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Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques
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Author: Kevin Mullet, Darrell Sano
List Price: $57.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0133033899
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR (05 December, 1994)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 46,442
Average Customer Rating: 4.45 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
Excellent, graphics oriented treatment
This book should certainly not be your first book on GUI design. You might want to check out Alan Cooper "About Face", Johnson "GUI Bloopers" or a similar one which focuses in a broad way specifically on GUIs. If you are interested in Web design you might prefer the excellent "Don't make me thing" from Steve Krug. Even if you want to look at GUI design with a strong graphics bias you might first want to read the beautiful books of Tufte.Having said that and you still make it to this book. You get an excellent treatment of the graphic aspects of design in general and at many places with special applications to GUIs. Examples are posters, maps, public transportation information, different GUIs including the NextStep. If you like Piet Mondrian, the Bauhaus ... then you enjoy the positive examples a lot. The book gives some theoretical background and tries to help build our taste by showing good and bad solutions to design problems. The pictures are well reproduced (mostly black and white) and of good quality. The cover of the book is somewhat horrid (on line order saved me here from not buying it). Also it is extremely soft cover - way too soft for such a valuable book.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Good information, flawed by presentation
This book has a lot of great information, and the layout (of the information) is actually pretty good. Unfortunately, the density and otherwise poor quality of the prose and editing obscure this. I can't believe a book that costs this much, and whose focus is presentation, would have such glaringly obvious errors. I've never seen a book with so many typos. It also uses the incredibly wordy and verbose style often found in the art world, a technique that does not exactly help in demystification of a topic that surely needs it. The good news is that I was preparing a technical writing class as I was reading the book and it provided a ready source for exercises.
A good rewrite of this book, with up to date examples, is overdue. In the mean time, if you can wade through the prose, the information is definitely there.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Very basic, nothing inspiring.
If you are looking for a basic introduction to the priciple's involved with UI design they are all here. If you are looking to be inspired or taken to another level, don't look here.
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