I've been given the opportunity to review the brand new "The Mobile Book" from Smashing Magazine. The book features the most important things that you need to know as a designer, developer or mobile strategist for your websites. You’ll find instruction and inspiration on making content truly adaptable for the mobile platforms.
This book is a compilation of exceptionally smart and detailed instructions on crafting websites with mobile users in mind. It might even permanently change the way you think about your work in content.
The book has seven chapters which explores trends, responsive design techniques and user experience concerns. For web designers all over the world, it's essential to take mobile devices into account when designing a website, designers have to create engaging mobile experiences, with state-of-the-art design solutions for advanced mobile devices.
Right now we are working on a new responsive theme for icanbeCREATIVE, so this book is exactly what we're looking for!
"When it comes to mobile, there are more open questions than definitive answers. Due to its fragmentation, it's not so easy to understand how mobile market looks and works in general. How to pick the right mobile strategy and select the right approach for your website? What design patterns and what UX techniques can assist you to design quicker and better for mobile devices? What design patterns do you need to be aware when building responsive websites and to optimize the performance for mobile? When you design with mobile in mind, how exactly should your design process be different from traditional design workflow? Our new book attempts to answer these questions."
The book has 3 main chapters, in the first one Peter-Paul Koch provides an overview about the evolving business models of mobile operators and what we should expect from device manufacturers, and OS vendors. Stephanie Rieger talks about what’s happening in the mobile industry right now, how it works, and how it affects us.
In the second chapter, Trent Walton, Brad Frost, and Dave Olsen will introduce us to a set of the latest ideas, techniques, and principles surrounding responsive design, the part that I've enjoyed the most. Trent Walton writes about strategies, techniques and design workflow tips on building effective and bulletproof responsive designs (flexible grids, flexible images, and media queries). Brad Frost follows that up with a lesson on responsive design patterns and explains how to use them meaningfully in your future projects. Dave Olsen explains how to optimize for the best performance techniques to keep bandwidth and latency issues in check, this is the must-read of this book.
On the last chapter, you will find two lessons on UX Design For Mobile, by Dennis Kardys and Josh Clark, which focused in on how to prototype mobile development, from wireframes to paper prototypes and lands on a case for HTML prototyping.
I really don't want to waste your time by going to explain every chapter when you should really read the book.
From left to right: Jeremy Keith, Peter-Paul Koch, Stephanie Rieger, Trent Walton, Brad Frost, Dave Olsen, Dennis Kardys and Josh Clark.
Without such well-written books, we’ll never build towards tomorrow mobile industry. In this book you will find that there are a lot of questions and no definitive answers, and for this reason The Mobile Book is a little to ambitious (you can't please everybody). Overall, I highly recommend that all beginning and intermediate designers and developers get a copy of this book.
As expected, Smashing Magazine delivers a high-quality product, if you want to get ahead on the mobile techniques, your should really consider buying this book, it’s excellent!
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