Top 10 Useful Free PDF ebooks for Designers and Bloggers

Web Font User Guide by FontShop

This Web FontFont User Guide contains information aimed at web developers, system administrators and website visitors.
Section B is for web developers, showing how to get started using Web FontFonts for display on your website. Section C contains information for system administrators about which configuration changes may be necessary to successfully serve webfonts from your web server and, finally, section D outlines some issues visitors of your website may experience in connection to webfonts and may assist site owners in answering webfont-related support requests.
Web Font User Guide →
Download the PDF →

Introduction to Good Usability by Peter Pixel

This guide is especially handy if you haven’t done a lot of webdesign yet or if you are involved in webdesign but don’t do any of the real work. I hope to shed some light on some common interface elements and mistakes people often make with them.
A lot of books have been written in the past but the threshold for reading them, especially if you have never built a site, is quite big, hence this short guide. This is by no means a complete guide or solid set of rules, but it is definitely a good start.
Introduction to Good Usability →
Download the PDF →

Web Accessibility Checklist by Aaron Cannon

Written by Aaron Cannon, blind web developer and accessibility consultant.Aaron explains in his article “The Accessibility Checklist I Vowed I’d Never Write”, that the problems with a “simple checklist that, when followed, will give you an accessible site without fail.” No such checklist exists or likely ever will. He believes that this list is not the perfect solution, nor is it the only solution, but believes it is a good first step, and it gives our developers and designers a place to start from.
Web Accessibility Checklist →
Download the PDF →

CSS Systems For Writing Maintainable CSS by Natalie Downe

A CSS System is a reusable set of content-oriented markup patterns and associated CSS created to express a site's individual design. It is the end result of a process that emphasizes up-front planning, loose coupling between CSS and markup, pre-empting browser bugs and overall robustness. It also incorporates a shared vocabulary for developers to communicate the intent of the code.
This ebook elaborates on this concept, and also describes a number of tricks used to preempt maintainability issues.
CSS Systems For Writing Maintainable CSS →
Download the PDF →

Better CSS Font Stacks by Nathan Ford

Better CSS Font Stacks →
Download the PDF →

Faster, and More Secure Webfonts by Bram Pitoyo

Font embedding for the web is a great step in making the web look better and become more functional, but what about security and load times?
Bram Pitoyo’s ebook takes the top layer off font embedding and shows us how things work, and ultimately how to improve performance and make it more secure.
Faster, and More Secure Webfonts →
Download the PDF →

Type Classification eBook by Jacob Cass

This book has been made to help you learn the 10 broad classifications of type. These are the basic foundations of what you need to learn to learn typography and it is essential for any designer to know how to classify type. This book goes through the 10 type classifications with a brief history as well as the key characteristics of each.
Type Classification eBook →
Download the PDF →

HTML5 Quick Learning Guide by freehtml5templates.com

This guide introduces you to just the main elements of HTML5 that you’ll probably want to use right away. This guide is for those who want to get the basics figured out first, and worry about the finer details later on.
HTML5 Quick Learning Guide →
Download the PDF →

The Woork Handbook by Antonio Lupetti

The Woork Handbook is a free eBook about CSS, HTML, Ajax, web programming, Mootools, Scriptaculous and other general topics about web design.
The Woork Handbook →
Download the PDF →

Typo Tips – Seven Rules for Better Typography by Erik Spiekermann

Typo Tips – Seven Rules for Better Typography →
Download the PDF →

Read more...

Top 10 Useful Books For Web Design

1. Web Design: Navigation – Julius Wiedemann

This addition to the popular ICONS Web Design series focuses on very carefully crafted navigation systems, where usability and narrative are taken in consideration in the development of the website.

Released: March 2009

Order

2. The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing

This book will help position your business front-and-center when prospects are searching for solutions online.

In addition, Lutze explains how to respond to your customers and understand their issues, wants, and needs so that you can more easily turn prospects into customers. Her step-by-step approach, up-to-date research, and warnings about common pitfalls make this the ultimate practical guide to getting your business noticed on the Internet.

Released: March 2009

Order – Publisher’s Website

3. A Project Guide to UX Design: For User Experience Designers In The Field or In The Making – Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler

This book presents a chapter-by-chapter guide through an appropriate User Experience process, as well as provides additional information on the creating SOWs and Proposals, Project Ecosystem, best practices for meetings, and understanding business requirements.

User Experience neophytes and professionals alike should be able to find information relevant to any phase of a project in this book.

Released: March 2009

Order – Publisher’s Website

4. When Search Meets Web Usability – Shari Thurow and Nick Musica

This book delivers a proactive approach to building an effective Web site that is search engine friendly and will result in better search rankings.

It outlines the steps needed to bridge the gap between a Google search and a Web site, and also improve the users’ experience once they get to the site.

By understanding the wide variety of information-seeking strategies and the individual behaviors associated with them, this book helps information architects, Web designers/developers, SEOs/SEMs, and usability professionals build better interfaces and functionality into Web sites.

Creating a satisfying user experience is the key to maximizing search effectiveness and getting conversions.

Released: March 2009

Order – Publisher’s Website

5. Sexy Web Design: Creating Interfaces that Work – Elliot Jay Stocks

Designing usable and aesthetically pleasing interfaces is crucial to the success of any application on today’s Web. This book answers critical questions such as:

• What makes a web site work?
• What makes a web site look good?
• What makes a web site easy to use?

This book also covers the process of web site design from the discovery phase all the way through production and the development of style guides.

Released: March 2009

Order – Publisher’s Website – Author’s Website

6. Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field – Helen Armstrong

Graphic Design Theory distills modern design thinking into twenty-four essential essays.

It presents ground-breaking, primary texts from the most important historical and contemporary design thinkers—from Aleksandr Rodchenko’s “Who We Are: Manifesto of the Constructivist Group” to Kenya Hara’s “Computer Technology and Design”

This fundamental survey quickly reveals key evolving ideas in the industry, putting them into a rich historical and cultural context.

To Be Released: April 4, 2009

Preorder – Publisher’s Website – Author’s Website

7. Search Engine Optimization for Flash: Best Practices for Using Flash On The Web – Todd Perkins

This breakthrough book offers you a series of best practices for using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, for building sites with Flash that will stand tall in search rankings. You’ll learn how search engines work, what constitutes a search-engine-optimized (SEO) site, and what to watch out for in the way of SEO pitfalls. With this concise book, you will:

• Learn about searchable content, and understand the importance of metadata, keywords, and links
• Place HTML content in your Flash applications
• Create an SEO website by connecting Flash to JavaScript and CSS
• Work effectively with SWFObject by understanding its capabilities and limitations
• Realize the advantages of using the Adobe Flex framework for SEO

The first -and only- book that explains how to optimize Flash content for search engines,Search Engine Optimization for Flash is an invaluable resource if you develop with Flash and want to be sure your audience can easily find your site.

To Be Released: April 6, 2009

Preorder – Publisher’s Website

8. Speaking in Styles: Fundamentals of CSS for Web Designers – Jason Cranford Teague

Speaking in Styles targets Web designers, aiming to help them learn the “language” that will be used to take their vision from the static comp to the live Internet.

Many designers think that CSS is code, and that it’s too hard to learn.

Author Jason Teague takes an approach to CSS that breaks it down around common design tasks and helps the reader learn that they already think in styles- they just need to learn to speak the language.

To Be Released: April 7, 2009

Preorder – Publisher’s Website – Author’s Website

9. Professional Web Widgets with CSS, DOM, JSON and Ajax – Rajesh Lal and Lakshmi Chava

Professional Widgets with CSS, DOM and Ajax is the first guide to building web widgets – tiny applications that can be embedded in a web page or on the desktop and have exploded in popularity in recent months.

Inside, award-winning programmer Rajesh Lal provides readers with a methodology for building widgets using standards like CSS and DOM to create widgets that work anywhere.

Next he guides readers though the creation of widgets using several popular toolkits and frameworks including Yahoo! Widgets, Silverlight with PopFly, Google Web Toolkit, Microsoft Web Gadgets and more.

Professional Widgets with CSS, DOM and Ajax is heavy on step-by step examples enabling readers to get up to speed and begin building widgets quickly and easily.

To Be Released: April 13, 2009

Preorder – Publisher’s Website

10. Semantic Web Programming – John Hebeler, Matthew Fisher, Ryan Blace, Andrew Perez-Lopez, Mike Dean

The next major advance in the Web 3.0 will be built on semantic Web technologies, which will allow data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.

Written by a team of highly experienced Web developers, this book explains and examines how this powerful new technology can unify and fully leverage the ever-growing data, information, and services that are available on the Internet.

Helpful examples demonstrate how to use the semantic Web to solve practical, real-world problems while you take a look at the set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and technologies that form the semantic Web.

To Be Released: April 13, 2009

Preorder – Publisher’s Website

Read more...