As much as I hate creating websites, my latest project seems best suited as a website, so I'm back on the web design path. Looking for inspiration, I came across a book titled, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird, on some blogs. I realised that it was a Sitepoint book, and knowing Monash has a fair few in their libraries, I searched and found it there, brand new.
The thing that drew me to this book initially were the pictures - the book is full of screenshots of well-designed websites, as well as examples of how to design, position, edit individual elements.
Covering layout, colour, texture, typography and imagery, the book is well written, full of real-world examples, and simple to understand. That is also its downside though - there are a few tutorials on how to do things, but generally the book is about principles only. Leads on well to the 'anthology' set of books by Sitepoint I guess. It does offer some nice pointers to websites with good resources though.
One thing I don't agree with is the book's stance on hotlinking. It basically says any hotlinking is bad, whether it be hotlinking a diagram found on another blog, or a product image on a manufacturer's website. I think there it's ok if I hotlink an image from a product's website for the purposes of writing a review, especially if it's favourable. Or if I am writing about a book and I link to an image on a bookseller's website with a link to their product page, that should be ok too. Hotlinking a flickr image with attibution should be ok too. Generally, if the website being hotlinked gets some sort of benefit from the website hotlinking it, the hotlinked image is the least they could do, especially if they're a commercial entity.
Worth reading for a basic overview of the design factors that go into designing a website. I found I did some of it subconsciously anyway, but it's nice to have it in writing. The colour and typography theory was interesting as well.
Speaking of websites - stupid domain name squatters are driving me nuts! I can't think of a name for my new project that's available as a .com or .net. I could add suffixes to it like what 37signals do with basecamp (basecamphq.com) and backpack (backpackit.com), but I'd rather not. Back to the dictionary and thesaurus it is...