Although I haven’t talked much about the details, it’s no secret that I was working on a design book for SitePoint. Most of my friends and relatives have been asking me “How’s the book going?” and “Are you done yet?” since I started the first chapter back in early April. After several months of late nights, long weekends, and increased caffeine consumption, I’m excited to announce that “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” is now available!

My Book

My personal copies arrived about a week ago, but I didn’t want to post anything about it here until my parents and a few influential people had received the copies I sent them. I thought I would have a few weeks to prepare a promotional page before the book “hit the streets”, but it became available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million, and Wal-Mart around the same time I received my box. There’s even a review up on Amazon already. In a rush to get something posted for people to link to, I set up principlesofbeautifulwebdesign.com. Yea, I know it’s ginormously long for a domain name but I couldn’t think of a better available name. I’m quite proud of how that little page turned out for the amount of time I put into it. I still have a lot more ground to cover in marketing the book. I printed up some glossy business cards over the weekend that I plan to take to some of the local book stores and ask if they can put a few copies on their shelves. SitePoint also let me send some copies of the book to a few select celebrity designer/developers. For better or worse, I’m looking forward to hearing what these people think about the book. I am personally very excited with how it turned out and think it will benefit a pretty broad range of people who are looking for a primer in graphic design principles as they apply to the web.

This whole experience has been a wild ride. I was excited (and a little scared) by the idea when SitePoint initially asked me to write the book. Somehow though, in the flurry of working on it, I lost track of what being a published author would be like. Being a quiet and humble person, it’s still strange to see my name on the cover. It’s weirder still when all my friends ask me to sign their copy when it arrives. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that, but it really makes all the hard work worthwhile.