In retrospect, I have spent more than a decade building my online portfolio. Visualgui.com has evolved over the years, but the primary goal remains the same: to showcase my work. This site played an important role in my career and landed 95% of my client projects. For web designers, an online portfolio is a requirement. For beginners, creating an online presence could be a daunting task. If you’re in that situation and don’t know where to begin, Ian Clazie’s Creating Your Digital Portfolio is for you. With practical tips and professional examples, this book is an invaluable guide for creating an effective online portfolio. In addition to the book’s advice on the visual design, I strongly recommend that you pay attention to the codes as well. Particularly for web designers, clean, well-structured markups under the hood are as important as the striking display.

Any CSS book written by Eric Meyer is worth a read. Smashing CSS is no exception. Meyer’s expertise in CSS and clear explanation help clear up technical obscure of CSS selectors like specificity, the order of multiple classes, ID vs. class, outline vs. borders and substring attribute selection. Smashing CSS is not for beginners. Most of the tips assumed that readers are already familiar with CSS and HTML.

With the growing popularity of CSS3, I am a bit surprised that Meyer still covers techniques like CSS Sprites, Sliding Doors, Complexspiral, Pre-CSS3 Rounded Corners, Faux Columns and One True Layout. I was hoping that he would delve more into the new CSS3 techniques. Nevertheless, I have learned things that I haven’t realized before like ideas for using attribute selectors to style types of links.

With deep knowledge and a light sense of humor, Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp have done an excellent job of Introducing HTML5. To help readers understand how to apply the new structures, the authors use real case studies such as The Guardian newspaper and a WordPress comment form. In addition, the book delves into web development including data storage, offline web applications, drag and drop and geolocation API. Introducing HTML5 is a solid guide for making intelligent, accessible web sites using the new language.

Kristofer Layon’s The Web Designer’s Guide to iOS Apps is an informative intro to create an app with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript using NimbleKit, the Objective-C framework. From installing the iOS SDK to creating contents to marketing and distributing your app, Layon demonstrates how web designers could pull together an app without knowing how to program. While the book helps readers get started, it doesn’t take them further than creating a simple web page for an app. I was expecting something more dynamic like how to pull in an RSS feed or hook up an API.

Released in July last year, Matthew David’s HTML5: Designing Rich Internet Applications seems to be rushed to catch the new HTML5 wave. The contents are poorly edited. The sample codes are inconsistent and choked full of obvious errors. The author goes as far as using inline CSS to float elements rather than calling external file or in the page header. This method of coding reminds me of workarounds I have to do inside a CMS, which is not fun at all.

If you’re interested in learning HTML5, Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers is still highly recommended. It’s a concise read, but I return to it again and again. If you want more details with broader topics including HTML5, CSS3, DOM, Microformats and best practices, John Allsopp’s Developing with Web Standards is still an indispensable read.

With over 400 type specimens and diagrams, Designing Type examines each letter in great details. From serif to san serif and from capital to lower case, Karen Cheng discusses the nuances and the characteristics in a font. Her technical knowledge on typography makes this book an indispensable read. Designing Type requires tremendous patience and many re-reads, but without a doubt a must-have text for anyone who is interested in type design.

If I were to teach web design, Brian Miller’s Above the Fold: Understanding the Principles of Successful Web Site Design would be my choice for textbook. You won’t learn HTML5, CSS3 or jQuery in this book, but you’ll learn about whitespace, grid, typography and design elements for the web. Miller also provides great screenshots of web sites to illustrate his points. For instance, Apple’s homepage is a perfect example of showcasing products above the fold, which according to Jakob Nielson is where users spend 80% of their time looking for information.

Unlike his previous Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, which was all over the place, Thord Daniel Hedengren’s Smashing WordPress Themes: Making WordPress Beautiful focuses mainly on theme development.

To help readers understand how theming works, Hedengren deconstructs WordPress’s default Twenty Ten. He then explains the concept of child theme and how quickly one can build his own based on a parent theme or a framework. The selling point of this book is obviously how to build one’s own theme and Hedengren has done a great job of walking readers through three different sites: semi-static (for small, corporation site), media (for portfolio site) and magazine. He also covers briefly on BuddyPress, a plugin that adds social-networking features to WordPress-powered site.

Because of its flexibility and easy-to-use admin interface, WordPress is a perfect tool for clients who would like to update contents themselves. Smashing WordPress Themes is an excellent guide for web designers who would like to build sites using WordPress as a content management system.

I hesitated to purchase Thord Daniel Hedengren’s Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog because the book only covers WordPress 2.8. After spending two hours in the bookstore reading it, however, I bought the book. From helping readers understand the core of WordPress including the syntax and the loop to guiding us through the process of theme design and development, Smashing WordPress is a great resource for customizing WordPress to meet individual project requirements. The downside of Smashing WordPress is that it doesn’t delve deep into a certain topic. For instance, the book only scratch the surface on how to use WordPress as a CMS. So if you would like to build an e-commerce site powered by WordPress, this is not the right book for you. If you need snippets of codes or how to accomplish certain tasks in WordPress, this book is very useful. I sure will have this book by my desk when I need to develop a WordPress site.

In Ordering Disorder, former design director for NYTimes.com Khôi Vinh deconstructs his grid-based design in details. The book begins with the concept to help readers understand the basics of the grid and the mathematical formulae. Then Vinh walks us through the process (research and requirements, wireframe, preparatory design, comps and production) as well as explains the terminology (unit, columns, regions, etc.). The heart and soul of the book is in the execution, in which Vinh illustrates his approach to a real-world project from sketches on paper to the final layouts. The real magic is flipping through the pages and witnessing the contents fall perfectly into the grid. With his own art direction, the book itself was designed on a grid. The texts on one side match up with the illustrations on the other side of the same page is not a coincident.