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Reviewer: William J. Hankley

The basis of this book is a tutorial that the authors had presented at several technical conferences. In the foreword, Jakob Nielsen states, “As software gets closer to achieving commodity status, users can be expected to make very rapid choices…they will immediately discard any interface that looks boring, obsolete, or too confusing.…There is no substitute for having `real' graphic designers involved from the beginning in the design of any important interface with major visual elements.” The focus of the book is to “make possible for the larger community of interface designers to improve their graphic design skills and understanding of graphic design concepts.” There are six main chapters: “Elegance and Simplicity,” “Scale, Contrast, and Proportion,” “Organization and Visual Structure,” “Module and Program,” “Image and Representation,” and “Style.” Each chapter is organized as “principles,” “common errors,” and “techniques.” The authors provide many example illustrations, with many taken from the OpenLook and Macintosh interfaces. For people not trained in graphic design, the verbal descriptions may at first be somewhat abstract, but the visual examples are clear and well commented. They give vibrant life to the book. The visual examples alone should be studied by anyone involved in GUI design; they should be presented in any class on GUI development. That said, I do not agree with every evaluation made in the visual examples. Interestingly, the cover does not seem to meet all the guidelines of the book, but it was not designed by the authors.

Reviewer: Anthony L. Clapes

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a cliche´ that contains a profound truth about communication. The eye and the mind form a tightly integrated system for the receipt and processing of information. The commercial software industry has vaulted into the visual world without adequate forethought about the elements of style in visual communications. As customer demand demonstrates, however, graphical interfaces—even those that are not well designed—have provided a new dimension in programmer-to-user communications that extends the usability of the programs to a much wider and less technically sophisticated audience. Operating system (OS) suppliers provide a base of graphical user interface (GUI) elements that serves as a common optical lexicon for the applications they support. This can be good or bad, depending on the design elements and principles employed by the OS GUI developers. What teaching should guide their selection of elements and principles__?__ Application developers usually have flexibility in adopting, extending, or supplanting the standards provided by the OS developers. How creative should they be, and why__?__ This book starts from the premise that nondigital visual design disciplines are a valuable training ground for GUI designers. It ends with a quote from Douglas Martin [1] that pithily summarizes why general principles of graphic design cannot be ignored by conscientious software developers: “The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.” Between these bookends, the authors offer a tremendous amount of wisdom on how to differentiate good design from bad and on how to implement the basic principles of communication-oriented graphic design in a user interface. The chapter titles suggest that the authors intended their work to be a stylebook for graphical interface design: “Elegance and Simplicity,” “Scale,” “<__?__Pub Caret>Contrast and Proportion,” “Organization and Visual Structure,” “Module and Program,” “Image and Representation,” and “So What about Style__?__” As befits a book on this subject, the text is generously supplemented with illustrations, not just of good and bad GUI design, but of mostly good design from the realms of advertising, posters, consumer products, computer games, mapmaking, and architecture, both ancient and modern. This is not a long book, but it is full of wisdom, insight, and guidance. It is a valuable introduction to the art and science of intelligent 2D GUI design.