Recommend me some good Design Tutorials / Books

design
#1

I’m a pretty decent programmer. I have a CS degree and I’m relatively well-versed on the coding side. My problem lies, however, in my lack of experience or training on the visual side of things.

Does anyone have any good sites or books that would help teach me the basics of visual design for the web? Things like color theory, typography, etc etc. Stuff that will help me come up with visually appealing designs. I believe that I already know how to create the designs on a webpage, but I just can’t come up with the designs initially :stuck_out_tongue:

Any help would be appreciated!

#2

I like CSS Zen Garden: http://www.csszengarden.com/

I find that it’s much easier for me to be inspired by existing sites than to study design theory and come up with my own ideas. Not that there’s much in the way of original ideas, so I’m ok with mimicking what I like. Kind of like music.

#3

Thank you for the css website. I was finally able to get my close button to be in the same place for my slide in opt-in form on my blog for both IE and Firefox. The float right command in the css that came with the plugin acted differently between the two browsers.

#4

I agree with CSS Garden as a recommendation. You might like StrangeBanana, too: http://www.strangebanana.com/.

I don’t know how good they are, but Coffeecup Software (http://www.coffeecup.com/) offers books on typography and design. I use their HTML editor (since I can’t buy HomeSite anymore, grumble, grumble >:( ), so they send me ads for these books in my email.

#5

You can get good tutorials on Websitetips website. You can find CSS - Cascading Style Sheets Tutorials, HTML, XHTML, HomeSite Tutorials, Graphics: Adobe Photoshop Tutorials over there. These tutorials will be more helpful to you for getting good knowledge of designing. Also I suggest you the following list of books : Don’t Make Me Think, Principles of Beautiful Web Design, Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTMl and CSS, CSS, the Missing Manual. These all are the books for web designing. You can get all of the above books from the Amazon. I hope this information will be useful to you.