The Smashing Idea Book: From Inspiration to Application [Brossura]

Having been sent this book for review, it took me a few minutes to figure out that it was about Web design and that was connected with a website set up to support Web design professionals - smashingmagazine dot com. These facts are not well communicated in the first pages, which indicates the problem. This is a book about design and communication but itself is not very well designed or communicated.

The purpose is nominally a sourcebook or collection of ideas - 'inspirations' in the author's word - for webdesigners to browse through for suggestions they might like to try in their own layouts, including photos, patterns from nature, and existing websites which offer interesting examples. However, the reproductions are rather cramped and, since each is accompanied by a URL, one tends to immediately type in the URL of an interesting figure to get a better look. Also the book is intended to be used with the resources found on the parent website - it can't easily be used independently. And there is very little 'how to' guidance here. So what's the point and why would one pay 40 bucks for this? Wouldn't it be better to make this array of photos and links just a tab on the parent smashingmagazine?

This book is about inspiration. There is no code and no mention of how specific web page layouts are achieved. This is refreshing... books on web aesthetics are rare compared to books on HTML and CSS. So lots of examples of layout, color, and style. Not all the styles have good examples though. Could not find a good 'grunge' example; one was said to have 'subtle grunge' but perhaps the screen capture was too small to see it.

On the other hand, many of the displayed web pages screamed grid system, it would have been nice to include a comment about where to explore grid layout techniques. A short technical appendix about grids, jQuery, etc. would have been useful. No code, just exceptional URLs.

Roughly speaking, the first half of the book is illustrated using screen captures of web pages. Kinda nice... some are indeed inspirational. From that point on the book is populated with images drawn for Flickr. The section on drawing inspiration by industry is intersting, but not all industried used for inspiration are represented through web pages. The chapter on drawing inspiration from architecture and interior design is all Flickr images. It's not clear why this distinction is made. I believe it would have been better to use both web pages and images together for specific industries. Other industires treated as photo only include toys, technology and textiles.

Since the whole last half of the book is Flickr images the book might have been better organized as inspiration by web page examples, and inspiration by photography. There is a chapter on photography with examples of Lomography, HDR, people, landscapes and macro. Frankly the images selected are not drawn from photographers with exceptional portfolios on Flickr. The ones I was able to locate were images from typical users. Not sure what the inspirational lesson is here. I was left with the feeling that the author was faced with a deadline that could most easily be met with Flickr images, not finding appropriate web sites.

I can only conclude that those things that inspire us are unique to the individual. A book of inspiration is unlikely to satisfy all readers. In this case, I liked the use of web site examples; most were clearly well done even if not inspirational. The images chosen were generally dark and forboding, and to me disppointing. Your mileage may vary...

If I were to sum up my thoughts on the book it would be: disappointed. I feel that the book's description promises something more than it delivers, but maybe I'm reading too much into things like "a rich source of inspiration," "hundreds of smashing ideas guaranteed to get your creative juices flowing and your mind buzzing," "invaluable insights into the universal components of great design," etc.

I expected practical tips. What I got was 300 pages of images of websites, print designs, and photos--without comments or explanations of why they were selected. The authors have simply curated content from other sources so you don't have to browse the web, Flickr and other sources yourself. That's not to say the book isn't useful. It is nice to have a book I can reach for when I need some inspiration instead of doing the legwork myself, but I'm not convinced the value of the book justifies the price tag or that it lives up to its own promises.

There is some information scattered throughout the book, but a lot of it is fluff that feels like it was put in just to put some words between pages of endless images. The most useful part of the book for me is "Part III: Using Inspiration"--but it's only the last 25 or so pages of the 390-page book. It's short, but it has some practical tips and guidelines for using inspiration found elsewhere to create new designs. This is the kind of information I expected to find scattered throughout the entire book, but added at the end of it.