Hardboiled Web-Design: A review

During the last two-three years that I follow Web Design gurus I’ve seen several books being published. Some caught my attention, some not. But no book has been praised and promoted more than Hardboiled Web-Design by Andy Clarke.

Before going into details about the book itself, I’d like to mention that I spend several hours per day reading blogs and tweets from a group of Web Designers, Andy included, that talk about Web Design practices and so on. (I intend to post this list of “web design heroes” soon). This, might be important in order to understand my point of view for to this review.

The first impression when I got the book on my hands was, undoubtedly, positive. The quality of the print, the illustration of the cover, the full-background-color pages for the Case studies and the examples, everything. Ten out of Ten for that.

The initial excitement gave it’s place for some skepticism as I began reading the first part, “Getting Hardboiled”. I got the impression some things were repeated over and over again throughout it. Or maybe that Andy was building up for quite some pages, to end up saying:

“hardboiled web-design redefines graceful degradation for the challenges we face today”

The chapter went on about things I more or less already knew about, such as browser adoption, vendor CSS prefixes, and the “it doesn’t have to look the same” slogan, that I personally feel shouldn’t be directed to us, web designers, but to our bosses/clients. I bet Andy knows that very well, as he mentions it quite often in the book. I guess his goal is to convince us so then we can go and convince our bosses. But in that matter, I would prefer to read a book entitled “Convincing your boss it doesn’t have to look the same”, because, well, I was already convinced.

That said, I by no means want to underestimate the message of the book and Andy’s Hardboiled approach. If Andy with his book alongside with other people of his magnitude can push the industry in such a way that “It won’t have to look the same”, then I’m willing to tattoo the cover of the book on my..back and do Andy’s dishes for a year.

Then came Part II, Hardboiled HTML. I felt that many technologies in this part were already covered either by other more specialized books, or by the websites-homes of the specifications themselves: “Introducing HTML5” by Bruce Lawson & Remy Sharp, the HTML5 Doctor blog ,  HTML5 for Web Designers, all cover extensively HTML5 related stuff, and Microformats are pretty well explained in their own project home. Plus, since schema.org is out, it seems that, unfortunately, all existing Microformats will have to be converted to microdata. Oh and last but not least, I believe that now, after the 4th time, I can recite the HTML story of the last past 10 years while juggling with 3 fireballs on a bike.

Part 4 was the one chapter from which I had lots to learn, mainly because I haven’t yet worked a lot with Keyframe transitions and the CSS Multi-column Layout Module. The most interesting part of the book, technically, were Media Queries. Of course, and judging from the cross-references, Andy was inspired by Ethan Marcotte and his infamous article Responsive Web Design which also became recently a book.

To sum up, I think I would suggest this book to a person just starting in Web Design, someone who cannot go back and track all these articles and sources himself. Andy’s book does a good job in catching the momentum of Web Design, although a book is a book and it will not present more than a specific fragment of time/period. Anything happening straight after the book has been finalized won’t be there. (makes sense)

The question I’m asking myself (and consequently you the readers) is whether traditional print can really catch up to online media considering the frenzy rhythm of innovation today. Every time I see a new publication in A List Apart, I think, “oh boy, there we go again”. I’m not a lot into books, but I understand the excitement, prestige and of course financial benefits involved in writing a book about cutting-edge technologies. I would do it yesterday if I had the chance to. I just don’t think it would be my first choice if I wanted to learn something new.