Voices That Matter – serie

Apply psychology and behavioral science to web, UX, and graphic design

Behavioral science leader and CEO at The Team W, Inc., Susan M. Weinschenk, provides a guide that every designer needs, combining real science and research with practical examples on everything from font size to online interactions. With this book you'll design more intuitive and engaging apps, software, websites and products that match the way people think, decide and behave.

Here are some of the questions this book will answer:

We design to elicit responses from people. We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. Increase the effectiveness of your designs by using science-backed examples on human behavior.

"Every once in a while, a book comes along that is so well-written, researched, and designed that I just can't put it down. That's how good 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People is!"

—Lynne Cooke, Clinical Assistant Professor at Arizona State University

From the moment it was published almost ten years ago, Elements of User Experience became a vital reference for web and interaction designers the world over, and has come to define the core principles of the practice. Now, in this updated, expanded, and full-color new edition, Jesse James Garrett has refined his thinking about the Web, going beyond the desktop to include information that also applies to the sudden proliferation of mobile devices and applications.

Successful interaction design requires more than just creating clean code and sharp graphics. You must also fulfill your strategic objectives while meeting the needs of your users. Even the best content and the most sophisticated technology won't help you balance those goals without a cohesive, consistent user experience to support it.

Design intuitive navigation for the ideal user experience

Hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on web usability expert Steve Krug's guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it's one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject.

If you've read it before, you'll rediscover what made Don't Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you've never read it, you'll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on websites.

"After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book."

—Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards

Since Lightroom first launched 18 years ago, Scott Kelby’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book has been the world’s #1 top-selling Lightroom book (it has been translated into dozens of different languages), and this latest version is a huge update where Scott shares all his newest techniques, insights, and invaluable tips using his award-winning, plain-English style that makes learning Lightroom easy and fun.

Scott doesn’t just show you which sliders do what (every Lightroom book does that, right?). Instead, he shares his own personal settings, his time-tested techniques, and his proven step-by-step method of learning Lightroom, so you can begin using it like a pro from the start. Each year, he trains thousands of Lightroom users at his live seminars, online conferences, and through his blog at LightroomKillerTips.com, and he has learned firsthand what really works and what doesn’t. He tells you flat-out which techniques work best, which ones to avoid, and why.

You’ll learn:

You can download many of the same images in the book, so you can follow right along, and you'll get a killer collection of custom Lightroom Develop and Print presets to give you some of the most sought-after looks and effects, all with just one click.

This is the first and only book to bring the whole process together in such a clear, concise, and visual way. There is no faster, more straight-to-the-point, or more fun way to learn Lightroom.

Are you ready for an amazing new edition of the Photoshop book that breaks all the rules?

Scott Kelby, Editor and Publisher of Photoshop User magazine—and the #1 best-selling photography techniques author—once again takes this book to a whole new level as he uncovers more of the latest, most important, and most useful Adobe Photoshop techniques for photographers.

This update to his award-winning, record-breaking book does something for digital photographers that has never been done before—it cuts through the bull and shows you exactly “how to do it.” It's not a bunch of theory; it doesn't challenge you to come up with your own settings or figure it out on your own. Instead, Scott shows you step by step the exact techniques used by today's cutting-edge photographers, and best of all, he shows you flat-out exactly which settings to use, when to use them, and why. That's why editions of this book are widely used as the official study guide in photography courses at colleges and universities around the world.

The photographer's workflow in Photoshop has evolved greatly over time and, in the latest edition of this book, you'll learn how to leverage Photoshop's new AI-powered masking features and how to spend less time on boring production tasks, so you can spend more time being creative. Plus, you'll learn:

You also get four online bonus chapters with even more content, along with the images used in the book, for download, so you can follow right along. If you're ready to learn all the “tricks of the trade”—the same ones that today's leading pros use to correct, edit, retouch, and sharpen their work—then you're holding the book that will do just that.

Best-selling brand expert Marty Neumeier shows you how to make the leap from a company-driven past to the consumer-driven future. You’ll learn how to flip your brand from offering products to offering meaning, from value protection to value creation, from cost-based pricing to relationship pricing, from market segments to brand tribes, and from customer satisfaction to customer empowerment.

In the 13 years since Neumeier wrote The Brand Gap, the influence of social media has proven his core theory: “A brand isn’t what you say it is – it’s what they say it is.” People are no longer consumers or market segments or tiny blips in big data. They don’t buy brands. They join brands. They want a vote in what gets produced and how it gets delivered. They’re willing to roll up their sleeves and help out – not only by promoting the brand to their friends, but by contributing content, volunteering ideas, and even selling products or services.

Book 1 of 3 in the Learning Design Essentials Library

Products, technologies, and workplaces change so quickly today that everyone is continually learning. Many of us are also teaching, even when it's not in our job descriptions. Whether it's giving a presentation, writing documentation, or creating a website or blog, we need and want to share our knowledge with other people. But if you've ever fallen asleep over a boring textbook, or fast-forwarded through a tedious e-learning exercise, you know that creating a great learning experience is harder than it seems.

With digital content published across more channels than ever before, how can you make yours easy to find, use, and share? Is your content ready for the next wave of content platforms and devices?

In Designing Connected Content, Mike Atherton and Carrie Hane share an end-to-end process for building a structured content framework. They show you how to research and model your subject area based on a shared understanding of the important concepts, and how to plan and design interfaces for mobile, desktop, voice, and beyond. You will learn to reuse and remix your valuable content assets to meet the needs of today and the opportunities of tomorrow.

Discover a design method that starts with content, not pixels. Master the interplay of content strategy, content design, and content management as you bring your product team closer together and encourage them to think content first.

Learn how to

It takes more than just a design school education and a killer portfolio to succeed in a creative career. Burn Your Portfolio teaches the real-world practices, professional do's and don'ts, and unwritten rules of business that most designers, photographers, web designers, copy writers, programmers, and architects only learn after putting in years of experience on the job.Michael Janda, owner of the Utah-based design firm Riser, uses humor to dispense nugget after nugget of hard-won advice collected over the last decade from the personal successes and failures he has faced running his own agency. In this surprisingly funny, but incredibly practical advice guide, Janda's advice on teamwork and collaboration, relationship building, managing clients, bidding work, production processes, and more will resonate with creative professionals of all stripes.

Since Lightroom first launched 15 years ago, Scott Kelby's The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers has been the world's #1 top-selling Lightroom book (it has been translated into dozens of different languages), and in this latest version, Scott did his biggest update ever, sharing all his newest techniques, insights, and invaluable tips using his award-winning, plain-English style that makes learning Lightroom easy and fun.

Scott doesn't just show you which sliders do what (every Lightroom book does that, right?). Instead, he shares his own personal settings, his time-tested techniques, and his proven step-by-step method of learning Lightroom, so you can begin using it like a pro from the start.

Each year, he trains thousands of Lightroom users at his live seminars, online conferences, and through his blog at LightroomKillerTips.com, and he has learned firsthand what really works and what doesn't. He tells you flat-out which techniques work best, which ones to avoid, and why.

You'll learn:

This is the first and only book to bring the whole process together in such a clear, concise, and visual way. There is no faster, more straight-to-the-point, or more fun way to learn Lightroom.

USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN is the multifaceted discipline of shaping digital products and systems into tools that are both useful and usable. Success as a UX designer extends beyond just knowledge of the latest technologies; it also involves diplomacy, management insight, and a solid grasp of business dynamics. In this updated guide, you'll learn to:

The third edition offers new insights on the Operations (Ops) functions within UX practices, discovery in UX, and collaboration activities for designers and stakeholders. You'll find new information on the many remote methods that can be used to gain important insights about users and on frameworks that help you define the products to create. This guide is a vital resource for anyone looking to stay at the forefront of the ever-changing field of UX design.

Reach your audience through simplicity and storytelling

Garr Reynolds, the bestselling author of Presentation Zen, is back with a third edition that covers advances in PowerPoint, Keynote, and other presentation technology. Garr tackles storytelling through slides and shares his approach to effective presentation design.

Garr offers techniques for cutting through the noise and distractions of modern life and truly engaging with your audiences in a meaningful way.

"Presentation Zen changed my life and the lives of my clients. The philosophy and approach so elegantly explained in Garr's book will inspire your audience. Don't even think of giving another presentation without it!"

—Carmine Gallo, author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs and Talk Like TED

"Garr has broken new ground in the way we think about the power of presentations, and more important, has taught an entire generation of communicators how to do a better job. Don't miss this one."

—Seth Godin, legendary presenter and author of This is Marketing

"If you care about the quality and clarity of your presentations—and you should—pick up this book, read every page, and heed its wisdom. Presentation Zen is a contemporary classic."

—Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and Drive

All of Peachpit's eBooks contain the same content as the print edition. You will find a link in the last few pages of your eBook that directs you to the media files. Helpful tips:

HTML and CSS can be a little daunting at first but fear not. This book, based on Shay Howe's popular workshop covers the basics and breaks down the barrier to entry, showing readers how they can start using HTML and CSS through practical techniques today. They'll find accompanying code examples online, while they explore topics such as the different structures of HTML and CSS, and common terms. After establishing a basic understanding of HTML and CSS a deeper dive is taken into the box model and how to work with floats. The book includes an exercise focused on cleaning up a web page by improving the user interface and design, solely using HTML and CSS. With a few quick changes the web page changes shape and comes to life. Interactive, technically up-to-the-minute and easy-to-understand, this book will advance a student's skills to a professional level.

In this comprehensive guide to creating e-commerce website using PHP and MySQL, renowned author Larry Ullman walks you through every step—designing the visual interface, creating the database, presenting content, generating an online catalog, managing the shopping cart, handling the order and the payment process, and fulfilling the order—always with security and best practices emphasized along the way. Even if you’re an experienced web developer, you’re guaranteed to learn something new. The book uses two complete e-commerce site examples, with various features and goals, to present the widest possible range of e-commerce scenarios. This fully updated and expanded second edition includes an additional and new payment processing example, and also reflects the latest changes in PayPal’s options and methodologies. There are new chapters on marketing-related tools to improve the site and sales, on adding functionality via Ajax, and on implementing e-commerce functionality using OOP instead of procedural code. Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL, Second Edition teaches you how to:

Aviation photography is the perfect mix of sleek, beautiful machines, blended with nature’s beautiful skies and fields, along with a fascinating collection of fearless pilots and capable crew, all wrapped in a rich, significant, and crucial part of history. Few genres combine this many elements, and invoke this much passion from photographers. This one-of-a kind book from Moose Peterson, one of the world’s most recognized experts in aviation photography, not only teaches you exactly what you need to know to start making beautiful, intriguing photographs of aircraft, but inspires you and pushes you creatively and technically every step of the way.

Moose takes you through all the basics for camera gear and settings, showing you what he travels with and the settings he uses to get those tack sharp images. He covers one of the most important aspects of aviation photography–light! And, he gives you a number of examples of how to take the best advantage of that light any time of the day. He shares the critical techniques you’ll need to master to create the illusion of flight, speed, and romance in a still image, including which types of prop blur you’re aiming for (and which types you want to avoid).

You’ll learn how to make the most out of air shows and fly-ins–what to shoot while you’re there, and what you might want to skip or avoid altogether (and why). You’ll learn how to photograph aircraft on the ground, from ground-to-air, and ultimately air-to-air, and how to capture one of the most important elements in aviation photography today: the fascinating pilots and crew–the people!

Moose shares many wonderful stories and adventures along the way, which illustrate how, as photographers, we’re also storytellers, and the importance of bringing out those stories in our aviation photos. Plus, you’ll gain free access to his acclaimed KelbyOne film, Warbirds and the Men Who Flew Them.

With this book, your camera, and your passion, your success in aviation photography will quickly take flight!

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is truly an awesome program, and the primary editing tool for so many photographers today. But, at some point, you realize that there are things you need to do to your images that Lightroom just can’t do. It could be anything from pro-level portrait retouching, to blending two or more images together, to incredible special effects, to removing distracting things in your image, to adding beautiful type to your images, and, well…there are just lots of incredible things you could do…if you just knew Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop is…well…it’s Photoshop—this huge, amazing, Swiss Army knife of a program with 70+ tools, and more than a hundred filters. So, compared to Lightroom it seems really complicated, and it could be, but you’ve got a secret weapon: Scott Kelby. He’s the same guy who wrote the world’s #1 best-selling book on Lightroom, he’s Editor and Publisher of Photoshop User magazine and Lightroom Magazine, and he’s here to teach you just the most important, most useful parts of Photoshop—just the stuff that Lightroom can’t already do. Once you learn these techniques (all covered in this short, quick, easy-to-use, plain-English guide), it opens a whole new world of productivity and creativity. 

Here’s what you’ll learn:

If you’ve been saying to yourself, “Ya know, I really should learn Photoshop,” you’re holding the absolute best book to get you there, coming from the guy who literally wrote the book on Lightroom. He knows how to help you make the most of using these two powerful tools together to take your images (and your fun) to the next level. You are going to love being a Photoshop shark! 

When Steve Krug wrote the third edition of his best-selling book about usability in 2013, he thought he was finally through with writing. And he really liked that idea.

More than half a million people had read Don’t Make Me Think, often described as “required reading,” “the bible of usability,” or “everyone’s introduction to UX design.” Readers seemed to love that it was short, witty, profusely illustrated, and full of practical commonsensical insights about how people actually use all the digital “stuff” we create.

But given all the changes between then and now (usability had became, as he puts  it, “a wholly owned subsidiary of User Experience Design,” a million new UXers were minted during the UX hiring gold rush, and AI suddenly appeared, promising to either make all of them incredibly productive, put them all out of work, or wipe them out with the rest of mankind), against his better judgment he couldn’t resist giving it one more shot.

It’s still short enough to read on a plane ride (as many people actually have), still a fun read (“for a technical book”), and it’s still a uniquely useful guide to understanding how to design for people. This new edition retains and updates Steve’s core principles, and adds entirely new chapters like

Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a newcomer, designer, researcher, developer, product manager, stakeholder, CEO, or just someone vibe coding in your spare time, this book will help you produce—and your users enjoy—better products.

A Designer's Guide to Creating Realistic 3D Experiences For Extended Reality

Designing Immersive 3D Experiences helps visual designers move into the fast-growing fields of 3D and extended reality (XR) design. Author Renée Stevens (Powered by Design) introduces a proven approach and an effective design-thinking process you can use to create successful immersive user experiences. The book is grounded in familiar design principles and explores how you can build on these foundations, adapting them for virtual and augmented reality environments. Designing Immersive 3D Experiences prepares visual designers to succeed with 3D and XR design in multiple environments, from mobile, to web, to wearables.

This book begins by exploring the basics of XR and 3D immersive design, how they are evolving, and how you may already be using them. It then moves into core concepts and technologies, from computer-human interaction, to spatial computing, to projection mapping and head-mounted displays.

Learn how to:

Part handbook, part classroom this book has everything you need to make your story a reality.

Nowadays, telling a story through video is a necessity. Video has become the new printed word. Creators must be able to craft video narratives using one of the most powerful tools available—the smartphone.

In Video Storytelling Projects, award-winning content creator RC Concepcion shows you how to combine the timeless principles of storytelling with the latest technology. You'll identify the right gear you need in your bag, the best techniques you need in your notebook, and the precise skills you need to make, edit, and share your creation.

The book is broken into four parts:

Purchase of the book or eBook includes access via QR codes to videos from the author that supplement the key skills from the book to help you tell your story.