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Discover the techniques behind beautiful design by deconstructing designs to understand them
The term 'hacker' has been redefined to consist of anyone who has an insatiable curiosity as to how things work--and how they can try to make them better. This book is aimed at hackers of all skill levels and explains the classical principles and techniques behind beautiful designs by deconstructing those designs in order to understand what makes them so remarkable. Author and designer David Kadavy provides you with the framework for understanding good design and places a special emphasis on interactive mediums. You'll explore color theory, the role of proportion and geometry in design, and the relationship between medium and form. Packed with unique reverse engineering design examples, this book inspires and encourages you to discover and create new beauty in a variety of formats.
Breaks down and studies the classical principles and techniques behind the creation of beautiful design
Illustrates cultural and contextual considerations in communicating to a specific audience
Discusses why design is important, the purpose of design, the various constraints of design, and how today's fonts are designed with the screen in mind
Dissects the elements of color, size, scale, proportion, medium, and form
Features a unique range of examples, including the graffiti in the ancient city of Pompeii, the lack of the color black in Monet's art, the style and sleekness of the iPhone, and more
By the end of this book, you'll be able to apply the featured design principles to your own web designs, mobile apps, or other digital work.
Autorentext
David Kadavy is a user interface designer whose clients include Silicon Valley startups such as oDesk, UserVoice, and PBworks. He led the design departments at two Silicon Valley startups and an architecture firm, taught a college course in typography, and studied ancient typography in Rome. David blogs about design at kadavy.net, and his Twitter handle is @kadavy.
Klappentext
"If you want to learn to create great design yourself...there simply is no way to do so with lists of rules. Instead, I want to provide you with a new set of eyes through which you can see the world anew."---DAVID KADAVY
WHY DID MONET NEVER USE THE COLOR BLACK IN HIS PAINTINGS?
WHY IS THE GOLDEN RATIO NOT ALL IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE?
WHY IS COMIC SANS SUCH A HATED FONT?
It's amazing what you can learn about great web design by asking questions like these. Award-winning designer David Kadavy uses this "reverse-engineering" process in Design for Hackers to deconstruct classical design principles and techniques from web designers. Using an eclectic array of reverse-engineered examples, ranging from Twitter's latest redesign, to Target's red shopping carts, and ancient graffiti from the walls of Pompeii, he explains:
Inhalt
Introduction 1
Design as Literacy 2
The Hacker Attitude 3
The Gap in Design Knowledge 5
Part I: Understanding Design
Chapter 1 Why Design Matters 9
What Design Really Is 11
What Design Is Not 13
The Layers of Design 15
Purpose 17
Medium and technology 17
Aesthetic decisions 18
Conclusion 18
Chapter 2 The Purpose of Design 19
Visual Design and Its Relation to User Experience Design 21
The basics of user experience design 22
The visual design of one product versus another 24
Sometimes a Visual Design Is Just Good Enough 25
Sometimes Visual Design Is Your Advantage 26
Reverse-Engineering the Twitter User Experience 28
User personas 29
Use cases 30
Wireframes 32
Knowledge Applied 33
Part II: Medium and Form
Chapter 3 Medium and Form in Typography 37
The Tragedy of Misuse: Why You Hate Comic Sans 38
The Shackles of the Typographer: The Unalterable Word 45
The Formation of Our Alphabet 47
The Birth of Our Letters 50
The Twitter of the Roman Empire 51
The height of Roman typography 52
The Type That Has Lived On 62
The invention and spread of printing 63
Punchcutting: The cradle of the unalterable word 64
Venice and the Renaissance 65
France and Garamond 66
Garamond Today: Why You Don't Use Garamond on the Web 66
The birth of the web font 67
A great leap 68
Bridging the gap 69
Limitations can be embraced even parodied 72
Knowledge Applied 73
Chapter 4 Technology and Culture 75
How Trends Are Created 76
The birth of Impressionism 76
Impressionism and the middle class 78
Impressionism and photography 79
Impressionism and modern art 81
Web 2 0 graphics 82
How Apple started the Web 2 0 style 83
How Aqua influenced the web 85
How Aqua met Web 2 0 86
Form shapes technology, this time 90
SEO Is Design 90
Understanding why SEO is important 93
Choosing the right keywords 94
Considering content and coding 96
URL 97
Title tag 97
Meta tags 98
Headers 98
Content: em, strong, img 98
Authority of linking pages 99
Content of linking pages and of anchor text of links 100
Everything in moderation 100
Getting the content, getting the links 101
Knowledge Applied 102
Part III: Composition
Chapter 5 Fool's Golden Ratio: Understanding Proportions 105
What Is Proportion? 107
Proportion and Design 109
The Broken Promise of the Golden Ratio 110
The golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence: Similar, but different 112
The golden ratio in the human form 113
Misconceptions about the golden ratio 115
The golden ratio in ancient Greece 115
The golden ratio in fine art 117
The golden ratio in nature 118
The golden ratio in psychology 118
Other Pleasing Proportions 119
The root 2 rectangle 119
The 2:3 rectangle 120
The 3:4 rectangle 121
Proportions in Our World 121
Music and dance 122
Nature 123
Computers and mobile devices 125
Proportions at Work 126
Knowledge Applied 132
Chapter 6 Holding the Eye: Composition and Design Principles 133
Compositional Relationships 134
Reading direction 135
Guiding the eye with composition 136
Renaissance sculpture 137 Impressionist paintings 13...