My New Favorite Design Book

One of our current web design projects is being enriched by a client with absolutely no design sense at all. The experience is a little like this, but much more fun, because the client is a fun person.

The thing is, we can usually show the client a new design and expect those oohs and ahs showing that the client, while he or she might have been okay with that ugly old design from the past, can now see how much better the new design is.

Not in this case. This is a client for whom things like balance, rhythm, proportion, and good taste are irrelevant. He may have paintings of Elvis on velvet on his walls at home. And that's fine. We love this guy, We want him to be happy, and if it makes him happy to have images stuck randomly onto his site --

No, I'm lying. We can't do that. We couldn't sleep at night if our website turned out ugly. So I want to add the book White Space is Not Your Enemy to the list of books I'd like to give clients. (The other book on that list is Don't Make Me Think, in case you were wondering.)

This book is written for beginning designers, and in fact probably for design students (the authors are teachers, and the chapters have assignments in them). But it's all about eye training. And mind training. It has scads of good examples of design, and some bad ones, too. It lays out the rules for making images and words look good together, and has some thoughtful discussions on how to break those rules.

In the very first chapter, is has a list of things good design should do:

• capture attention
• control the eye's movement across the page or screen
• convey information
• evoke emotion

Isn't that great? Your website should capture people's attention and make them want to stay instead of clicking right back to the SERP. It should help them find the call to action, and also the information they need and want; in fact, it should guide them unobtrusively through the user experience you have in mind for them. It should contain that information they need and want in a readily-available form. And it should give them the feeling your company gives your customers.

The book includes explanations of things like contrast, balance, and movement. It answers questions like, "How do I know where to put my stuff?" It explains why centering everything isn't as good a move as you thought it was. It explains how to send graphics to your web designer, and what all that stuff about different browsers has to do with you and your website. And it does all of this in a friendly, easy format with lots of nice pictures.

If you're toying with building your own site, or you update your blog yourself, then this book will be very helpful to you -- you might even want to do the assignments. If you just didn't spend as much time in art galleries in your youth as you should have, and you often get the feeling that other people are seeing things you don't when they talk about how your suggestions would mess up the design -- well, this book will give you some insight into what they're thinking.

I won't really be giving this book to the client in question, any more than I give Don't Make Me Think to people who don't grasp the concept of usability. I love my clients just as they are. But I feel better for having gotten this off my chest.

Six Pixels of Separation

I had the opportunity to read a pre-publication version of Mitch Joel's new book, Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. Click on the link for some previews.

Back when I was an in-house marketing person seeking to figure out how to make our website profitable, unlike those of everyone else in our industry, I tried very hard to find a good book on SEO. No luck. Now there are books on the subject, but they tend to be out of date as soon as they hit the shelves, so I haven't yet found one that I'd recommend to anyone who knows where to find blogs on the subject (for example, you).

Six Pixels is a worthwhile book on social media and its use for business.

Joel explains some of the key points that bloggers like me keep making and businesspeople keep ignoring -- like, this isn't an overnight thing, you have to be sincere, and it's more like networking with other humans than it is like advertising, so quit thinking you can do it with an automatic program. He gives a lot of background and persuasive detail, and also a lot of specific, practical advice to get from "Huh?" to success with social media.

You'll find definitions and explanations of key terms that may stump you if you're new to the topic, checklists to think about if you've been using social media for a while and aren't quite sure you're doing it right, and ideas for the near future (are you really taking mobile devices into account when you plan?) if you're successful with social media and want to keep being successful.

There are in this book history lessons going clear back to 2000 when, Joel says, the common view of bloggers was that they were members of the lunatic fringe holed up in their basements writing about cats. There are insightful discussions of major social media platforms and sites. There are intriguing case studies.

There are also thought-provoking discussions of some of the tougher questions around social media. How can you monetize your involvement, or measure its value to your business? What kind of community is developing around social media, and how does it relate to your community in the physical world? What about privacy?

I'm planning to share Six Pixels with my colleagues, and I think our discussions of it will have a positive impact on our businesses. I'd love to discuss it with you, too.

If you're interested in social media, you should read this book. You can pre-order it at Amazon.com, and you probably should.