35 Free Web Design Ebooks / Resources (Part 3 of 3)
Web Tutorials, Creativity, Design, HTML5, Time Management, Typography and many more!
This is the final and the last part of this compilation. We hope you’ve enjoyed these series as much as we did compiling them. These ebooks include:-
- Web Design from Scratch – Free Web Design Tutorials – webdesignfromscratch.com
- W3Schools Online Web Tutorials – w3schools.com
- An Introduction to Good Usability – peterpixel.nl
- How To Be Creative – changethis.com
- Why Design? – aiga.org
- The Design Funnel: A Manifesto for Meaningful Design – changethis.com
- HTML5 Quick Learning Guide – freehtml5templates.com
- Time Management Training for Creative People – wishfulthinking.co.uk
- A Concise Guide to Archiving for Designers – aiga.org
- Type Classification eBook – justcreativedesign.com
- Designing for the Web – designingfortheweb.co.uk
Web Design from Scratch – Free Web Design Tutorials
by webdesignfromscratch.com
Dedicated to helping its web developer readership make better websites, whether as amateurs or professionals, the site is a web design and development resource containing free tutorials covering virtually all the skills you need for great looking and practical websites. It is also home to some of the most popular web design articles from design professionals that you can click to access their respective pages. The site calls them articles but like the ‘Web 2.0 Design,’ most are eBook-long, complete with graphics and screenshots, as well as related resource links, in just one page requiring you to scroll down through 15 chapters.
Clicking on the web design tutorials gives you access to 26 pages of tips and guides from several authors since December 2004 with 5 topics per page, offering useful insights and web site reviews from web design gurus to enable you to create the simplest to the most sophisticated web pages. There are no download facilities but considering that each title in the tutorials and articles are confined to just single pages each, you can just use your browser’s ‘save Page As’ command to put the files on your PC for future offline reading. The site also endorses several eBooks which you can purchase directly from the site.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Web Design from Scratch – Free Web Design Tutorials
W3Schools Online Web Tutorials
by w3schools.com
The site is a self-learning online resource center which it claims to be the largest web development resource site in the world. While the site offers online certificated courses in basic and advance web development as well as eBooks it endorses for purchase at Amazon, it is home to a wealth of ready skills resources that makes it a one-stop reference site for just about everything a web designer needs, even novice ones, to build practical and aesthetically pleasing websites. It also has links to several useful sites that allow readers to use free online website templates and build free websites along with several paid hosting bureaus for their newly created websites.
But what makes the site stand out is the left window column which lists all the basic and advance HTML, XML, CAA, ASP, PHP, SQL and JavaScript topics for anyone who needs such a quick and ready resource material. These topics are cross-categorized into tutorials, reference and examples allowing readers to access what they need faster. Clicking on one brings you to topic on a single page containing text explanations, syntax construction and corresponding screenshot examples. In fact, you can say that the entire site is an HTML eBook with the commercial aspects thrown in just to support the site.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
W3Schools Online Web Tutorials
An Introduction to Good Usability
by peterpixel.nl
The Peter Pixel blogsite brings more flesh to its tagline ‘User experience design’ with the free 19-page eBook ‘Introduction to Good Usability’ by the site owner Peter Conradie as published in 2008. Clicking the site from its home page brings you to eBook’s introduction page containing an embedded viewer applet which you can alter from its default PDF-like view into either a presentation or magazine view, all of which can be zoomed to full screen by just clicking on the page display. The magazine view is great as you can flip through the pages like a real magazine. All views can be directly routed to your printer. In addition, the eBook is also available in Spanish which you can download from the site by clicking below the eBook’s viewer window.
Alternatively, you can also click on the title of the eBook at the top of the viewer to download a full page version to display on your browser’s Acrobat Reader add-on. Once displayed, you can simply click on the Reader’s disk icon button to save the file to your PC for offline reading. As a blog site, the popular eBook has received and continues to receive a stream of flattering reader comments at the last half of the blog page. These comments provide a quick glance on how the eBook is regarded by those who have read it.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
An Introduction to Good Usability
How To Be Creative
by changethis.com
The Change This blog site offers the eBook ‘How To Be Creative’ by Hugh MacLeod as published in October 2004 and which you can download for free as a PDF file. It forms part of the 6th issue of the blog’s 87 issues touching on various lifestyle, education, humanities, politics and social topics. Downloading takes a few minutes but once displayed on your browser’s Adobe Reader, you can save it to your hard disk by clicking on the reader’s disk icon button. The site page dedicated to the eBook shows 29 comments and 118 reactions to the eBook to give you some idea on how the eBook is received by its readers.
Rather than using a word processing format, the 49-page 26-chapter document has been authored in presentation format complete with text and graphics. An American educated in the UK, Hugh is an accomplished copywriter, cartoonist, advertising consultant and creative blogger with one of the largest online blog followers starting with his site at https://gapingvoid.com. He gives 26 proven and insightful tips corresponding to its 26 chapters on how to optimize one’s creativity in graphics, advertising and the arts and still survive in the practical world. These are useful tips which can readily apply to any creative webpage designer. The graphics in the eBook are cartoons drawn by the writer himself.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
How To Be Creative
Why Design?
by aiga.org
The AIGA blogging site posits the question ‘why design?’ and around that central theme, it houses a wealth of blog articles that can serve as an inspiration for budding and professional web page designers and developers, enabling them to recognize the value of sound design in everything they do for the online audience. Whether the topic is about design to foster cultural awareness, merging design business with ethical practices, design transparency that clarifies a user’s experience, designs that create value for the business, or designs that respect the environment, the site sends the message that designing has its place in business, society and the environment. And you can also take some hints of such a place by reading user comments in each of these articles.
The AIGA site has no eBooks or articles to download but it has external resource links related to the design philosophies that do. Many of these sites provide eBook length materials in one page which you can read online or download from your browser’s ‘save as’ command. You have external articles from Good.is and Fastcodesign.com that provide good reads to make the site a rich insightful resource for web designers and developers.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Why Design?
The Design Funnel: A Manifesto for Meaningful Design
by changethis.com
The Change This blog site presents a free eBook ‘the Design Funnel: A Manifesto for Meaningful Design’ by Stephen Hay as published in July 2008. Forming part of the site’s 48th issue, the 12-page manifesto targets professional designers of any media with a clear set of steps that allow them to consistently produce creative work that puts them ahead of their peers. Author Stephen Hay leverages his decades of experience in advertising and creative web development to create a concise and insightful guide for professionals in effectively translating their client’s often vague ideas and directions into clear platforms for solid creative design work.
Authored in landscape presentation style, the text heavy eBook can be downloaded as a free PDF file that gets displayed in your browser’s Adobe reader add-on. You can then click on the reader’s disk icon button to save it in your PC for offline reading or printing. A quick look at the 7 reader comments on the dedicated blog page shows a reasonably positive acceptance and you can check it out yourself with a short download time.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
The Design Funnel: A Manifesto for Meaningful Design
HTML5 Quick Learning Guide
by freehtml5templates.com
This has to be the shortest HTML5 reference guide but the site does admit the author meant it to be an introduction to the main elements of HTML5, calling it appropriately as a ‘quick learning guide.’ The 5-page ‘HTML5 Quick Learning Guide’ focuses on the difference between the old and the new HTML, allowing HTML and XJTML programmers to know and prepare the stage to move to the new HTML5 standards using its broad templates. The finer details can come later or from other tutorial sites including the site’s other pages.
The site offers a quick download facility for the eBook in PDF format. It merely displays the document’s cover and a short description of the eBook which is more a statement of its primary objectives. Below the description is the linked text to get it downloaded. As a reference guide, the document is better saved in your PC. Once downloaded and displayed on your browser, you can simply click on the disk icon to save it on your hard drive for future reference. And while the document is short, it does have the resource links to other sites to further help you migrate from HTML 4 or earlier versions to the new HTML5 standards.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
HTML5 Quick Learning Guide
Time Management Training for Creative People
by wishfulthinking.co.uk
One may think that time management has no bearing on the skills needed for website development. But rather than be wishful that it does, the Wishful Thinking blogsite creates a good argument that it can make a significant difference for creative people in the profession. You can learn all that after reading the 32-page 9-chapter eBook ‘time Management for Creative People’ by Mark McGuiness who had earlier posted the contents as a series in his own site. Mark has leveraged his years as a business coach and trainer to show that time management allows creative people to produce timely results amidst the distractions of 21st century business demands.
The site boasts that the eBook has been downloaded more than 100,000 times since it was released in 2007 and since then, the blog site has had several positive reviews about it on the download blog page. There are no prominent download buttons and you may need to read through the introduction to come across the ‘Click Here’ hyperlinked text to download the document. Once downloaded to your browser’s Adobe Reader, you can simply click on the reader’s disk icon to save it on your PC.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Time Management Training for Creative People
A Concise Guide to Archiving for Designers
by aiga.org
The AIGA site is making available for free the eBook ‘A Concise Guide to Archiving for Designers,’ an English version of its earlier work ‘dutch Archives for Graphic Designers’ (NAGO) by Karen van der Heiden released in the Netherlands . The document, translated by the author herself in English, has 10 easy short chapters that offer tips on the proper methods to store and describe the creative collections of designers. Both works were published by NAGO, a foundation that gathers, preserves and provide digital access to archives of famous Dutch designers. Since their publication in 2008, the guide has been updated only once in December 2010 for chapters 9 and 10. The writer has had more than 9 years as a digital archivist in NAGO and in the academe.
Downloading the document needs no further action from the readers . It is automatically loaded on the page’s embedded Scribd reader, allowing you to read it through on the site or get it zoomed. But you can also download it as a PDF document from the Scribd reader almost instantly. Clicking on the download button on the reader prompts you to save the file on a directory in your PC. The 10 chapters, while image-rich, only has 13 pages in presentation format including cover and acknowledgement, with a file size of only 503 Kb.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
A Concise Guide to Archiving for Designers
Type Classification eBook
by justcreativedesign.com
The Just Creative Design site of freelance graphics artist Jacob Cass offers its first free eBook, a 29-page ‘type Classification,’ meant to inform graphics designers about the 10 broad classifications of font types. The eBook discusses briefly the fundamental elements of typography and the 10 type classifications including a short history and characteristics of each type. It makes for a quick reference guide essential to all graphics designers when applying fonts to their creative works.
The download site page has a snapshot thumbnail of the 29 pages including its cover and table of contents. You can already get those 10 type classifications from these shots but their histories should make for interesting read. Downloading uncomfortably takes its sweet time which could be due to a low bandwidth hosting server or there are many around the world downloading it as of this writing. Once downloaded, it gets displayed on the browser’s Adobe Reader. You can save the file by clicking the Reader’s disk icon button.
The Just Creative Design site encourages readers to post comments in its announcement blogging page where there are 67 flattering comments posted since the eBook’s release in 2008 with the latest comment posted in June this year.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Type Classification eBook
Designing for the Web
by designingfortheweb.co.uk
The site makes a bold promise that you can design a website in five simple steps. Actually, these are five general chapters in its free eBook ‘designing for the Web’ by Mark Boulton published in March 2010. The entire site is the eBook itself with the Table of Contents greeting you when you get to the site. The sub-chapter topics under each of the five chapters have hyperlinked texts to get to their respective pages. Each sub-chapter occupies a single page where you get the facility to navigate to the next chapter or go back to the content page if you want to skip to other chapters. No ‘previous’ chapter button.
There is a download facility on each of the sub chapter page so you can download and save the entire eBook in PDF format. Unfortunately, you have to shell out £12 to do that. If you just want to save the page for future offline reading, just use your browser’s ‘save page as.’ You will just have to do this for each page in the eBook and load each chapter to read since the ‘next chapter’ button on each page will always look for the target online page.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Designing for the Web
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