Kevin Mullet, Darrell Sano
Designing Visual Interfaces
Communication Oriented Techniques
Prentice Hall, 1994
304 pages
ISBN: 0-1330-3389-9

“Designing Visual Interfaces” is not your typical GUI book with a lot of specific guidelines. The authors divided it into several chapters (“Elegance and simplicity,” “Scale, contrast, and proportion,” “Organization and visual structure,” “Module and program,” “Image and representation” and “Style”) and within each of them they present design principles, then proceed to common GUI errors, ending with useful techniques. There’s a lot of screenshots (and, what is commendable, big chunk of those comes from less known operating systems), but also many design examples of real life designs. This makes this 9-year-old, tastefully packaged book still relevant and useful. A very good and highly recommended volume for everyone interested in graphic and interface design.

The following paragraphs are quoted verbatim from the back cover:

This book describes fundamental techniques that can be used to enhance the visual quality of graphical user interfaces, data displays, and multimedia productions. The authors approach interface design from the perspective of communication-oriented graphic design, industrial design, and architecture. The skills, practice, and orientation of these design disciplines are essential to the success of every graphical interface, yet few software developers, human factors professionals, or product managers receive any training in these areas. Designing Visual Interfaces addresses this shortcoming by describing essential design concepts as manifested in the graphical user interface. The book presents basic design principles, common errors, and practical techniques in each of six major areas:

	Elegance and Simplicity
	Scale, Contrast, and Proportion
	Organization and Visual Structure
	Module and Program
	Image and Representation
	Style

Designing Visual Interfaces will be useful to anyone responsible for designing, specifying, implementing, documenting, or managing the appearance of computer-based information displays. Design concepts are supported by hundreds of illustrations, with an emphasis on visual examples drawn from dozens of existing software products. Readers will gain a new perspective on product development and an appreciation for the contribution that effective visual design offers their products and users.

Kevin Mullet is the Product Designer for Macromedia’s multimedia authoring tools and the technical lead for a cross-product, cross-platform interface design standard in the Macromedia User Interface. Mr. Mullet worked previously as a human interface engineer at Sun Microsystems, and has consulted extensively on software design issues.

Darrell Sano is a User Interface Design Consultant at Netscape Communications Corporation. He currently provides design consultant services to numerous businesses and organizations who will use Netscape technology to establish a web presence on the Internet. Prior to joining Netscape, Mr. Sano was a member of the Human Factors Engineering group at Sun Microsystems.