Delve into Design

This book is an absolute must read from Mark Boulton – A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web.

The book is broken down into five chapters for easy reading. Part One is ‘getting started’ which contains background information about working as a web designer, from Boulton’s first hand perspective and there’s also some tips about working for yourself. Part Two is about the very important process of research and ideas and I love the way he explains it all in such an easy to understand and follow way. Part Three is about Typography and Part Four is about Colour – both massive subjects, but Boulton manages to cram the most beneficial stuff into his chapters in manageable chunks. Finally, Part Five is the layout – all about grid structures and spatial relationships.

It’s genuinely very enlightening for me, as a web designer I usually go straight to the coding and play around with things on screen. The book encourages you to take a step back and prepare your layout before starting. Although it doesn’t discourage from my usual way of designing. Boulton appreciates different designers do things slightly differently, but certainly his methods work so are well worth taking on board and implementing.

Boulton’s chapter on colour would have been very useful to me while I was writing my dissertation, as colour was the subject I chose. However you can never hold too much information on a subject and Boulton’s points about designing purely in black and white certainly opened my eyes to different ways of doing things.

I whole-heartedly recommend buying this book from http://www.fivesimplesteps.co.uk