Coding Horror: Visual Design Patterns

January 25, 2006

Visual Design Patterns

A recent post by Steve Makofsky reminded me that the excellent UI Patterns and Techniques site is now a book from O'Reilly -- Designing Interfaces.

There's technically no reason to buy a book on visual design patterns when you can find the same information online ..

.. but what a glorious, infinitely browsable full-color book this is. It's highly visual and truly does justice to the concept: a Design Patterns for the eye instead of the mind. Sometimes atoms are better than bytes.

Unlike any of the Design Patterns in that famous book, these patterns are visible to your users. Plan accordingly.

Posted by Jeff Atwood View blog reactions

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Comments

Wow! You mean the book has off-line reading capabilities and doesn't require a power cord? Sign me up!

Haacked on January 26, 2006 04:44 PM

AND you can read them in the bathroom!

Well, I guess we could do that with laptops and wifi too.

Jeff Atwood on January 26, 2006 05:33 PM

Thanks for the recommendation. Wishlisted.

BTW there is a sample chapter online here: <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/designinterfaces/index.html">http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/designinterfaces/index.html</a>; and from what I can see the illustrations are gorgeous.

Alastair on January 26, 2006 06:47 PM

Yeah, I love that book. It's indespensible, imho.

Steve on January 26, 2006 07:49 PM

Man, that toastytech.com GUI site sucks long and hard. How does that guy have the gall to criticise *anyone* else's GUI?

Andy on January 27, 2006 08:12 AM

Whoa, the irony. Post 1, here's a book, it's great. Post 2: creating any information that isn't Web searchable is a waste of time. Dude, you need to decide. :-)

mike on January 28, 2006 06:40 AM

Thanks, everyone! Glad to hear that people like it.

By the way, you can find about half the book's patterns online -- they've been moved to http://designinginterfaces.com from the time-tripper site, and updated to match the book text -- but the book does have lots of material that'll never be on the Web (except via Safari).

Jenifer Tidwell on January 28, 2006 05:05 PM