Rating:
Author: David Kadavy
ISBN : B005J578EW
New from $22.99
Format: PDF
You can download Free Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty [Kindle Edition] from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
Discover the techniques behind beautiful design?by deconstructing designs to understand themThe term 'hacker' has been redefined to consist of anyone who has an insatiable curiosity as to how things work—and how they can try to make them better. This book is aimed at hackers of all skill levels and explains the classical principles and techniques behind beautiful designs by deconstructing those designs in order to understand what makes them so remarkable. Author and designer David Kadavy provides you with the framework for understanding good design and places a special emphasis on interactive mediums. You'll explore color theory, the role of proportion and geometry in design, and the relationship between medium and form. Packed with unique reverse engineering design examples, this book inspires and encourages you to discover and create new beauty in a variety of formats.
- Breaks down and studies the classical principles and techniques behind the creation of beautiful design
- Illustrates cultural and contextual considerations in communicating to a specific audience
- Discusses why design is important, the purpose of design, the various constraints of design, and how today's fonts are designed with the screen in mind
- Dissects the elements of color, size, scale, proportion, medium, and form
- Features a unique range of examples, including the graffiti in the ancient city of Pompeii, the lack of the color black in Monet's art, the style and sleekness of the iPhone, and more
By the end of this book, you'll be able to apply the featured design principles to your own web designs, mobile apps, or other digital work.Direct download links available for Free Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty [Kindle Edition]
- File Size: 18338 KB
- Print Length: 352 pages
- Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (August 15, 2011)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B005J578EW
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54,922 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #29
in Books > Computers & Technology > Internet & Web Culture > Hacking - #82
in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development & Design > Web Design - #90
in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Graphics & Multimedia
- #29
in Books > Computers & Technology > Internet & Web Culture > Hacking - #82
in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development & Design > Web Design - #90
in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Graphics & Multimedia
Free Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
Kadavy does a fantastic job taking the complete design beginner through the important parts of design. From a hacker's point of view, this book is brilliant, and exactly what I needed.
Having designed several web sites and applications before without any form of design training or knowledge, I always felt like my designs were grossly lacking in a lot of ways. Designs seemed to always be based off of my gut feeling, and the opinions of other non-designers. While a gut check was good, my designs still sorely lacked.
After reading this book, I feel as though Kadavy makes it clear how I can approach my designs with a different perspective. His chapters on typography, proportion and color are fantastic examples of this. I no longer feel like I will be stabbing in the dark to find that perfect color, but now have some tools in my arsenal to get good jobs done quickly.
When I need the heady parts of design done and refined, I will still probably need to hire a designer, BUT with this book, as a hacker, It has set me off in the right direction to either leave my knowledge as is, and put out really good designs, or pursue a greater understanding of design but with a solid foundation.
As a hacker, my time is money, and every day fiddling around with something is another day lost in terms of making great applications. This book will reduce my time fiddling with design, and increase my time focusing on my apps' functionality.
That said, it isn't a perfect text (though still gets 5 stars in my opinion). There is a very fine line between a lot of information and too much information. Kadavy walks this line VERY well in this book, but at some points I felt as though it was a little too much info that was not giving me any more practical information.
I was extremely excited for this book. I know a lot of programmers who feel like they can futz around with Photoshop or HTML or what not, but don't really know why they're doing what they're doing or how to approach design problems. They always bemoan the lack of background knowledge of design concepts. So, when I saw this book was being released, I rushed out to my local B&N and grabbed it (Amazon was backordered for weeks, which spoke to how good I thought this would be!).
I thought I'd get a really good introduction to design concepts, accompanied by really solid, cohesive examples of either how to use this in a design or examples of the concept in action and why it's a good use of it. What I got instead was a scattershot of sort of interesting concepts, a few examples, and a bunch of other random stuff. Maybe I'm more persnickety about books than the other reviewers, but if we're reading the same book, we must have totally different definitions of a good teaching book.
Most of the information in there just struck me as weird and disjointed. I won't cover all the my issues with the book (some of them are just simply pedantic...), but I'll share a few examples. There's a (by page count) huge amount of space spent on Roman/Greek typography (something the author spent a lot of time researching in school as we're told in his back cover bio, inside bio, introduction, first chapter, and a few other times), but a tiny bit of information on selecting fonts for designs, type proportion, and so on. There's also a long rant on why Comic Sans is a bad font (even going so far as presenting a number of really technical arguments as to why it sucks), but completely neglects the most important point about font choice which is context.