I dropped by my local Barnes and Noble today, and picked up a few books. Two of them are from the hit Web Design: Studios series (books 1 and 2 of the series, infact), and they are truly AWESOME pocket sized books. Note that I call them pocket sized books only because they’re 8×5.6 inches and although you couldn’t really fit that inside your pocket, they are quite small.
They feature 90 or so Web Design Studios, giving the name, “mission” or services that the studio provides, year founded, team size/members, tools used, location, awards, clients, and contact details. Each design firm has 2 pages to itself (you open the book and all you see if one studio), and there are full color screenshots of websites and work that the studio has done.
These books are excellent and a must for a web designer looking for inspiration or a web studio looking to scout out some community members/competition. I think it’s great to see what the best studios out there are creating on print, and how’s this for an idea for taschen, the publisher of the book: Create a book with the best designs out there on the web. Get 100 of the best of the best from CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) galleries, Smashing Magazine, and any other sources and put it all into a full color 8×5.6 book. Brilliant!