A while ago, we shared 25 great web design and development books and, since this earlier post got a great response (and we’ve read a lot more books since), we’ve now gathered another 25.
In this list, you’ll find books about design, theory, development, CSS, HTML, and a lot more. I hope you enjoy this post!
When Search Meets Web Usability
Author: Shari Thurow
Topics: Web-Design, SEO, UX
Price: $15.11
This book delivers a proactive approach to building an effective website that is search engine-friendly and will result in better search rankings. It outlines the steps needed to bridge the gap between a Google search and a website, and also improve the user experience once they get to the site. By understanding the wide variety of information-seeking strategies and the individual behaviors associated with them, this book helps information architects, web designers/developers, SEOs/SEMs, and usability professionals build better interfaces and functionality into websites.
The Smashing Book #1
Authors: Multiple authors
Topics: Web-Design, UX, Typography, more…
Price: $23.38
The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability, and optimization. It also explores how to create successful user interfaces and applies marketing principles to increase conversion rates. Plus, it shows how to get the most out of typography, color, and branding, so that you end up with intuitive and effective web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.
The Smashing Book #2
Authors: Multiple authors
Topics: Web-Design, UX, Typography, more…
Price: $6.90
This book shares valuable practical insight into design, usability, and coding. It provides professional advice for designing mobile applications and building successful e-commerce websites, and it explains common coding mistakes and how to avoid them. You’ll explore the principles of professional design thinking and graphic design and learn how to apply psychology and game theory to create engaging user experiences.
CSS3 For Web Designers
Author: Dan Cederholm
Topics: CSS3, Web-Design, Development
Price: $24.00
From advanced selectors to generated content to the triumphant return of web fonts, and from gradients, shadows, and rounded corners to full-blown animations, CSS3 is a universe of creative possibilities. No one can better guide you through these galaxies than world-renowned designer, author, and CSS superstar Dan Cederholm. Learn what works, how it works, and how to work around browsers where it doesn’t work.
HTML5 For Web Designers
Author: Jeremy Keith
Topics: HTML5, Web-Design, Development
Price: $24.00
The HTML5 spec is quite hard to read probably due to its thickness. However, HTML5 for Web Designers is pretty short and fun to read. Easy choice. HTML5 is the longest HTML specification ever written. It is also the most powerful, and in some ways, the most confusing. What do accessible, content-focused standards-based web designers and front-end developers need to know? And how can we harness the power of HTML5 in today’s browsers?
Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning
Author: Dan M. Brown
Topics: Web-Design, Development, IA, UI
Price: $31.69
Successful web design teams depend on clear communication between developers and their clients—and among members of the development team. Wireframes, site maps, flow charts, and other design diagrams establish a common language so designers and project teams can capture ideas, track progress, and keep their stakeholders informed.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
Author: Steve Krug
Topics: Usability, UX
Price: $29.97
It’s been known for years that usability testing can dramatically improve products. But with a typical price tag of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usability consultant to conduct each round of tests, it rarely happens. In this how-to companion to Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug spells out an approach to usability testing that anyone can easily apply to their own web site, application, or other product. (As he said in Don’t Make Me Think, “It’s not rocket surgery”.)
Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
Author: Jenifer Tidwell
Topics: UI, Design, Usability
Price: $45.95
Despite all of the UI toolkits available today, it’s still not easy to design good application interfaces. This best-selling book is one of the few reliable sources to help you navigate through the maze of design options. By capturing UI best practices and reusable ideas as design patterns, Designing Interfaces provides solutions to common design problems that you can tailor to the situation at hand.
Think Unstuck
Author: Tanner Christensen
Topics: Creativity, Productivity
Price: $14.59
Discover more than 100 ways to be creative… Want to be more creative right now? Download Think Unstuck and get creative strategies, examples, and insights that have been used by creative geniuses for centuries.
Logo Design Love: A Guide to Creating Iconic Brand Identities
Author: David Airey
Topics: Design, Theory, Logo
Price: $2.47
In Logo Design Love, Irish graphic designer David Airey brings the best parts of his wildly popular blog of the same name to the printed page. Just as in the blog, David fills each page of this simple, modern-looking book with gorgeous logos and real world anecdotes that illustrate best practices for designing brand identity systems that last.
Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field
Author: Helen Armstrong
Topics: Graphic Design, Theory, more…
Price: $20.99
Graphic Design Theory is organized in three sections: “Creating the Field” traces the evolution of graphic design over the course of the early 1900s, including influential avant-garde ideas of futurism, constructivism, and the Bauhaus; “Building on Success” covers the mid- to late twentieth century and considers the International Style, modernism, and postmodernism; and “Mapping the Future” opens at the end of the last century and includes current discussions on legibility, social responsibility, and new media. Striking color images illustrate each of the movements discussed and demonstrate the ongoing relationship between theory and practice.
Speaking in Styles: Fundamentals of CSS for Web Designers
Author: Jason Cranford Teague
Topics: Web-Design, CSS
Price: $17.28
Speaking in Styles aims to help web designers learn the “language” that will be used to take their vision from the static comp to the live Internet. Many designers think that CSS is code, and that it’s too hard to learn. Jason takes an approach to CSS that breaks it down around common design tasks and helps the reader learn that they already think in styles–they just need to learn to speak the language.
Hardboiled Web Design
Author: Andy Clarke
Topics: Web-Design, CSS, HTML
Price: £7.99
If you care about markup, you’re in for a treat because we focus on how to use the new semantic elements contained within HTML5 right now. We also cover microformats and WAI-ARIA landmark roles, looking at how they’ll reduce your reliance on presentational elements and attributes, as well as making your websites and applications more useful without doing anything more than writing HTML.
A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web
Author: Mark Boulton
Topics: Web-Design, Typography, Theory
Price: $11.98
A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.
A Practical Guide to Designing with Data
Author: Brian Suda
Topics: Design, Data, Theory
Price: $9.99
In recent years, the terms Visualization, Infographic, and others have been bantered around with almost no regard to their uses or meaning. There is a new vernacular emerging in the realms of data representations, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the much simpler origins and best practices of charts and graphs.
A Practical Guide to Information Architecture
Author: Donna Spencer
Topics: Content, Theory, IA, Design
Price: $122.78
If you need to know how to structure content on a website, then you need to know some basics of how to design an IA. So, that includes people like Project Managers, Copywriters, Developers, Designers, eMarketing people, Product Owners, Web App owners, and editorial assistants.
Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work
Author: Robert Hoekman
Topics: Design, Theory, Interaction Design
Price: $73.90
At the start of every web design project, the ongoing struggles reappear. We want to design highly usable and self-evident applications, but we also want to devise innovative, compelling, and exciting interactions that make waves in the market. Projects are more sophisticated than ever, but we have fewer resources with which to complete them. Requirements are fuzzy at best, but we’re expected to have everything done yesterday.
Good Design: Deconstructing Form and Function and What Makes Good Design Work
Author: Terry Marks
Topics: Design, Theory, Critique
Price: $60.36
The author polls several designers of different age groups and phases in their careers about what they consider “good design”. Each has selected an existing design piece they feel to be good, based on their personal definition of what “good” is. The author also takes a critical look at the design to determine if it is effective with its target market and interviews the designer of the piece to unlock the concept behind the design.
Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting
Authors: Multiple authors
Topics: Web Standards, Design, CSS, XHTML, DOM
Price: $25.43
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!
The Big Book Of Font Combinations
Author: Douglas Bonneville
Topics: Typography, Fonts
Price: $32.95
The Big Book of Font Combinations is an expansive collection of carefully crafted typeface pair samples. The font pairings in BBOFC will inspire you and give you back time you need for your design projects. Use the font combination examples straight out of the BBOFC in your next project, or use them as a springboard for your own creativity.
Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
Author: Jenifer Tidwell, Charles Brewer, Aynne Valencia
Topics: UI, Design, Usability
Price: $35.49
With multiple channels, screens, and contexts in mind, creating well-designed good application interfaces can be quite challenging. To make a seamless user experience while having to consider all these isn’t easy. This book in its updated third edition can certainly help with issues like this. It offers several design options that can help you navigate this obstacle. You’ll find the best UI design patterns and solutions to common problems when it comes to designing interfaces.
Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design
Authors: Dan Cederholm & Ethan Marcotte
Topics: CSS, Web-Design, Development
Price: $40.57
Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design is an attempt to share some of these details that matter most. By encouraging “progressive enrichment” to utilize advanced CSS and CSS3 properties that work in browsers today, to reevaluating past methods and best practices.
Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
Authors: Robert Hoekman Jr.
Topics: Web App Design, Design, Development
Price: $31.99
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.
Undercover User Experience Design
Authors: Cennydd Bowles
Topics: UX, Usability, Theory
Price: $59.27
Once you catch the user experience bug, the world changes. Doors open the wrong way, websites don’t work, and companies don’t seem to care. And while anyone can learn the UX remedies usability testing, personas, prototyping and so on unless your organization ‘gets it’, putting them into practice is trickier.
Function, Restraint, and Subversion in Typography
Authors: J. Namdev Hardisty
Topics: Typography, Graphic Design
Price: $17.65
The beauty of contemporary graphic design is that dozens of movements emerge and re-emerge from view. Yet, too often we are left with only the vague impression that something is going on. To appreciate what that might be requires us to slow down, ignore superficial trends, and take a more in-depth look.
Your Turn Now
I hope you enjoyed this post and found some great books you didn’t know about. Of course, feel free to chime in and let us know about other books you think we should check out!
First published in March 2011; updated October 2021
Bought 5 of the above mentioned books. Looking forward to buy CSS3 For Web Designers soon. Thanks for listing these books.
Looking forward to buy some.thanks for useful resource.
I would add Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke. There were quite some interesting insights on design workflow in it.
Logo Design Love is really a great book…good choice for the list!
Thanks very much for the mention, Jon, and thanks to Doug, too, for the kind comment.
Hey David, you’re very welcome. I really enjoyed reading Logo Design Love :)
very good collection there. Thnx for sharing.
Good collection of books on every need of designers.
Thanks for sharing.