For those interested in typography, while I found blog posts helpful in teaching myself, if you really want to understand, I recommend reading one of the canonical texts depending on your particular interest. Typography is a deep field with a lot to know before you can really know what you're doing.

The Elements of Typographical Style is a beautiful book and an elegant, literary introduction and guide: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881792063/ref=as_li_qf_sp_...

Thinking with Type is full of contemporary examples to give you new ideas: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568989695/ref=as_li_qf_sp_...

Ruder's Typographie is the book that established modern typography and is the de fact guide to modernist typography: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3721200438/ref=as_li_qf_sp_...

As an introduction to typography, I also recommend watching Helvetica: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002RIOGI0/ref=as_li_qf_sp_... – it will give you a personal perspective on different philosophies of choice of type-face

For that matter, the same goes for color theory.

Here's a nice introduction to color in general from the Adobe website: http://www.adobe.com/products/adobemag/archive/pdfs/9611febf...

The Wikipedia entry is worth reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color

Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art is a beautiful manifesto on art, but contains a very interesting theory of color: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1619491532/ref=as_li_qf_sp_...

Itten's The Elements of Color is the classic text on color: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471289299/ref=as_li_qf_sp_...

Albers' Interaction of Color will teach you that colors are no absolute reference ponts – they interact with each other to create all sorts of effects (this text pairs well with the Kandinsky): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300018460/ref=as_li_qf_sp_...

To get really deep into color, check out the IESNA handbook: http://www.ies.org/handbook/

All this is not to obviate OP's impetus to write posts on these topics. Blog posts are crucial as introductions and I find tend to work better as references than books, which tend to be overwhelming and ignored in this digital age. But if you want to go deeper, these are my favorite references after moderately exhaustive research.

>Nerds will never, ever get it through their heads that typefaces aren't cheap. They're expensive.

I realize that I am not normative. I consider "The Elements of Typographic Style" one of the better books I have read, period. It is a real pleasure to read: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...

I am willing to pay $$$ for good fonts, if they are available as web fonts at all. I didn't say that adobe should "democratize" high-end typography, I just said they will get the luddite foundries on-board.

W.R.T. being "virtually impossible to track", I think that is less true than you think it is -- there are many trivial ways to watermark fonts files.

Great question. The web being text oriented - I believe that typography is one of the most important aspects of a great website (visualization being the other).

If there's one seminal book - that would be The Elements of Typographic Style: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...

That's a deep dive into it though. If you're looking for a shortcut you can get a quick hold of them here: http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Typography-Gavin-Ambrose/...

At Future Simple (http://www.futuresimple.com) we think about that a lot, sometimes agonizing over it. We still have a lot of work to do :) - as any designer will tell you - we are never satisfied with our work...

It can all be traced back to a remark by Robert Bringhurst in his influential book "The Elements of Typographic Style" in which he suggests that in titles it is worth using the most decorative & sign we have (some fonts have different variants available) or even use the italic ampersand in roman context, because the italic & is often more decorative (ultimately they all come from a stylized "et").

I think many have taken it too far and the results sometimes look pretentious. An example still on the safe side (IMHO) is in pg's book:

http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR2J5Pw_xUwVNxV_z504...

And the typograhy book (highly recommended):

Non-affiliate: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...

Affiliate: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0881792063/mybookbox-...

I was searching yesterday, the results only really offered good stuff for typography learning (which I'm working on now), but overall graphic / web design are left out a bit.

Here are the resources I drilled out of the threads I came across:

Type: http://www.amazon.com/Logo-Lettering-Bible-Leslie-Cabarga/dp... http://www.amazon.com/Graphic-Design-Manual-Principles-Pract... http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin... http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Typographic-...

Usability: http://www.amazon.com/Think-Common-Sense-Approach-Usability/...

Design: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592532616?ie=UTF8&tag=... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592533485?ie=UTF8&tag=... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159253192X?ie=UTF8&tag=... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592532349?ie=UTF8&tag=...

Web Design: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0975841963?ie=UTF8&tag=... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/032145345X?ie=UTF8&tag=... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1847192505?ie=UTF8&tag=... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735712069?ie=UTF8&tag=...

Sites: http://dribbble.com/ http://www.deviantart.com http://forrst.com/ http://lookslikegooddesign.com/ http://webtypography.net/toc/ http://ui-patterns.com/

Some previous discussions:

Ask HN: Learning Web Design — http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1604915

Ask HN: How can I get better at design? —http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1474315

I’ve found this online book great — http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/index.php

Experienced designers always emphasize learning about typography, and which seemed unintuitive to me until I began to study it. Bringhurst is a fantastic place to start there:

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...

I don’t have much for book recommendations, but start off with The Elements of Typographic Style [http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...] and get a feel for creating usable and readable typography in your apps. http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/ makes a good companion site too.

Graphic design comes down to “the art of organizing” and effectively using five elements: line, shape, space, colour and texture. When searching for fundamental design books I’d look for those that cover how to harness said elements effectively.

I recommend Bringhurst's Elements of Typographical Style as a crash course in typography.

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...

It contains wonderful guidelines for typesetting and also gives a sense of history and culture behind common fonts.

Also useful is this site that outlines how to apply Bringhurst's principles to the web:

http://webtypography.net/

Andy Rutledge's blog has lots of good stuff. His five-part introduction to gestalt principles is about the basics of graphic design:

http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt-principles-1-figure-grou...

http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt-principles-2-similarity....

http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt-principles-3.php

http://www.andyrutledge.com/common-fate.php

http://www.andyrutledge.com/closure.php

For typography, Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style is a must-read. http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin....

You mentioned the looks of your sites, so the above are about visual and graphic design, but good interaction design will also help making people think your site looks better, is faster, has more features etc.

Be careful whose judgement you trust. People here on HN sometimes seem to have a caricatured view of users as only being attracted to visuals. In reality, visuals can't do much more than support (or ruin) an otherwise well-designed site.