The Smashing Book: Already Got Yours?

• By Smashing Editorial Team
• January 27th, 2010
• Events
• 394 Comments

Have you gotten your copy of The Smashing Book yet? If not, it may still be worth spending $29.90 for this printed book. The book shares technical tips and best practices on typography, usability, UI design, marketing and color usage. It contains interviews with high profile designers and developers. And you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine. You can buy the book now, it is available and can be shipped right away! And you can also check more details about the book.

Also, in this post we are giving away 35 exclusive Smashing Book Posters (folded, limited edition), and if you want to win one, just leave a comment on this post and tell us what you would do with it! So, let’s find out who are Smashing Magazine’s biggest fans?

Bonus: New Free Chapter Of The Book

Need an appetizer? Here are two free chapters of the Smashing Book (Chapter 1 was released a couple of months ago). You can download them as a PDF:

• Chapter 1: User Interface Design in Modern Web Applications
• Chapter 7: Design To Sell — Increasing Conversion Rates

Smashing Book Around The World

Many things have been happening with and around The Smashing Book in recent weeks. You must have read or heard that it would fall apart immediately upon being opened (okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration). In fact, the pages loosened quickly, and the reading experience was anything but ideal (the adhesive binding was the culprit). The verdict from many users was thus: brilliant content, very poor binding. And yes, let’s face facts: we indeed did a poor job in our first attempt at offline publishing, but we are willing to learn from our experience and do it better the next time. In fact, the next time has already come.

We have thoroughly monitored the feedback and heard your complaints, which is why we have produced a Corrected Edition of the book, with stable, high-quality stitched binding. Nothing will fall apart here… guaranteed. And the price remains the same.

The release of the Smashing Book has been very exciting. We’ve seen many photos, videos and even unboxing galleries. We have even seen the books being explored by cats, pancakes, cactuses and babies!

Photo by Remworks

Photo by Eddie Ebeling.

Photo by Julien Bob (the cat’s name is Monsieurbleu).

Photo by Danielle Wu.

A Word On The Shipping

We are of course not a postal service, and because we are located in Germany, we had to rely on the German postal service (Deutsche Post) to deliver the books to you. This usually works fairly well, but the first weeks in December certainly weren’t our preferred shipping time. Logistics companies were already busy with the Christmas season, and so delivery of our books went very slowly. And because we have been shipping the books worldwide, delivery times have varied significantly. No wonder it took as long as a couple of weeks for the books to be delivered, slowed down as they were by the holidays.

It’s truly astonishing what can happen to books when you ship a large number of them. There are hundreds of stories: the labels got messed up, damaged, loosened or stuck together; the book was delivered but is sitting in the apartment of a neighbor who has gone on vacation; the mail carrier delivered the book to the wrong house or misread the label; the label has a printing error; my address has changed; the book was left sitting in a delivery container; the postal service sent the book to the wrong state and is in the process of rerouting it; the book is being held up in customs. The list goes on and on. Every day we learn of a number of such cases. If you purchased your book a long while ago but still haven’t received it, please send your order details to our support team at orders@smashingmagazine.com. We’ll be in touch right away and will investigate.

Was It Worth The Wait?

Well, we can’t answer that question because we are obviously biased. But our readers and book reviewers can answer that question for us. Many book reviews are out there, sharing both positive and negative impressions. In our forum, murphyslaw has published a long, very detailed review of every chapter of the book. What do other readers say? Here are a few snippets:

“The advice is pitched at what I would call intermediate-to-advanced level. It’s aimed at web designers, doesn’t include any coding details, and focuses on notions of good practice. Elegant solutions for common problems are offered on almost every page. The book has also been written by a group of professional designers – so they know what they’re talking about.” — Roy Johnson

“The Smashing Book is a great, really great book for everybody who is interested in design and web-development. Especially the typography and learning from the experts chapters where inspirational resources to me. The content is great but I believe the layout of the pages should be as a book. Support the Smashing Magazine Book by ordering your copy and I hope SM will continue the concept of bringing the content by book.” — Sander Baumann, Designworkplan

“The book is basically all of SM’s best articles condensed into a book. This is what you’d expect, as it would be hard to top what they have on the website already. The content is very detailed, perhaps even too much in some cases, but it is like a ‘bible of web design’ covering all the things you should know.” — Lee Munroe

“I think the Smashing Book is a perfect book for web designers and developers of all levels, and I am excited that it lives up to the hype. It provides very comprehensive information that is both useful and essential for designers and developers who want to make the quailty of their websites improve.” — admixweb

“I think the book is a great buy for the price. For all you people still waiting for it to be delivered, it’s worth it!” — ThatDeadPixel

“Overall, this is a great effort from the Smashing Team and all the authors. The book features good web design theory and many practical techniques backed up by real world examples in the form of colourful screenshots. This book will not become obsolete in the short term, and should be placed in everyone’s library. Overall score:  8.5/10 – A Smashing Book!” — Hixdesign

Please note that all errors and inaccuracies are being collected in the Errata, which can be found through our Smashing List of Links (only a few errors have been found so far).

Buy The Book Now!

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.

It’s a paperback: 313 pages, full-color images on coated paper, available worldwide. Free shipping to the US and Germany, and reduced shipping costs to other countries. 30-day 100% money-back guarantee. You can find more details about the book in the post Smashing Book: It’s Out Now!

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