Designing for Performance: Weighing Aesthetics and Speed

by Lara Callender Swanson

As a web designer, you encounter tough choices when it comes to weighing aesthetics and performance. Good content, layout, images, and interactivity are essential for engaging your audience, and each of these elements have an enormous impact on page load time and the end-user experience. In this practical book, Lara Hogan helps you approach projects with page speed in mind, showing you how to test and benchmark which design choices are most critical.

To get started, all you need are basic HTML and CSS skills and Photoshop experience.

Topics include:

The impact of page load time on your site, brand, and users
Page speed basics: how browsers retrieve and render content
Best practices for optimizing and loading images
How to clean up HTML and CSS, and optimize web fonts
Mobile-first design with performance goals by breakpoint
Using tools to measure performance as your site evolves
Methods for shaping an organization’s performance culture

Genres: Design, Technology, Nonfiction, Computer Science, Website Design

184 pages, ebook

First published December 1, 2014

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

A concise guide to web performance. It's old at this point but most of it still holds true. The early chapters will be very useful to designers or an engineer new to the web. I especially appreciated the last two chapters which cover the culture change required to avoid being alienated Performance Cops or Janitors. I would've preferred some case studies that weren't limited to Etsy, but overall recommend. Even if you know the basics already, you'll come away with some ideas to try out.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book that covers a lot of performance improvements. It doesn't delve much into performance improvements with HTTP/2 though.

[Edward Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little dated already, but still some good ideas. Context was heavily applied to Esty website and could have been expended to companies that have several products to test.

[David Poon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Covered all the expected areas with current tools and updates. A good overview of the methods used.

[Štěpán · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I read the second published iteration, still pre official release.

The book didn't contain anything new for me apart from some background on different compression/property options in image formats. However even in that section I'd welcome non-Photoshop centric take (or at least include alternatives). Rest of the text is mostly introductory and not that interesting. Whole book was basically summarized in Hanselminutes (http://hanselminutes.com/433/designin...) where I learned about the book.

I'm very curios about the chapters that are not released yet because they could bring something more value to book. I'm definitely missing some sort of checklist (or guide) which could help the last chapter about empowerment. Similarly an example of complete setup and work flow would greatly improve the book. (I mean examples of best practices of organization of assets, steps that need to be taken once in the design/development process, steps that are repeated on each release, what are the dependencies etc.)

However the book is great overview for newcomers to the subject.

[Tim Kadlec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Designing for Performance is the book to hand to anyone—designer or developer—who wants to get started making faster sites. Lara carefully and clearly explains not just how you can create better performing sites, but how you can champion performance within your organization ensuring it remains a priority long after launch. Consider this the starting point in your web performance journey.

[Borislav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone responsible for a website, wether business or private one, should read this hands-on book on web performance.

[Marcus Österberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basically the same content as Lean Websites, though less technical, less backend and more CSS code. A great read!

[Katie Harron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent! A must read for Front-End Devs!

[Zac Colley · Rating 5 out of 5]

great overview of web perf, ways to think about as well as implement changes. gonna give this to some designers at work

[Angel Garbarino · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always learn new tricks when I read performance books. I have lots of new tools to play with. Recommend for anyone involved with building websites.