About

What is this?

Communicating Design is a book about artifacts designers use in the course of creating a web site.

CommunicatingDesign.com is a web site to support the book. Right now it contains only a blog where I post updates on progress writing the second edition.

Why a second edition?

The first edition covered 10 different “deliverables,” diagrams and documents produced by designers to describe their ideas. These deliverables ranged from those describing the users of the site to those showing what the web site will look like and how it will behave. While the book acknowledged that there are relationships between these artifacts, it treated them as independent deliverables.

In the second edition I introduce a more nuanced approach to preparing documents. Each chapter is dedicated to the same artifacts, but it treats them as such, not as self-contained deliverables but as portions of a larger story. A new chapter will

The second edition also includes these improvements:

• More illustrations: My biggest frustration with the first edition is the lack of great examples.
• Larger format: The book will be 8.5″X11″ landscape format which gives me more room to feature illustrations.
• Exercises: The book is widely used as a text in graduate programs on user experience design. These exercises will help the student and professional alike in practicing the skills described in each chapter.
• Better structure: I’ve adjusted the structure of each chapter to be a little easier to follow.
• Less redundancy: There’s a lot of overlap between the artifacts, both in creating and presenting them. I consolidate much of this in the introduction and use the chapters to expand on the basics in the context of each artifact.
• Fewer chapters: This is certainly an improvement in my mind. A few of the artifacts I describe in the first edition are ones that I don’t use very much any more or about which I have not much more to say.
• Tone & Style: The narrative is, shall we say, a little disjointed. I’m tightening things up, making the structure more practical and leave out the ambiguous or questionable advice, while trying to preserve some semblance of a sense of humor. Emphasis on “semblance”.

What will the cover look like?

Something like this.

When is it coming out?

September 2010. Fingers crossed.

Can I pre-order it?

Please do!

Dude, downloads?

Yes. I feel very badly about this. The first edition makes a commitment to offer downloadable templates and other kinds of content. Obviously, that never came to be. I have a few personal excuses, but they don’t erase the commitment. There are two other (perhaps actually legitimate) reasons why I neglected this portion of Communicating Design:

• Other people are doing it better: Konigi.com keeps an ongoing set of links to useful design resources, and a wiki all about user experience, with a node dedicated to deliverables.
• EightShapes Unify: Shortly after the book was published, my firm released a free, comprehensive set of templates for Adobe InDesign. My partner Nathan Curtis was the driving force behind this product, and it realizes a much more sophisticated and practical view of documentation.