This is the number one book about visual design: it is recommended whether
you are a visual artist or not. It is useful even if the only visual design
you do is to lay out buttons in a dialog box. As indicated by the title,
the authors stress communication as the goal of visual
design, so they tell you how to produce designs that help users accomplish
tasks and not simply look good. The instructional goals of the authors are
accomplished through eminently understandable explanations of the
fundamental principles and ground rules of the design of interactive
visuals. The book is richly illustrated by many examples of good and bad
design, and even though the illustrations are only in black-and-white, the
book still wins because of the way the authors point out why the
various designs work or don't work. I liked this book enough to write its
foreword.
Nice book about visual design for the Web. There are plenty such books, of course, all with pretty pictures, but most of them ignore the fact that humans ought to be able to use the pictures to achieve their goals in an interactive system. In contrast, this book actually talks about how visual design can help support the interaction design of a website.
Introductory textbook on the design of graphs and tables. If you need to visualize complex information, this book will show you how. Actually, it's useful even if your info is not all that complex: for example, most investor relations pages could be made much easier to use by applying the principles in this book. (Compared with Tufte's book on charting, Few is more applied and provides more explicit guidelines for everyday datasets. Also, Few emphasizes business information, whereas Tufte emphasizes scientific datasets.)
A thin book that provides a quick introduction to many of the same visual
design principles as Mullet and Sano's book. If you only want to spend an
hour to brush up your visual design vocabulary, then this book is for you.
If you have time for more depth, then Mullet and Sano is better.
All three of Tufte's books are famous and all three are richly illustrated
with many of the best information design works throughout the ages (most
done before the computer - which may be telling). The first is the best,
the second is the most beautiful, and the third is a little disappointing
compared to the others. The only one from which you actually
learn fundamental design concepts is The Visual Display of
Quantitative Information. Most of the illustrations are
black-and-white (it was done before Tufte got famous enough to demand 100%
color printing), but that does not matter much because the emphasis is on
how to visualize different kinds of numeric data. The main value of the
book comes from its detailed discussion of a small number of design
principles (e.g., chart junk and repeated instances) that are useful in
thinking about how to visualize complex data in ways that help users make
sense of it. The second book, Envisioning Information is truly
beautiful and a work of art: not much in the way of theory or in-depth
conceptual discussion of the examples, but oh! what examples. The third
book is less interesting: it mainly rehashes ideas from the first two books
with slight variations (and new examples - buy this book for the examples
if you liked the first two and want a fresh dose).
Seeing the cover of this book almost made me refuse to read it: a very busy
and overblown design that screams at the reader "look how cool I am." Once
you get past the cover, the book is quite good, though. It has many series
of screenshots from a variety of highly graphical interactive systems
(mainly CD-ROM; some Web). The explanations and discussions are rather
superficial (you are not going to learn any deep concepts from this book),
but seeing the many pictures is a great source of inspiration and ideas as
to how interactions can be visualized. A strength of this book compared
with my other recommendations is that it usually shows many steps in the
use of the various products it covers.
Great book about
simple data visualization. Currently, it is hard to go beyond Tufte's
examples on the Web. But looking ahead, much more can be done with
interactive visualizations of complex and dynamic data. Yes, I already mentioned this book once above, but it's one of the few books (and the only one of Tufte's) to be worth recommending twice.
State-of-the-art thinking about advanced visualization.
This book should be required reading for anybody working on the next
release of Internet Explorer and other Internet Desktop designs. And it's
good food for thought for the rest of us as we consider use of advanced
visualization techniques to enhance our communication with the user
(currently, most Web animations do nothing but annoy and distract the user;
let's aim to do better).
So how do you get ideas for how to show things? A method that
has worked well in some of my projects is to look up concepts, items, and
metaphors associated with the project in this dictionary: it translates
from words (nouns only) into pictures by showing how each word looks.
Here's a set of drawings of tools, here's a series of hats, here are a bunch
of buildings, and so on. (The dictionary also works the other way: if you know how something looks, you can find out what it's called.)
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