Rating: 
Summary: An excellent guide to practical issues in gui design
Review: *Designing Visual Interfaces* deserves a wider audience. Its promotion of visual literacy for GUI designers is a worthwhile cause. Every GUI designer, which includes most programmers these days, should read this book!
*Designing Visual Interfaces* is a "nuts and bolts" design book with lots
of examples of bad and good interface design in present-day Graphical
User Interfaces. The authors attempt grand analogies with media that
offer richer opportunities for design--posters, timetables, appliances.
Sometimes it seems that returning to the same old dialogue boxes
is a bit of a come-down in the design world, the need to shove a lot
of info into a few pixels. Nonetheless, the book has lots of good
advice. Perhaps the reason it hasn't found wider readership is
that its own printing format, using small black and white images,
doesn't do justice to the careful thought they've put into their
selection.
The authors both worked on the Open Look standard, which is not my
favorite GUI. But fortunately their book is not a brief for that
standard. And they do have some good criticism of Microsoft Windows--well merited!
Rating: 
Summary: Exceptional
Review: A wonderful (if rather dense) book. In some ways similar to the superb Tufte trio, this work rounds up example of good and bad interface design, provides a (very) complete analysis and finishes off with practical suggestions based on that analysis (something Tufte doesn't do). How much use it would be as a hands-on design aid is unclear but as a source of inspiration it's a great success. On the downside, it's a tad wordy (scale and contrast are described as "capricious" - eh?) and the writing style is dense enough to demand being consumed in small sips, but so what? The effort demanded is repaid many times over. In fact this book is so rich in information and ideas I feel I need to re-read it immediately, and that can't be bad.
Rating:
Summary: Design (with a capital D) for programmers
Review: Does everybody criticize your user interfaces but nobody seems to have any useful suggestions? This book is for you! Have you been expected to make user-friendly interfaces, but you have absolutely no background in design? This book is for you! "Designing visual interfaces" provides an introduction to visual design that is very accessible to engineer types (like myself). Although people's reactions to various designs are "touchy-feely", the process to creating a good design is surprisingly scientific. You don't have to be an especially creative type of person to avoid the common pitfalls. The book covers two or three related aspects of design in each chapter (such as Scale, Contrast, and Proportion). The first section of each chapter describes the principal variables that control those aspects. The simplest possible examples are presented first, typically black and white line drawings, then examples from industrial design and finally some examples from actual user interfaces. Then a "common errors" section shows examples of graphical user interfaces where these aspects of design are out of balance. Finally a "techniques" section gives handbook/cookbook approaches to avoiding the common errors. This section includes before and after screenshots. The presentation is wonderfully uniform and consistent. Rather than using contrived examples, the authors have found real-life examples (many of which you will recognize) for all of the common errors. This book does not cover how to map a problem domain to a user interface. It is assumed that you already understand the problem domain. It is not a style book for a particular operating system (the authors advocate using the vendor's guidebooks). What the book does is provide an introduction to basic design principals and set of procedures that you can follow to avoid the common pitfalls. Creative endeavors can take an undeterminable amount of time to achieve a desired reaction, but if you follow the author's procedures, which will take a consistent amount of time and effort, you will at least have done due-dilligence and have a professional looking product whose looks are guaranteed not to be a turn-off.
Rating:
Summary: Design (with a capital D) for programmers
Review: Does everybody criticize your user interfaces but nobody seems to have any useful suggestions? This book is for you! Have you been expected to make user-friendly interfaces, but you have absolutely no background in design? This book is for you! "Designing visual interfaces" provides an introduction to visual design that is very accessible to engineer types (like myself). Although people's reactions to various designs are "touchy-feely", the process to creating a good design is surprisingly scientific. You don't have to be an especially creative type of person to avoid the common pitfalls. The book covers two or three related aspects of design in each chapter (such as Scale, Contrast, and Proportion). The first section of each chapter describes the principal variables that control those aspects. The simplest possible examples are presented first, typically black and white line drawings, then examples from industrial design and finally some examples from actual user interfaces. Then a "common errors" section shows examples of graphical user interfaces where these aspects of design are out of balance. Finally a "techniques" section gives handbook/cookbook approaches to avoiding the common errors. This section includes before and after screenshots. The presentation is wonderfully uniform and consistent. Rather than using contrived examples, the authors have found real-life examples (many of which you will recognize) for all of the common errors. This book does not cover how to map a problem domain to a user interface. It is assumed that you already understand the problem domain. It is not a style book for a particular operating system (the authors advocate using the vendor's guidebooks). What the book does is provide an introduction to basic design principals and set of procedures that you can follow to avoid the common pitfalls. Creative endeavors can take an undeterminable amount of time to achieve a desired reaction, but if you follow the author's procedures, which will take a consistent amount of time and effort, you will at least have done due-dilligence and have a professional looking product whose looks are guaranteed not to be a turn-off.
Rating:
Summary: "They eat their own food..."
Review: Excellent book. I have been shopping around for all books related to "Information Design" and this one is mandatory. Most of all, as I mention on the title, the authors applied their techniques to the overall design, layout of the book !
Rating:
Summary: "They eat their own food..."
Review: Excellent book. I have been shopping around for all books related to "Information Design" and this one is mandatory. Most of all, as I mention on the title, the authors applied their techniques to the overall design, layout of the book !
Rating:
Summary: Great introduction to visual design for user interfaces
Review: I didn't expect too much from this book when I saw it's cover... for a book on visual design, it's pretty badly designed! But it turned out to be the best book on the subject I've seen-- it draws heavily from graphic and industrial design (and could just about be a textbook on either one of those courses). But it also shows the direct applicability of those fields to the design of dialogs, icons etc. Very readable, and beautifully presented.
Rating:
Summary: wonderful, clear, very useful
Review: I really loved this book.
It is simple, clear and goes right to the point.
It helps understanding the essence of good design, reaching simplicity and elegance but it provides also instruments to guide (through design choices) the user/viewer attention towards most important elements (visual priority). And this is essential to make good interfaces.
Rating:
Summary: Design thought
Review: I was very impressed when I first read this book. Complex ideas are clearly explained in the most simple words they can be explained for the literate person. Examples from an intelligent understanding of what is useful history of design are wisely approached.
Rating: 
Summary: Very basic, nothing inspiring.
Review: If you are looking for a basic introduction to the priciple's involved with UI design they are all here. If you are looking to be inspired or taken to another level, don't look here.
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