Finally a book aimed at the non-beginner market

Written by Andy Clarke this book is probably the must have web design book of 2007.

The book itself is beautiful to hold and some fantastic photography sourced from Flickr has produced a programming book that looks like no other. His writing style is informal and chatty, what seems to have become the fashion lately. But then using the diagrams and graphics to do what they do best: illustrate the concepts visually. This really clicked with me as I am the sort of guy who needs to draw everything before he understands it.

Clarke first concentrates on marking up the content semantically before even thinking about the design, before following with putting together a working prototype instead of the traditional wireframes you might expect.

All this makes complete sense as soon as it’s put together, reflecting how I had already started to work but giving me courage that it was the right thing to do. Clarke’s approach shares a great deal with the Getting Real approach put forward by the 37 signals team.

The second half of the book deals with more general design issues and less code, talking about grids, scrapbooks and getting inspiration from the world around you. All very useful stuff.

In fact my only caveat is about the preface from Dave Shea (of the Zen Garden) and to a lesser extent the foreword from Molly Holzschlag (of the Internet). I found it to be a bit too much of a plug for their own published work. Even down to having a image of the Zen Garden book (written by them both) amongst the text! Shameless plug never did anyone any harm, I guess.

However this is a fine work and pleasingly different from most other books on the subject. Some might feel its a bit light on multiple examples but that misses the point somewhat, the point is the process and moving on past just using CSS. The intent of the book is in the title: web design needs to move on to become an art rather than an afterthought.

Amazon UK