Visual Usability: Principles and Practices for Designing Digital Applications

Imagine how much easier creating web and mobile applications would be if you had a practical and concise, hands-on guide to visual design. Visual Usability gets into the nitty-gritty of applying visual design principles to complex application design.

You'll learn how to avoid common mistakes, make informed decisions about application design, and elevate the ordinary. We'll review three key principles that affect application design - consistency, hierarchy, and personality - and illustrate how to apply tools like typography, color, and layout to digital application design. Whether you're a UI professional looking to fine-tune your skills, a developer who cares about making applications beautiful and usable, or someone entirely new to the design arena, Visual Usability is your one-stop, practical guide to visual design.

• Discover the principles and rules that underlie successful application design
• Learn how to develop a rationale to support design strategy and move teams forward
• Master the visual design toolkit to increase user-friendliness and make complicated processes feel straightforward for your product

About the Authors

Tania Schlatter is a visual designer equally interested in content, form, and people. She designs interfaces and communication systems that help people by combining user-centered and visual design techniques and applying them to complex applications.

Tania has been practicing design for more than 20 years. Her formal design study includes an M.Des. in human-centered communication design from the Institute of Design in Chicago; a summer with Paul Rand and Armin Hofmann in Brissago, Switzerland; and a BFA in graphic design from Boston University. She served as the first experience design chair for the AIGA at the local level. Tania currently teaches interactive information design to graduate students at Northeastern University in Boston.

Deborah A. Levinson is a user interface designer with over 16 years of expertise helping designers, engineers, and communications professionals find common ground and build successful digital applications. A former webmaster for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Debby is also a coauthor of The MIT Guide to Teaching Website Design, published by MIT Press in April 2001. She and Tania co-own Nimble Partners, a Boston-area user experience and user interface design firm.

The year this book was written, Tania and Debby worked with the founder of Catapult.org to define the site's user experience and administrative interface; with researchers at MIT's HyperStudio on interfaces for social annotation; with CafePress.com; and with a software firm on a suite of applications utilizing artificial intelligence and labor data.