I recently picked up Patrick McNeil’s book, The Web Designer’s Idea Book. The book takes about 700 or 800 designs found in the wild and categorizes them. Categories are by theme of the site’s content, color of the site, theme of the design of the site, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting. I was able to grab the book up well below list price.
Those of you who aren’t familiar with Patrick McNeil, he runs a few websites on design. This book basically is a print form of DesignMeltdown.com, which is an excellent reference. I bought the book because it’s fun to look at and nice to smell is a bit easier to read when on a bus/plane/train/etc.
In addition to having a huge number of examples and some decent explanations on color theory and a lot of helpful color charts. My only gripe seems to be in line with what was found in some of the reviews out there… The format of the book could have been larger. I would have paid a few extra bucks for a physically larger book. The thumbnails of most the sites mentioned are just that… thumbnails. The book does provide the URLs of all the sites shown though so you can jump online and take a better look.
Oh, and for those of you who think you have beautiful website… The author of the book is preparing to put out a follow up to this one. If your site or a site you’ve made for someone else is print worthy, he is taking submissions. Submit your site on Design Meltdown if you think it has the stuff. You have until May 31st to do so. If your site gets selected, I’ll eventually end up having a tiny picture of your web page sitting on a bookshelf in my house. Maybe you can autograph it for me?
Update: This book is great. I don’t know how many times I’ve flipped through it since purchasing it. Having the ability to look at scores of site layouts while I’m not on my computer (or staring at a tiny screen on a cell phone) is more handy than I expected.
