What I appreciate about Jason Beaird’s book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design is the simplicity with which he tackles each topic. He begins with the client interview, advising to focus on client needs and making them feel at ease.

It’s good advice to use a pad of paper instead of a laptop to record notes in a meeting, but the more important thing to derive is that body language is an important part of the trust-building process of a customer relationship.

Personally, I’m a big proponent of the Golden Ratio, so seeing a good basic explanation of it early in the work was a big plus. He then proceeded through all the basics of design in a very common-sense way.

The typography section appears the most information-packed, and seems obsessively-detailed compared to the rest of the sections. In fact, I could almost imagine the author talking about fonts like Bubba in Forrest Gump talked about shrimp!

Altogether, this book is a very good basic primer on design for the screen. It covers all the topics — though not comprehensively in any case — and presents them in a very understandable way.

The examples serve the text very well, and as you’d expect from a design book, everything looks good to fit its function. If I didn’t know all of this already, I’d be happy to have learned it from this guide.

I will recommend this book to any friends interested in the topic, as well as to patrons at the library I work at (which incidentally already has a copy!) who may happen to ask about the subject.

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