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The Smashing Book project is coming along. At the end of February we announced our most interesting (and important) project for 2009: “The Smashing Book,” a smashingly written, beautifully designed and professionally printed book. The book’s title will be “The Smashing Book”; it will be a paperback; and the price is fixed, as is the release date, which is early September 2009.

We asked for your opinion about what the topics of the book should be, your wishes and ideas, and we were completely overwhelmed with the huge amount of great ideas and suggestions in our Smashing Book Forum. We express sincere gratitude to all those who helped us and discussed various ideas in the forum.

We took some time to go through all the suggestions and ideas, analyze them, find common interests and determine what you expect from the book and how it should look to meet your expectations. And now it’s time to get a little bit more concrete in the second round of our project.

Special Awards For Active Participants

Of course, we also came up with some exclusive, special awards for the active participants of the Smashing Book Forum. However, we don’t want to lay all our cards on the table — the special prize is not a free book copy, not a third-party gift: it is directly related to the book. The awards will be unique and are not for sale.

Here are the winners so far (or their forum nicknames at least): GeoEgo, mloclam, Furmi, ajcates, noirfatom, mWalk, fluxerj, mediocre, Norbert, mads, vladgidea, John, earthwormjim, rostek. Thank you for your participation, folks! We appreciate it! You’ll get the exclusive awards when the book goes into print.

Making the users’ wishes and interests the core focus of a new project is quite an old yet successful strategy. We don’t want to publish the book for us; we want to publish it for our readers and the whole design community. The book is supposed to become our common book. Unfortunately, not everyone understood the idea behind this project. That’s why we would like to explicitly point out that the articles for the book will be written by writers of Smashing Magazine. All authors and graphic artists who contribute to the book will be paid by Smashing Magazine.

The details of the book layout will be determined as we learn more about the content of the book. You can discuss book layout suggestions in this forum thread.

Topics Of The Book

We have carefully read through all comments in the magazine and the forum and tried to figure out which are the most popular ideas and most desired topics. It wasn’t easy, because users had different opinions about the same topics, so we sometimes had to find compromises.

Our readers clearly pointed out that they did not want a “general” book that would go through the boring basics of Web design as can be easily found on the Web. The book should not be a “beginner’s” handbook but instead should be written so that it remains useful and informative for at least a couple of years. Specifically, you would like a book of principal guidelines, filled with exciting practical examples and concrete ideas and suggestions. You want it, you got it! The book, then, will cover at least the following seven topics:

1. Behind The Curtains: The Smashing Magazine Story
2. Prototyping & wireframing
3. Typography guide
4. Color theory and practical examples (guide)
5. Usability
6. Performance Optimization for websites
7. Business and freelancing guide, starting your own business

Of course, this isn’t everything. Many more topics can be covered in the book, and you can decide what those are. Please vote in the poll below!

Vote now and please spread the word!

What Won’t Be In The Book?

Unfortunately, the book will not contain a CD or DVD. All links and files will be made available online. The book will also not contain tutorials for specific applications — otherwise, it would become outdated very quickly.

What Will The Book Look Like? Stay Tuned.

Thank you for your participation, folks! And please feel free to let us know your ideas, thoughts and suggestions in the comments to this post!

You can decide on the book cover design next week. We have picked out the six most interesting book cover designs among a number of drafts suggested in the forum. And now we would like you to tell us which cover you like best. We think every design is appropriate for the Smashing Book. However, which do you think would make the book look really smashing? Please stay tuned.