March 19, 2024

10 Free Online Books for Web Designers

There’s a never ending supply of information out there for us web designers. If there’s something we need to learn, we can find it in one form or another. Sometimes it may be on a blog or it could be in a book. While you may have to shell our some money for a good web design book, there are a number of them out that have online versions that are totally free. Here are 10 you should find very useful.

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web

web design books

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout.

Getting Real

web design books

Getting Real is the business, design, programming, and marketing philosophies of 37signals — a developer of web-based software used by over 1 million people and businesses in 70 countries.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web

web design books

In order to allay some of the myths surrounding typography on the web, is structured to step through the principles found in Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS.

jQuery Fundamentals

web design books

jQuery Fundamentals was written to help you understand the fundamentals of this JavaScript library and teach you how to complete basic tasks with jQuery.

Web Style Guide, 3rd Edition

web design books

Consistently praised as the best volume on classic elements of web site design, Web Style Guide, now in its third edition, maintains an emphasis on fundamentals while bringing every chapter topic up-to-date.

Access by Design

web design books

Access by Design offers guidelines for universal usability, and the online version includes examples and links to related articles and tutorials.

Web Designer’s Success Guide

web design books

Web Designer’s Success Guide is the definitive guide to starting your own freelance Web design business. This book gives you step-by-step instructions on how to do things like transition from full-time to self-employment and how to price your services appropriately.

The Web Book

web design books

The Web Book contains all the information you need to create a Web site from scratch. It covers everything from registering a domain name and renting some hosting space, to creating your first HTML page, to building full online database applications with PHP and MySQL. It also tells you how to market and promote your site, and how to make money from it.

Dive Into HTML 5

web design books

This book seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine Standards.

http://www.uiaccess.com/accessucd/index.html

web design books

This book will help you understand and apply principles to make your products more accessible.

Henry Jones is a web developer, designer, and entrepreneur with over 14 years of experience. He is the founder of WDL and ThemeTrust.

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  1. Pingback: 10 Free EBooks for Web Designers | Freebies

54 Comments

  1. Warren Jerzyszek Reply

    Hey, thanks for sharing this amazing freebie! This seems to be a nice list of useful resources for me which I am looking forward to getting stuck into. The HTML5 book looks interesting, before I start reading any would you suggest any you enjoyed reading? Thanks again for sharing this with us.

  2. Bruce Reply

    I can’t seem to download “The Web Book”, their download link is stuffed, and yet it seems to always make it into all the “free ebook” articles! Doesn’t anyone check the resources out before publishing them in an article?

  3. Patrick Dow Reply

    This is great!

    I have more time than money so I plan on doing all of my own web design. The only hitch is that I don’t know how to do web design, or html, or css. Is one or more of these books the place to start, or do you have other advice?

  4. sawgrassshack10 Reply

    Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.

    If you’re a designer, developer, or content producer, reading A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web will enrich your website design and plug the holes in your design knowledge.

  5. Jazza Reply

    God pdf… I hate that it costs money to encode, therefor putting a price on purchasing what it encodes.

    Thanks for the books though.

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