This book explores principles of beautiful design, covering color theory, medium and form, classical principles and techniques, culture and context, the importance, purpose and constraints of design, fonts, scale and proportion, and even ancient graffiti, Monet, the iPhone, and much more.

Design for Hackers

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“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” - Steve Jobs

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Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty ®

Preface

Given that you’re reading this book, you probably don’t need much convincing that design is, in fact, important. Good design has clearly been fundamental to the success of many of the world’s largest companies, and interest in and awareness of design has exploded during the past couple decades. But exactly what kind of impact can design have? More important, what really defines the bounds of design?

Why Design Matters

Design is the manifestation of many different “layers” that make up a product. So, something that might just appear attractive or pretty isn’t necessarily going to be a “good” design. Good design is sensitive to these many layers that influence the final design of a product. What is often misunderstood as design – things such as the pattern of a fabric, or even the graphic styling of a button on a website – don’t come close to encompassing the definition of design. Visual characteristics are certainly components of design, but they are products of many factors.

The Purpose of Design

Understanding the right tools for the job is always important to the hacker. You know better than to use the font tag for typographic control and tables for layout (unless economic considerations say otherwise, as in Chapter 2). Instead, you use CSS. It has taken a while, but web standards are finally such that content and style can be separated in this way. Understanding these technologies and their intended uses enables you to make wise decisions such as this. You probably hardly even recognize it as a decision – it’s just the way you do things.

Medium and Form in Typography

As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, design is a product of many “layers.” The purpose of a piece of design sets the foundation upon which these layers are built. As illustrated in Chapter 3, the medium with which a particular typeface is created interacts with the alphabet to create letters that have differing qualities. And, as I’ll talk about more in Appendix A, certain philosophies and cultural factors further evoke particular moods in various type styles.

Technology and Culture

Proportion is key in making things look beautiful. Our eyes seem to be naturally attracted to a sense of order in the things that we see. You may have heard someone talk about proportions before: “His nose is out of proportion with the rest of his face.” But what does it really mean for something to be “out of proportion”? Better yet, what makes something “in proportion”?

Fool&rsquo;s Golden Ratio: Understanding Proportions

In our cluttered world, full of disparate pieces of information all commanding our attention, the attention of your audience is at a premium. As I talked about in Chapter 1, making your work visually interesting ensures that your message is taken more seriously and gets this ever more precious attention. If you have a visually interesting interface on your application, customers will choose your product over one with equal features and pricing that is less visually interesting. In some cases, they’ll pay more for the perceived extra value created by a more visually engaging interface.

Holding the Eye: Composition and Design Principles

The “compositions” that most of today’s designers work with are far more complex in information and clearer in objectives than a Renaissance sculpture or an Impressionist painting. If they’re designing an interface for a blog, for example, there are specific tasks and objectives for the user. The user needs to be able to navigate to any page that he wants, but at the same time, the articles on the blog need to be easy to read. Categories need to be easy to navigate to, and information about the blog and its authors need to be clearly accessible.

Enlivening Information: Establishing a Visual Hierarchy

Color is one of the most mysterious and subjective aspects of design. Color tastes and meanings vary across cultures, and from individual to individual. In fact, the very notion of color is rooted in subjectivity. As I’ll explain in this chapter, what we perceive as color as a species varies from the experiences of other species. There are colors we can see that, say, a dog cannot see. There are other colors that other animals – such as birds – can see, that we cannot. Additionally, there are variations within the human experience of color. To complicate matters further, our representations and codifications of color (such as the hexadecimal color system that powers the web) often don’t do color its full justice, and representations of color vary from medium to medium, and device to device.

Color Science

We know a great deal about the science of color, and yet color – and the usage of it – is full of subjectivity. Although we have some psychological reactions to color that stem from prehistoric life, colors carry meanings that differ across cultures and from person to person. Additionally, color is contextual: A color that may connote positive feelings in one context may have the opposite effect in another context. Still, in pursuit of beautiful aesthetics, a great deal of thought and practice has been applied toward understanding and bringing structure to how colors interact to establish a particular mood or feeling. By understanding how colors interact, and what factors are at play in giving color meaning, you can begin to use color well.

Color Theory

Today’s designers have a nearly limitless choice of fonts, of varying degrees of quality. Letters that were once carefully chiseled into marble, or cast out of lead can now be reproduced in limitless numbers with just a few clicks. Publishing technology has come a long way, and with it, the number of fonts available to designers has exploded. You can find revivals of old classics, such as Adobe Garamond, as well as thousands of much lower-quality fonts.

Appendix A: Choosing and Pairing Fonts

The journey of language through technology has created a variety of rules and habits, customs and taboos. Knowing which rules are still applicable and which are outdated can be difficult.

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Design for Hackers