Website design: aesthetics and usability

Resilient

I am a CS student and am fairly comfortable with coding, which basically implies that I am relatively awful at usability and aesthetics in design.

I was hoping someone might be able to point me in the direction of a good book in the genera of website development from a usability and visual design perspective. Failing that, a quality website that had similar info would be good.

Information in the realms of:

-Color choices (How many colors should a website have, and colors look good together?)
-Layout (Is a side column better than a top horizontal bar? Does it depend on the purpose of the website?)
-Splash pages (Is a good looking welcome page with no useful information something my website should have?)

I know some of this could come from a pure design (not web related) book. However, I was hoping to find something more closely tied to web design.

Has anyone taken classes similar to this? And if so what textbook did you use? I went the the bookstore today, but mostly found books like "VISUAL WEBSITE DESIGN FOR YOU!!!11!!!" and "Modern Web Design: Is Your Website Y2K Compliant?". I would prefer something a little more academic rather than flashy.

Thanks!
Justin

mellowshipslinky

I recently graduated with a design major, and I've had a few web/interaction design classes. We never had textbooks, although my professors would frequently give us lists of books that they recommended. Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell is excellent if you're looking on tips concerning usability/functionality. I would highly recommend checking it out... not only is it extremely informative with plenty of examples, but it's also the type of book that you can just flip through randomly... you don't have to read it in order from cover to cover for it to be really helpful.

I honestly have never heard any recommendations for amazing books concerning specifically web design aesthetics. I know that's what you'd ideally like to have, but there are some fantastic general design books out there that I wouldn't dismiss simply because they aren't web specific. Some of my favorites that you may want to try checking out from the library or something:

Making and Breaking the Grid by Timothy Samara
Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Muller-Brockmann
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton

Learning about grid systems and typography should be really helpful in beginning to understand how to create effective layouts. Really, it's about understanding basic concepts (I wouldn't call them rules) and learning how to apply them according to the purpose and content of the site. It's also about understanding how different elements relate to each other visually as well as functionally, and being able to see things as a whole and not a sum of parts. So, for instance, when you ask "Is a side column better than a top horizontal bar?", it's very much dependent on the other components of the site and how everything fits together. In many instances it may not even matter either way whether the nav is a side column or a horizontal bar.

Developing design skills also just takes a lot of practice/experience. Don't expect to find a tidy little list of rules that will let you instantly design guaranteed awesome websites.

MagicToaster

Most of the time I look at how other people tackle the same problems I have. Someone at the Art Corner once gave me this link: http://www.designmeltdown.com, it's a very good inspiration page. Also, usability is a concept that once understood can be applied to anything, which is why I recommend The Design of Everyday Things as an excellent read. It doesn't talk about web-design, or graphic design, but it brings up some excellent points that one can later apply in the design field.

Jasconius

Splash pages should be avoided, in 99.9% of cases.

Web design is very broad now and there are many styles, so visit a lot of sites, try to find a style you like and make layouts that borrow from it, adding your own ideas where required.

When in doubt, less is more.

NightDragon

Design Meltdown *is* very good (I wonder if I gave that to you, Toaster! :P)

Also, for color choices - you can find a lot of premade color themes here:

http://kuler.adobe.com/

Just observing which ones are most popular (# of downloads) or what's highest rated can usually give you a good idea on how to create effective color schemes, if you're good at figuring things out like that.

Dehumanized

I'd say as a very general guideline for color schemes, make sure you use lots of contrast between text and background.

Hypatia

Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen is a really good book. Take what he says with a grain of salt because he's very "stick with what works", which is great, but what works doesn't evolve without people pushing the boundaries.

CSS Zen Garden is nice to get some ideas for different layouts but some of their designs are impractical for wide varieties of content where you don't have all of the information available when you first design it.

SporkAndrew

Designing with Web Standards is a must.

Standards always come first.

wasted pixels

SporkAndrew wrote: »

Designing with Web Standards is a must.

Standards always come first.

Unless you want to get something done.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com is an excellent resource for tutorials, free resources, essays and lessons on basic to advanced design theory, and generally a great site for any web designer to read. And I'd say that even if I hadn't been published there.

EDIT: and OP, that first bit was a joke, absolutely learn up-to-date XHTML and CSS, and adhere to "best practices" for any languages, design approaches, or other creative endeavors you pursue.

flatlinegraphics

http://www.thegridsystem.org/
http://960.gs/
http://www.artsmonitor.com/
http://designobserver.com/
http://www.designiskinky.net/
http://digitalthread.com/

as a programmer, the 960 grid is probably going to be your friend. the others are inspiration and meta/link blogs

Resilient

Thanks for all the links. It looks like learning usability independent of web design will be the way to go. And I will browse through the rest of those sites for specific design help and ideas.

Thanks!