Book Review: Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques
A book review about a book explaining the basics of visual interface design would be nothing notable except that my more thorough readers might say: "Lars, you cannot write a review about a book that is more than ten years old and long out of print." Well, in this blog I have been describing how to design lock-in effects, propagated copying features, invoked The Beatles at least twice and referred to Zombies, so I guess I can.
Designing Visual Interfaces, by Kevin Mullet and Darell Sano, subtitled "Communication Oriented Techniques", was written in 1994, when Netscape was rocking the software world and Sun was still a powerful company and not an acquisition target for IBM. The concepts explained in this book that form the main chapters are elegance and simplicity, scale, contrast and proportion, organization and visual structure, module and program, image and representation, and style are indeed timeless and apply to graphic design as much as to visual interface design. Each chapter is using positive examples abundantly, following the philosophy that becoming a good designer needs first and foremost experience, which can be gained by exposure to works of great design. Additionally there is a section in almost every chapter that highlights the most common mistakes.
As I wrote, the books subject is timeless and not bound to any specific user interface technology, which is illustrated by the examples that are being used throughout the book. Applications and operating like Ami Pro, Windows 3.0, NextStep, Aldus Freehand that are being used as examples in the book might be long gone (or evolved into Windows Vista, Mac OS X Leopard, Adobe Freehand, but the principles that made the user interfaces of these applications exemplary in any sense still apply.
Aside from being reminded of software legacy and the word processor that taught me there were serious uses of computers, the illustrations and examples used in the book serve well to explain the concepts mentioned. On the one hand, visual design was not that prevalent, so that you could find really awkward user interfaces without going to obscure shareware applications, but also in mainstream software such as the Mac OS control panel. On the other hand with simple black-and-white displays and basic user interface toolkits, application developers could not use eye-candy to distract from the underlying weaknesses of their dialogs.
I do not spend as much time reading books as I would like to, but the time invested in this book was surely well spent and I can recommend it to anyone who is looking to understand the basics of visual interface design without having to rely on a cookbook or guideline approach. For readers with a bit of background in using different operating systems, it will be interesting to see how evolutionary lines in the software phenotype can be traced for example from Mac OS to Newton OS to Palm OS or from Mac OS to NextSTEP to Mac OS X.
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