We hear the voices of a conversation moving through the community of the craftspeople of interactive design: popping up at conferences, in tweets and blog posts, and in adrenalized chats over beer when we gather. The Manual chronicles these voices in a beautiful print artifact. It archives the insights of our best thinkers and writers—both the well known and the quietly working—as we define a more mature understanding of the discipline of web design and more effectively tell the story of our work.

Web design is coming into its own as a discipline, with its roots firmly in graphic design, yet now creating its own principles, tools, and visual language. Everything we do requires a good hard look. Our community has rightly focused on the how of design on the web. But you won’t find markup and code, tutorials, and galleries on these pages. The Manual looks at the why: the why of our designs, the why of the transformative power of our work, and the why of where we're heading.