Top 8 Web Design Books to Start Your Designing Career! [2024 Edition]
If you are talking about web designing, you can find diverse job opportunities there! This creative field will offer you the exclusive chance to work in an innovative field.
You can still practice the advanced principles of amazing web designs and get to know more about this domain with this blog post. You can also gain knowledge of the latest web design principles with the top 8 web design books, which will be discussed in this blog post.
These 8 books are specially selected by us because they offer us a clear understanding of various complex web designing principles with methodological approaches, which the online platforms failed to give! It’s not about reading a book; it’s all about gaining knowledge that drives us from becoming learners to web design experts!
So, we have prepared a list of the top 8 web design books to boost your design skills and give you industry-specific knowledge.
Join W3 Web School’s Web Design Course today to learn how to apply those best web design practices to your website.
Table of Contents
The Best Web Design Books
You can consider web design to be the most creative field with rapidly changing dynamics and practices. Books play a vital role as major resources for learning and offer industry insights from popular experts.
If you are a highly experienced professional in this field who wants to upgrade your career, these top 8 web design books are your perfect place to learn. Here, we are going to show you how these five books are different from others in meeting the demands of aspiring web designers.
1. Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics
You can start your reading journey with the book “Learning Web Design” by Jennifer Robbins, as this is the one you should read first if you want to gather a basic understanding of web development. You can learn the major languages of web design, which are well-described by Jennifer Robbins.
This book is a bible for those who have very little knowledge of coding and helps them to develop an understanding of complex topics such as CSS, HTML, web graphics, and JavaScript.
The book covers the following five major topics:
- How to build HTML pages with texts, images, links, forms, and tables.
- Fundamentals of JavaScript and its importance as a programming language in web design.
- How to create and optimize web images for quick downloading.
- How to use CSS for backgrounds, layouts, catchy backgrounds, and page formatting.
- Learn simple effects of animation with the application of CSS.
Each topic offers easy and simple graphic and code snippets, and a question related to the chapter is asked at the end. The book by Jennifer Robbins gives a useful tip for beginners who want to learn the basics of web design.
If you want to become an expert in the web design field, this book among other web design books delivers the concepts that will help you to become a highly qualified professional from a beginner!
2. The Principles of Beautiful Web Design: Designing Great Web Sites is Not Rocket Science!
The latest edition of the “Principles of Beautiful Web Design” by Jason Beaird & Alex Walker covers a range of vital web design topics. You can also go for the 3rd edition, which is easily available on the internet.
The major web design topics that have been covered in this book include:
- Typography covering concepts such as
- Colour covering concepts like color temperature, palette creation, tools & resources, color theory, chromatic value, and more!
- Texture covering subjects such as line, pattern, shape, point, depth & volume, and texture building.
- Imagery covering concepts such as image sources, resolutions, projects, file formats, and image presentation.
- Layout & Composition of Designs covering concepts such as Grid theory, web trends, web page anatomy, responsive design, and more!
You will be shocked to see how each chapter covers the topics in a way that anyone can use in real practical circumstances. The most recent edition of this book is extremely helpful for beginners and offers topics such as current industry standards of web design.
This will make sure that your design works are the latest and meaningful while maintaining the most updated industry trends and design patterns.
3. Web Design Playground: HTML & CSS The Interactive Way
“Web Design Playground” by Paul Mcfredries gives you a basic understanding of HTML and CSS along with different vital web design elements. This book among other web design books offers you the experience of practical tutorials in an interactive manner, making this web designing learning journey memorable and highly engaging.
If you are interested in learning the practical approach, then the attractive web pages designed by Paul McFredries will make your learning journey interesting!
You can learn how to design product pages, make websites, and design photo galleries with this book. You can get the vital web design topics covered in this book, and they are as follows:
- Essentials of HTML and CSS, how to build web pages, structure addition in the page, and how to format a web page.
- Principles of working with styles and images, how to add media and images, principles of styles, all about various web design elements, all about borders, sizes, and margins.
- Understanding the CSS properties and web page layout, how to design page layouts with the help of Flexbox, designing responsive webpages, making responsive typography, and responsive images.
- How to use more HTML elements to make your website thrive in the digital world, using colors in web designs, making your page look highly attractive to audiences by using typography, and how to use advanced CSS selectors.
This book will help you gain the basic knowledge of web design and then provide you with the most advanced design principles through clear explanations. If you want to learn and create web designs at the same time, then this book is perfect for you, as are other web design books!
4. 6 Practical WordPress Projects
If you want to build more than just a blogging website with WordPress, then you are at the right place! This web design book among other web design books will improve your knowledge and skills from scratch. You can learn more about how to build a non-blog website, use plugins, make custom themes, endpoints, custom admin, and more!
If you want to boost your web design skills with a robust WordPress experience, then this book by SitePoint is the one for you! You can learn the technical principles of how to use C# in the 5th chapter of this book.
The 6 Practical WordPress Projects by SitePoint covers six important topics of advanced web designing, and they are:
- Learn how to make WordPress themes, learn the basic templates, template hierarchy, filter hooks, and loops, and make the bare minimum themes, conditional tags, markup adjustments, and more!
- Learning how to develop non-blog websites with WordPress, searching for the appropriate theme for that site, choosing the most suitable Plugins, and managing the content for the specific non-blog site.
- How to make custom Endpoints, build a child theme, controller pattern application, and more!
- Developing WordPress Plugins with the most progressive JavaScript framework, Vue, and adding this framework to a WordPress Plugin.
- Make and build content for that non-blog WordPress site that matches the Extended reality future.
- How to build a custom admin page with the WordPress setting to make fully responsive digital stores.
This book will provide you with some project examples to boost your practical understanding of WordPress. Anyone willing to boost their WordPress knowledge and project understanding can go for this book!
5. Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript
This book by Robin Nixon presents you with web design topics like MySQL, PHP, and JavaScript if you want to build and design responsive websites. You must read this book among other web design books to get a solid understanding of scripting language and formatting when designing a robust website. If you are looking to develop your programming skills to make engaging websites for clients, then this is the right choice for you, although this book is not a must-read for web designers.
The topics you will get to learn in the latest edition of this book are;
- Major PHP syntax and adding MySQL for the scripting of the server side.
- How to use jQuery to make script writing easy.
- Learn how to make advanced as well as responsive graphic designs with HTML 5 and CSS.
- Learn the essentials of JavaScript for making a web page interactive.
If you are a beginner in this designing world and want to develop your skills, this book by Robin Nixon offers you the essentials needed to become a highly skilled web designer. This one became an ideal resource among other web design books for covering the major web designing technologies.
6. UX Design 2020: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to User Experience
The newcomers in web design find this book a game-changer in the robust user-experience design world. The latest UX design principles with real-world project examples have been highlighted in this book by Theo Farrington.
The major contents covered in this “UX Design 2020” book include:
- Learn the user’s needs and behaviors.
- How to use different advanced technologies for user testing and research.
- What are some golden rules of UX design?
- How UX is used for content, spaces, products, services, and interfaces.
- Learn how human motivations and behavior are related to UX.
- UX designer job roles include developing strategies for web designs for different social media platforms and devices.
If you are a beginner and want to learn UX principles, then this book will provide you with valuable resources. The real examples covered in this book give you a practical approach to inform you of the major principles of web designing projects. This book contains a chapter that is particularly dedicated to UX design principles and their applicability to websites.
7. HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites
This book by Jon Duckett has been a top choice for many web designers who want to get both access and depth of web designing. This book among other web design books will offer you the chance to learn basic technologies along with major concepts to create robust websites.
Jon Duckett has written the major concepts of CSS and HTML in a very easy and simple manner. This book is specially created for aspiring programmers, but you can also read it to enhance your web design skills and knowledge.
Jon Duckett has included various major topics in this book, and they are:
- Learn the fundamentals of CSS and HTML.
- Learn the technologies for designing and developing robust websites.
- Golden principles of web design.
- Learn how the practices of coding make your website stand out from the competition.
This book is a major resource for those who want to learn the concept of web development. Its clear and simple layouts make it a must-read for beginners who want to design and make aesthetically pleasing responsive websites.
8. Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
This book is the classic one for beginners to offer them the idea of creating and designing a responsive website. Steve Krug carefully elected the topics of the book and prepared this classic one with his 20+ years of working experience.
This book will provide you with the ways in which you can build and design a website in the most effective ways.
Steve Krug has added the chapters which include:
- Get an idea of how to use web designs effectively.
- Learn how to remove unnecessary elements from your website.
- Learn the ways to build websites that users can understand easily.
- Simple usability testing conduction.
- Effective navigation elements and their usage in a website.
The latest edition covers all the essential topics, such as mobile usability in today’s digital landscape, in a very useful and clear manner.
Wrapping Up,
These carefully picked web design books overcome the issues of a beginner and an expert professional. Each book has been selected cautiously not only for its topics but also for its easy-to-understand approach in the landscape of rapidly changing web design.
The concepts and real-client project experiences are very clearly highlighted in these web design books so that a reader will not get bored easily.
One major advantage of reading these web design books is the knowledge and understanding you can get after making trial and error in their long years of web design experiences.
FAQs on Top 8 Web Design Books to Start Your Designing Career!
There is no such best book for web designing, although some books are still serving the purpose, and those are “Learning Web Design” by Jennifer Robbins, “Principles of Beautiful Web Design” by Jason Beaird & Alex Walker, “Web Design Playground” by Paul McFredries, and many.
The five major books that I think are the best tools for web design are Adobe Photoshop, Sublime Text, Adobe Illustrator, Figma, and Adobe XD.
Yes, you can consider web design as a rewarding career that can offer you the opportunity to innovate, create, and grow in this rapidly transforming design field.
The major topics that come under web design are HTML, CSS, JavaScript, UX/UI design, responsive design, and golden principles of web design.