users being able to surf merrily through a well-designed site with minimal cognitive strain. Readers will quickly come to agree with many of the book’s assumptions, such as “We don’t read pages–we scan them” and “We don’t figure out how things work–we muddle through.” Coming to grips with such hard facts sets the stage for Web design that then produces topnotch sites.

Using an attractive mix of full-color screen shots, cute cartoons and diagrams, and informative sidebars, the book keeps your attention and drives home some crucial points. Much of the content is devoted to proper use of conventions and content layout, and the “before and after” examples are superb. Topics such as the wise use of rollovers and usability testing are covered using a consistently practical approach.

This is the type of book you can blow through in a couple of evenings. But despite its conciseness, it will give you an expert’s ability to judge Web design. You’ll never form a first impression of a site in the same way again. –Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered:

• User patterns
• Designing for scanning
• Wise use of copy
• Navigation design
• Home page layout
• Usability testing

2. Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

By Dan Cederholm

Web Standards are the standard technology specifications enforced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make sure that web designers and browser manufacturers are using the same technology syntax.

It is important that these implementations are the same throughout the Web, otherwise it becomes a messy proprietary place, and lacks consistency. These standards also allow content to be more compatible with multiple different viewing devices, such as screen readers for people with vision impairments, cell phones, PDFs, etc. HTML, XML, and CSS are all such technologies.

This book is your essential guide to understanding the advantages you can bring to your web pages by implementing web standards and precisely how to apply them. Web standards such as XHTML and CSS are now fairly well-known technologies, and they will likely be familiar to you, the web designer. Indeed, they are all around you on the Web. However, within web standards still lies a challenge: while the browser’s support for web standards is steadily increasing, many web developers and designers have yet to discover the real benefits of web standards and respect the need to adhere to them.

The real art is in truly understanding the benefits and implementing the standards efficiently. As a simple example of its power, you can use CSS to lay out your pages instead of nesting tables. This can make file sizes smaller, allowing pages to load faster, ultimately increasing accessibility for all browsers, devices, and web users.

• Expanded edition containing bonus material.
• Teaches how to use Web Standards effectively to build better web sites.
• Solutions style promotes learning by work-through examples and assessments.

3. Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTML & CSS

By Ian Lloyd

“Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS, 2nd Edition” teaches web development from scratch, without assuming any previous knowledge of HTML, CSS or web development techniques. This book introduces you to HTML and CSS as you follow along with the author, step-by-step, to build a fully functional web site from the ground up.

However, unlike countless other “learn web design” books, this title concentrates on modern, best-practice techniques from the very beginning, which means you’ll get it right the first time. The web sites you’ll build will:

Look good on a PC, Mac or Linux computer Render correctly whether your visitors are using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, or Safari Use web standards so your sites will be fast loading and easy to maintain Be accessible to disabled users who use screenreaders to browse the Web

By the end of the book, you’ll be equipped with enough knowledge to set out on your first projects as a professional web developer, or you can simply use the knowledge you’ve gained to create attractive, functional, usable and accessible sites for personal use.

4. Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting

By Andy Budd, Andy Clarke, Ian Lloyd, Cameron Adams, Rob Weychert, Ethan Marcotte, Dan Rubin, Derek Featherstone, Jeff Croft, Mark Boulton, Simon Collison

• Be inspired by 10 web design lessons from 10 of the worlds best web designers
• Get creative with cutting-edge XHTML, CSS, and DOM scripting techniques
• Learn breathtaking design skills while remaining standards-compliant

Here at friends of ED, we know that as a web designer or developer, your work involves more than just working to pay the bills. We know that each day, you strive to push the boundaries of your medium, unleashing your creativity in new ways to make your websites more engaging and attractive to behold, while still maintaining cross-browser support, standards compliance, and accessibility. That’s why we got together ten of the world’s most talented web designers to share their secrets with you. Web Standards Creativity is jam-packed with fresh, innovative design ideas. The topics range from essential CSS typography and grid design, effective styling for CMS-driven sites, and astonishing PNG transparency techniques, to DOM scripting magic for creating layouts that change depending on browser resolution and user preference, and better print layouts for web pages. We’re sure you will find something here to inspire you! This full-color book’s examples are not just stunning to look at, but

5. Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual

By David Sawyer McFarland

When it comes to building professional websites, Dreamweaver CS4 is capable of doing more than any other web design program — including previous versions of Dreamweaver. But the software’s sophisticated features aren’t simple. Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual will help you master this program quickly, so you can bring stunning, interactive websites to life.

Under the expert guidance of bestselling author and teacher David McFarland, you’ll learn how to build professional-looking websites quickly and painlessly. McFarland has loaded the book with over 150 pages of hands-on tutorials to help you create database-enabled PHP pages, use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for cutting-edge design, add XML-based news feeds, include dynamic effects with JavaScript and AJAX, and more. This witty and objective book offers jargon-free language and clear descriptions that will help you:

• Learn how to control the appearance of your web pages with CSS, from the basics to advanced techniques
• Design dynamic database-driven websites, from blogs to product catalogs, and from shopping carts to newsletter signup forms
• Add interactivity to your website with ready-to-use JavaScript programs from Adobe’s Spry Framework
• Effortlessly control the many helper files that power your website and manage thousands of pages
• Examine web-page components and Dreamweaver’s capabilities with the book’s “live examples”

Perfect for beginners who need step-by-step guidance, and for longtime Dreamweaver designers who need a handy reference to the new version, this thoroughly updated edition of our bestselling Missing Manual is your complete guide to designing, organizing, building, and deploying websites. It’s the ultimate atlas for Dreamweaver CS4.

6. The Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design

By Patrick Mcneil

The Web Designer’s Idea Book includes more than 700 websites arranged thematically, so you can find inspiration for layout, color, style and more. Author Patrick McNeil has cataloged more than 20,000 sites on his website, and showcased in this book are the very best examples.

Sites are organized by color, design style, type, theme, element and structure. It’s easy to use and reference again and again, whether you’re talking with a co-worker or discussing website design options with a client. As a handy desk reference for design layout, color and style, this book is a must-have for starting new projects.

7.Will be updated

8. Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics

By Jennifer Niederst Robbins, Aaron Gustafson

Visit Website: http://www.learningwebdesign.com/

Everything you need to know to create professional web sites is right here. Learning Web Design starts from the beginning — defining how the Web and web pages work — and builds from there. By the end of the book, you’ll have the skills to create multi-column CSS layouts with optimized graphic files, and you’ll know how to get your pages up on the Web.

This thoroughly revised edition teaches you how to build web sites according to modern design practices and professional standards. Learning Web Design explains:

• How to create a simple (X)HTML page, how to add links and images
• Everything you need to know about web standards — (X)HTML, DTDs, and more
• Cascading Style Sheets — formatting text, colors and backgrounds, using the box model, page layout, and more
• All about web graphics, and how to make them lean and mean through optimization
• The site development process, from start to finish
• Getting your pages on the Web — hosting, domain names, and FTP

The book includes exercises to help you to learn various techniques, and short quizzes to make sure you’re up to speed with key concepts. If you’re interested in web design, Learning Web Design is the place to start.

9. The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

By Jason Beaird

Tired of making web sites that work absolutely perfectly but just don’t look nice?

If so, then “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” is for you. A simple, easy-to-follow guide, illustrated with plenty of full-color examples, this book will lead you through the process of creating great designs from start to finish. Good design principles are not rocket science, and using the information contained in this book will help you create stunning web sites. Understand the design process, from discovery to implementation Understand what makes “good design” Developing pleasing layouts using grids, the rule of thirds, balance and symmetry Use color effectively, develop color schemes and create a palette Use textures, lines, points, shapes, volumes and depth Learn how good typography can make ordinary designs look great Effective imagery: choosing, editing and placing images And much more

Throughout the book, you’ll follow an example design, from concept to completion, learning along the way. The book’s full-color layout and large format (8″ x 10″) make The Principles Of Beautiful Wed Design a pleasure to read.

10. Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual

By Matthew MacDonald

Get everything you need to plan and launch a web site, including detailed instructions and clear-headed advice on ready-to-use building blocks, powerful tools like CSS and JavaScript, and Google’s Blogger. The thoroughly revised, completely updated new edition of Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual explains how to get your site up and running quickly and correctly.

11. Designing Interfaces

By Jenifer Tidwell

Designing a good interface isn’t easy. Users demand software that is well-behaved, good-looking, and easy to use. Your clients or managers demand originality and a short time to market. Your UI technology — web applications, desktop software, even mobile devices — may give you the tools you need, but little guidance on how to use them well.

UI designers over the years have refined the art of interface design, evolving many best practices and reusable ideas. If you learn these, and understand why the best user interfaces work so well, you too can design engaging and usable interfaces with less guesswork and more confidence.

“Designing Interfaces” captures those best practices as design patterns — solutions to common design problems, tailored to the situation at hand. Each pattern contains practical advice that you can put to use immediately, plus a variety of examples illustrated in full color. You’ll get recommendations, design alternatives, and warnings on when not to use them.

Each chapter’s introduction describes key design concepts that are often misunderstood, such as affordances, visual hierarchy, navigational distance, and the use of color. These give you a deeper understanding of why the patterns work, and how to apply them with more insight.

A book can’t design an interface for you — no foolproof design process is given here — but “Designing Interfaces” does give you concrete ideas that you can mix and recombine as you see fit. Experienced designers can use it as a sourcebook of ideas. Novice designers will find a roadmap to the world of interface and interaction design, with enough guidance to start using these patterns immediately.

12. A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making

By Russ Unger, Carolyn Chandler

User experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application—one that’s easily navigated and meets the needs of both the site owner and its users. But there’s a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, project management skills, and business savvy. That’s where this book comes in. Authors Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler show you how to integrate UX principles into your project from start to finish.

• Understand the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support
• Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives
• Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep
• Conduct user research and document your findings
• Understand and communicate user behavior with personas
• Design and prototype your application or site
• Make your product findable with search engine optimization
• Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance

13. Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions

By Bill Scott, Theresa Neil

Want to learn how to create great user experiences on today’s Web? In this book, UI experts Bill Scott and Theresa Neil present more than 75 design patterns for building web interfaces that provide rich interaction. Distilled from the authors’ years of experience at Sabre, Yahoo!, and Netflix, these best practices are grouped into six key principles to help you take advantage of the web technologies available today. With an entire section devoted to each design principle, Designing Web Interfaces helps you:

• Make It Direct-Edit content in context with design patterns for In Page Editing, Drag & Drop, and Direct Selection
• Keep It Lightweight-Reduce the effort required to interact with a site by using In Context Tools to leave a “light footprint”
• Stay on the Page-Keep visitors on a page with overlays, inlays, dynamic content, and in-page flow patterns
• Provide an Invitation-Help visitors discover site features with invitations that cue them to the next level of interaction
• Use Transitions-Learn when, why, and how to use animations, cinematic effects, and other transitions
• React Immediately-Provide a rich experience by using lively responses such as Live Search, Live Suggest, Live Previews, and more

Designing Web Interfaces illustrates many patterns with examples from working websites. If you need to build or renovate a website to be truly interactive, this book gives you the principles for success.

14. Head First Web Design

By Ethan Watrall, Jeff Siarto

Want to know how to make your pages look beautiful, communicate your message effectively, guide visitors through your website with ease, and get everything approved by the accessibility and usability police at the same time? Head First Web Design is your ticket to mastering all of these complex topics, and understanding what’s really going on in the world of web design. Whether you’re building a personal blog or a corporate website, there’s a lot more to web design than div’s and CSS selectors, but what do you really need to know? With this book, you’ll learn the secrets of designing effective, user-friendly sites, from customer requirements to hand-drawn storyboards all the way to finished HTML and CSS creations that offer an unforgettable online presence. Your time is way too valuable to waste struggling with new concepts. Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Web Design uses a visually rich format specifically designed to take advantage of the way your brain really works.

15. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites

By Peter Morville, Louis Rosenfeld

In Chapter 6 of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the authors discuss the details of good search-engine design. In a bitingly humorous segment, they analyze a Web site’s search-page results: “Let’s say you’re interested in knowing what the New Jersey sales tax is…. So you go to the State of New Jersey web site and search on sales tax. The 20 results are scored at either 84% or 82% relevant. Why does each document receive only one of two scores?… And what the heck makes a document 2% more relevant than another?”

With a swift and convincing stroke, the authors of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web tear down many entrenched ideas about Web design. Flashy animations are cool, they agree, as long as they don’t aggravate the viewer. Nifty clickable icons are nice, but are their meanings universal? Is the search engine providing results that are useful and relevant? This book acts as a mirror and with careful questioning causes the reader to think through all the elements and decisions required for well-crafted Web design. –Jennifer Buckendorff –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

16. Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (2nd Edition)

By Dan Cederholm

No matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be, if it’s not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn’t really succeeding. In Bulletproof Web Desing, author and Web designer extraordinaire, Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control – key components of every sucessful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of an unbulletproof site one that employs a traditional HTML-based approach which Dan then deconstructs, pointing out its limitations. He then gives the site a make-over using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you can see how to replace bloated code with lean markup and CSS for fast-loading sites that are accessible to all users. Finally, he covers several popular fluid and elastic-width layout techniques and pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template.

17. Sexy Web Design: Creating Interfaces That Work

By Jina Bolton, Elliot Jay Stocks

Sexy Web Design is an easy-to-follow guide that reveals the secrets of how to build your own breathtaking web interfaces from scratch. You’ll be guided through the entire process of creating a gorgeous, usable web site by applying the timeless principles of user-centered design.

Even if you’re short on design skills, with this book you’ll be creating your own stunning web sites in no time at all.

Throughout, the focus is on simple and practical techniques that anyone can use – you don’t need to have gone to art school or have artistic flair to create stunning designs using the methods outlined in this book.

The book’s full-color layout and large format (8″ x 10″) make Sexy Web Design a pleasure to read. Master key web interface design principles Design amazing web interfaces from scratch Create beautiful, yet functional, web sites Unleash your artistic talents And much more

18. Robin Williams Design Workshop, 2nd Edition

By Robin Williams, John Tollett

Learn design theory and practical know-how from the award-winning author/design team, Robin Williams and John Tollett! Robin Williams introduced design and typographic principles to legions of readers with her best-selling Non-Designer’s book series. Now she and designer/co-author John Tollett take you to the next level of creative design with practical advice and lessons in composition, visual impact, and design challenges.

Presented in Robin and John’s signature style—writing that is so crystal clear, it’s accessible to absolutely anyone—and illustrated with hundreds of full-color design examples, the ideas in this book tackle design theory, visual puns, and layout and graphics strategies for real-world projects. Developing designers will appreciate the authors’ imaginative approach and well-chosen examples.

• Discover practical and effective design principles and concepts—and how to apply them to virtually any project.
• Learn why some designs are attention-getting and others are not.
• Learn how to choose just the right look—corporate or casual, classic or trendy—for specific types of projects, such as business cards, letterhead and envelopes, newsletters and brochures, logos, advertising, and more.
• Test your design acumen by comparing before-and-after examples.
• Find a wealth of inspiration for your own design projects.
• Gain insight into the design process by studying the work of guest designers, who offer their personal commentary and insights.

19. Designing with Web Standards (2nd Edition)

By Jeffrey Zeldman

Standards, argues Jeffrey Zeldman in Designing With Web Standards, are our only hope for breaking out of the endless cycle of testing that plagues designers hoping to support all possible clients. In this book, he explains how designers can best use standards–primarily XHTML and CSS, plus ECMAScript and the standard Document Object Model (DOM)–to increase their personal productivity and maximize the availability of their creations. Zeldman’s approach is detailed, authoritative, and rich with historical context, as he is quick to explain how features of standards evolved. It’s a fantastic education that any design professional will appreciate.

Zeldman is an idealist who devotes some of his book to explaining how much easier life would be if browser developers would just support standards properly (he’s done a lot toward this goal in real life, as well). He is also a pragmatist, who recognizes that browsers implement standards differently (or partially, or not at all) and that it is the job of the Web designer to make pages work anyway. Thus, his book includes lots of explicit and tightly focused tips (with code) that have to do with bamboozling non-compliant browsers into behaving as they should, without tripping up more compliant browsers. There’s lots of coverage of design and testing tools that can aid in the creation of good-looking, standards-abiding documents. –David Wall

20. Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design

By Robert Hoekman Jr.

Designing the Obvious belongs in the toolbox of every person charged with the design and development of Web-based software, from the CEO to the programming team. Designing the Obvious explores the character traits of great Web applications and uses them as guiding principles of application design so the end result of every project instills customer satisfaction and loyalty. These principles include building only whats necessary, getting users up to speed quickly, preventing and handling errors, and designing for the activity. Designing the Obvious does not offer a one-size-fits-all development process–in fact, it lets you use whatever process you like. Instead, it offers practical advice about how to achieve the qualities of great Web-based applications and consistently and successfully reproduce them.

CSS Topic

21. CSS: The Missing Manual

By David Sawyer McFarland

“Almost 500 pages of CSS help, with more than 100 pages of practical tutorials to guide you through the process of implementing and refining CSS to save you many a wasted hour. At GBP25, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better guide to designing with CSS.”

You can tap into the real power of this tool with CSS: The Missing Manual. This second edition combines crystal-clear explanations, real-world examples, and dozens of step-by-step tutorials to show you how to design sites with CSS that work consistently across browsers. Witty and entertaining, this second edition gives you up-to-the-minute pro techniques.

You’ll learn how to:

• Create HTML that’s simpler, uses less code, is search-engine friendly, and works well with CSS
• Style text by changing fonts, colors, font sizes, and adding borders
• Turn simple HTML links into complex and attractive navigation bars — complete with rollover effects
• Create effective photo galleries and special effects, including drop shadows
• Get up to speed on CSS 3 properties that work in the latest browser versions
• Build complex layouts using CSS, including multi-column designs
• Style web pages for printing

22. CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

By Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Cameron Moll

Over the past couple of years, web designers and developers have begun taking more care in designing and building web sites. Less readily do they turn to old-fashioned techniques such as GIF spacers, tables for layout, and deprecated HTML elements, which can cause accessibility/usability problems and are just bad practice. There are three main web standards married together to create usable, standards-compliant web designs – XHTML for data structure, JavaScript for dynamic effects, and Cascading Style Sheets for styling your data.

Working as a companion to our Web Standards Solutions book, this title covers advanced Cascading Style Sheet techniques, and includes are all the techniques you need to master CSS and craft modern, standards-compliant web page designs. You’ll already know why you should be using CSS, so we don’t bore you with pages of theory; instead, we jump straight into practical solutions, allowing you to get what you need as quickly as possible.

Renowned web designer Andy Budd starts off by introducing the elements of an effective CSS toolkit, including good working practices, the cascade, the box model, relative and absolute positioning, floating, and more. He then delves into advanced techniques like replacing images, styling links and lists, creating navigation menus, making forms look good, debugging and overcoming browser quirks, and hacking and filtering. The book is rounded off with two case studies to give you inspiration for your own designs, written by two more of the world’s finest web designers, Simon Collinson and Cameron Moll.

23. The Ultimate CSS Reference

By Tommy Olsson, Paul O’Brien

A complete and thorough and up-to-date reference guide for CSS.

Stop wasting time doing Internet searches only to find inaccurate, out-of-date, or incomplete information. “CSS: The Ultimate Reference” includes all the ins-and-outs you need to know including compatability information for all major browsers, lists of useful hacks, known bugs in CSS, and much more – all presented in a beautiful, full color layout that will have you coming back over and over again.

Coverage includes: CSS 2.1 syntax and specifications, including features from current CSS 3 working drafts that are implemented in one or more major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera), and useful browser-specific features A clear and concise guide to the CSS cascade, including compatability information, known bugs and useful CSS hacks A media type guide, with coverage of which media types apply in which user agents under what conditions. A quick-reference guide to currently supported at-rules (@import, @media, etc.). An alphabetical property reference.

24. The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web

By Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag

Proving once and for all that standards-compliant design does not equal dull design, this inspiring tome uses examples from the landmark CSS Zen Garden site as the foundation for discussions on how to create beautiful, progressive CSS-based Web sites. By using the Zen Garden sites as examples of how CSS design techniques and approaches can be applied to specific Web challenges, authors Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag provide an eye-opening look at the range of design methods made possible by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). By the time you’ve finished perusing the volume, you’ll have a new understanding of the graphically rich, fully accessible sites that CSS design facilitates. In sections on design, layout, imagery, typography, effects, and themes, Dave and Molly take you through every phase of the design process–from striking a sensible balance between text and graphics to creating eye-popping special effects (no scripting required).

25. CSS Cookbook, 3rd Edition (Animal Guide)

By Christopher Schmitt, Dan Cederholm

This cookbook provides you with hundreds of practical examples for using CSS to format your web pages, complete with code recipes you can use in your projects right away. With CSS Cookbook, you’ll go beyond theory to solve real problems, from determining which aspects of CSS meet the specific needs of your site to methods for resolving differences in the way browsers display it.

Arranged in a quick-lookup format for easy reference, the third edition has been updated to explain the unique behavior of the latest browsers: Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft’s IE 8, and Mozilla’s Firefox 3.

• Learn the basics, such as understanding CSS rule structure
• Work with web typography and page layout
• Create effects for images and page elements
• Learn techniques for formatting lists, forms, and tables
• Design effective web navigation and create custom links
• Get creative by combining CSS with JavaScript
• Learn useful troubleshooting techniques, hacks, and workarounds

26.

The Art & Science of CSS

By Jonathan Snook, Steve Smith, Jina Bolton, Cameron Adams, David Johnson

CSS-based design doesn’t need to be boring. “The Art & Science of CSS” brings together a talented collection of designers who will show you how to take the building blocks of your web site’s design (such as headings, navigation, forms, and more) and bring them to life with fully standards-compliant CSS.

This full color book helps you to design web sites that not only work well across all browsers, are easy to maintain, and are highly accessible, but are also visually stunning.

Create truly attention-grabbing headings. Discover multiple ways to present images effectively. Use background images to give your site zest. Build usable and attractive navigation. Design forms that are stylish and functional. Learn how to break away from the square box gclich. Create funky tables. And lots more From the Publisher.

This book is ideal for anyone who wants to gain the practical skills involved in using CSS to make attractive web sites, especially if you’re not the type who likes to learn by memorizing a formal specification and then trying to work out which browsers implemented it completely (does anyone enjoy reading specifications?). The only knowledge you’ll need to have is some familiarity with HTML. This book will give designers the skills they need to implement their ideas, and provides developers with creative inspiration through practical examples.

27. CSS: The Definitive Guide

By Eric A Meyer

CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition, provides you with a comprehensive guide to CSS implementation, along with a thorough review of all aspects of CSS 2.1. Updated to cover Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft’s vastly improved browser, this new edition includes content on positioning, lists and generated content, table layout, user interface, paged media, and more.

Simply put, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a way to separate a document’s structure from its presentation. The benefits of this can be quite profound: CSS allows a much richer document appearance than HTML and also saves time–you can create or change the appearance of an entire document in just one place; and its compact file size makes web pages load quickly.

Author Eric Meyer tackles the subject with passion, exploring in detail each individual CSS property and how it interacts with other properties. You’ll not only learn how to avoid common mistakes in interpretation, you also will benefit from the depth and breadth of his experience and his clear and honest style. This is the complete sourcebook on CSS.

The 3rd edition contains:

• Updates to reflect changes in the latest draft version of CSS 2.1
• Browser notes updated to reflect changes between IE6 and IE7
• Advanced selectors supported in IE7 and other major browsers included
• A new round of technical edits by a fresh set of editors
• Clarifications and corrected errata, including updated URLs of referenced online resources

28. Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns

By Michael Bowers

Visit Website: www.cssDesignPatterns.com

Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns is a reference book and a cookbook on how to style web pages using CSS and XHTML. It contains 350 ready–to–use patterns (CSS and XHTML code snippets) you can copy and paste into your code. Each pattern can be combined with other patterns to create an unlimited number of solutions.

Each pattern works reliably in all major browsers without the need for browser hacks.

The book shows how to

• Code CSS and XHTML
• Turn HTML into XHTML
• Use CSS Selectors
• Use six CSS Box Models
• Create rounded corners, shadows, gradients, sprites, and transparency
• Replace text with images without affecting accessibility
• Style text with fonts, highlights, decorations, and shadows
• Create flexible, fluid layouts
• Position elements with absolute pixel precision
• Stack elements in layers
• Size, stretch, shrinkwrap, indent, align, and offset elements
• Style tables with borders and alternating striped rows
• Size table columns automatically
• Integrate CSS and JavaScript without embedding JavaScript in XHTML
• Create drop caps, callouts, quotes, and alerts

The book’s layout, with a pattern’s example on the left page and its explanation on the right, makes it easy to find a pattern and study it without having to flip between pages. The book is also readable from cover to cover, with topics building carefully upon previous topics.

A software developer can use this book to learn CSS for the first time. A designer familiar with CSS can use this book to master CSS and XHTML. If you are completely new to coding or completely new to CSS and XHTML, you may want to read an introductory book on CSS and XHTML first.

Typography Topic

29. The Elements of Typographic Style

By Robert Bringhurst

This lovely, well-written book is concerned foremost with creating beautiful typography and is essential for professionals who regularly work with typographic designs. Author Robert Bringhurst writes about designing with the correct typeface; striving for rhythm, proportion, and harmony; choosing and combining type; designing pages; using section heads, subheads, footnotes, and tables; applying kerning and other type adjustments to improve legibility; and adding special characters, including punctuation and diacritical marks. The Elements of Typographic Style teaches the history of and the artistic and practical perspectives on a variety of type families that are available in Europe and America today.

The last section of the book classifies and displays many type families, offers a glossary of typography terms, and lists type designers and type foundries. The book briefly mentions digital typography, but otherwise ignores it, focusing instead on general typography and page- and type-design issues. Its examples include text in a variety of languages–including English, Russian, German, and Greek–which is particularly helpful if your work has a multinational focus. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

30. Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs)

By Ellen Lupton

Visit Website: http://www.papress.com/other/thinkingwithtype/index.htm

“Worthy of adding to your library; it’s essential if you salivate when you look at well-designed and well-chosen type.”

“Design isnt just about how things look, the answer to a design challenge is more about discovering why certain things work. In steering projects toward visual solutions that deliver clear messages, we have to look at the very building blocks of design. Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, – Students aims to get at the heart of this issue.” — Brian E. Young (March 2, 2009)

Share Your Thoughts!

What is your favorite design book you have ever read? Share your recommendations as well so I could maybe improve this article so we all could have ideal Christmas wishlist, you can bookmark for later reference. Now when anybody will ask what would you wish, you can just point to this article and slowly create your own library, which will never disappear as virtual resources could!