This O'Reilly published book (2005) is just great. I had seen the book cover on safari.oreilly.com and thought oh I should look at that book

but didn't until I had to start explaining design to others and was looking for the most recent, "official" standpoint on navigation architecture.

Now that I have read this book - let me tell you, if you haven't read it, you are missing out.

If you are like me, you have been using the internet for so long, you kind of have an idea of all the tricks: tabbing, navigation, use of color, font size. And you look at a Mac and think that all those little tricks they've done on the graphics end are swell - you understand how they work, but you don't know the names of the design methods.

Which brings me to this book: she has names for everything. She has samples of good working solutions from all kinds of interfaces: windows, mac, web sites, ads. Her samples include iTunes, Flickr, photoshop , maya and other modern sites and applications. Some of the design principals of early web she still has - but this is updated for an internet that is turning into a giant application.

Each section includes a "Patterns" sections - which showcases some of the solutions for each subject (navigation, visual design, data design, forms, information design, doing things (buttons), editors (ex. image).

She also writes from the perspective of the user, and how the user's attention and visual systems work.

Basically, it's just great.