I have a shelf full of CSS and Web design books. Many were helpful in learning the technology, and several are helpful references. I thought I had enough books on this topic, but being the book junkie that I am, I couldn’t resist two new books, and they’ve delivered well beyond my expectations. I highly recommend both of them.

Transcending CSS

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design (Voices That Matter)

Andy Clark’s Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design is an extraordinary book. It explores territory that virtually none of the other books cover, and at the same time is visually stunning itself.

Transcending CSS is written for web designers with some experience, who understand the rudiments of CSS and HTML and Web layout and want to take their skills to the next level. If you’re new to CSS, there are better books to start with. But if you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll find this book invaluable. It will help you both write better CSS code, with less pain, while producing better-looking sites.

CSS, as Andy says with great understatement, is not designer-friendly. Even basic layout tasks, such as multiple columns with a footer below, are full of surprising complexity and require choosing from a myriad of approaches. Then there’s the challenge of supporting multiple browser versions—which ones do you design for? And what hacks do you use to support ill-behaved browsers?

Andy encourages readers to use modern CSS, semantic HTML markup, while also elevating visual designs to a high standard. In his own words, from the book’s first paragraph:

“Transcendent CSS is more than a plea to use the latest, coolest CSS. It’s a quest to use the lessons you’re learning in CSS as a means to becoming the finest artist and designer you can be. Transcendent CSS asks you to embrace the new rather than the old and to stimulate new ways to find inspiration, create more agile and appropriate workflows for Web design, and encourage yourself to constantly learn more about both the design and the technical issues with which you work.”

The book covers a range of topics that include not only a modern approach to HTML markup and CSS styling, but also the designer/developer workflow, how to prototype a design, the use of grids, and finding design inspirations. It also includes a section on CSS3, which may be more forward-looking that most designers need right now but is nevertheless interesting.

You can think of this either as a design book with an unusual amount of coding, or a coding book mixed with great design advice. Either way, if you’ve moved beyond the basics of Web design, you won’t regret buying this book.

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, by Jason Beaird, is a very different, but equally valuable, new book. It is a pure design book and ignores coding almost entirely. This gives the author more room to show, as the title says, what makes Web sites beautiful.

As a unifying theme, the author works through the design of an example site that is used throughout the book. He also shows examples from a number of other sites to illustrate various design approaches and techniques.

The sections of the book are:

• Layout and Composition
• Color
• Texture
• Typography
• Imagery

Experienced designers may find this book too basic, but it’s a perfect match for new designers and for developers seeking to move beyond sites that look like the developer designed them.

If you spend a few hours with each of these books, you’re almost sure to end up creating better designs in the future.