Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design Author: William Lidwell | Language: English | ISBN:
1592535879 | Format: EPUB
Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design Description
Whether a marketing campaign or a museum exhibit, a video game or a complex control system, the design we see is the culmination of many concepts and practices brought together from a variety of disciplines. Because no one can be an expert on everything, designers have always had to scramble to find the information and know-how required to make a design work—until now.
Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated is a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary encyclopedia of design. Richly illustrated and easy to navigate, it pairs clear explanations of every design concept with visual examples of the concepts applied in practice. From the "80/20” rule to chunking, from baby-face bias to Occam's razor, and from self-similarity to storytelling, every major design concept is defined and illustrated for readers to expand their knowledge.
This landmark reference will become the standard for designers, engineers, architects, and students who seek to broaden and improve their design expertise.
- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Rockport Publishers; Second Edition, Revised and Updated edition (January 1, 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1592535879
- ISBN-13: 978-1592535873
- Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 8.6 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
A UX colleague of mine initially recommended this book to me, and I started leafing through it. And when I looked up again, I had read half of the 125 snippets that make up this book...
This is the strength of this book - instead of taking one theory and squeezing 300 pages out of it (as so many other design and UX books do), it deliberately dedicates exactly 2 pages for each theory. The left side of this bigger-than-A4 book is dedicated towards theory, with very handy references of where one can find out more about the theory, while the right side has good visual examples of how this theory maps out in the real world.
For a seasoned professional, many of the theories will be well-known, but I was still surprised by the often clever cross-referencing to other pieces of research that made me think anew about the theory. Also, the authors made a fantastic effort in boiling down often very wordy theories into a few very concise paragraphs.
I also really liked the mix of theories: there is a lot of design, a lot of psychology, evolutionary biology, Gestalt and other research on perception, motivators, and many other things... this is a strength of this book because everybody who reads it will find something new from a related discipline, and the book makes it obvious why this is still relevant.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, also because it's easy to just pick it up, read a couple of theories and put it back down. I recommend it very much for people who always wondered what some of the names of the theories were that they were using on a daily basis, but also for students of design and UX who want to "cheat" and get really handy quick explanations of complicated subject matters without having to fight their way through the often tedious books of these areas.
By Matthias Schreck
We used this as a group study book at work to help our software design skills. This book it packed with useful and interesting topics. The only difficulty for what we are using it for is we need to make the connection between the concepts and how it applies to software. This is a great mental exercise but does take significantly more brain power than if the application to software were laid out directly in the book. There is an immense amount of content in this book and I think we will be exploring many of the topics in more depth in future discussions.
On a non work side my wife wants to pick this up and read because of the interesting application it has to every day life and advertising. Overall a very interesting and insightful book.
By Jeramyn Feucht
Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design Preview
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