I’m going to spend this time talking about a recent book I read called “Hello Web Design” by Tracy Osborn. I decided to pick up a few books to help with my coding journey in the spare time that I have away from a computer. This first book I chose was this one. In it author Tracy Osborn explains some small fundamental tips to improve the flow and responsiveness of your web applications. There isn’t much in terms of actual programming knowledge in this book. But the value of the knowledge I took away from my time with it cannot be overstated.
The book opened my eyes to more than a few things. For starters, when I start a new project, I usually just jump straight into coding. Not giving much thought to the design of the website until I reach that point in the project. But this book explains that not only should you brainstorm the ideas you want to implement in the project., it is also important to brainstorm and create rough drafts of the design of your app outside of the code itself. This might come off as common sense to most everyone else, and by no means am I saying that I don’t put any preproduction work into my applications. But the idea of drawing or using software other than an actual compiler like VS code never really crossed my mind. I’ve only made a handful of projects so far but I have noticed within those projects that the designs just don’t have a ton of though behind them. So this is definitely my biggest takeaway from this book and its for sure something I’ll be implementing in the future.
The book goes on to talk about other fundamental concepts of design. Such as
- how to use white space effectively
- proper fonts and spacing
- word and image placement
- color theory
using white space to your advantage is something that I struggle with. In a lot of my projects I’ve struggled with over adding things to the design to take up the empty spaces on the screen. Looking at the differences between my own applications and the ones in the book examples, there is an extremely apparent gap in professionalism.
The book also talks about the importance of engaging your target audience right away. It breaks down that the average user is good for about 80 words or so and to make those words important and make sure that the points you want to get across in that word cap stand out.
“Hello Web Design” is a quick read coming in at about 140 pages and I highly recommend it. The book retails for about 25 dollars and is well worth the price. Its definitely changed my approach on how to handle layouts and designs for my future projects.
Ryan's Coding Journey 