Web Design Examples to Create Beautiful Documentation

Web designer creates interactive websites from old books. Just have a look at the examples!

WERNER’SNOMENCLATURE OF COLOURS By P. Syme

A recreation of the original 1821 color guidebook with new cross references, photographic examples, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux.

This is a project by Nicholas Rougeux. He created this project to enhance Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours by adding information that he wanted when he read the guidebook like easily jumping to any color, seeing the colors referenced in the description, and seeing photos of what Werner referenced for his descriptions of each color.

He recognizes the system Werner devised isn’t as useful as it used to be when it was devised so many years ago but he enjoys breathing new life into classic works of art so he chose to recreate it online.

Here is what you’ll find there:

COLORS. Explore all 110 colors painted by Syme with photos of where to find each color as outlined in the original guide.
ORIGINAL GUIDEBOOK. See scans of the original guidebook created by Syme from 1821 that Charles Darwin consulted during his voyages.
POSTERS. Decorate your walls with creative data visualizations designed to highlight the beautiful colors used in the original guidebook.

**ILLUSTRATIONS of the NATURAL ORDERS of PLANTS with GROUPS AND DESCRIPTIONS by ELIZABETH TWINING**

This site is a complete reproduction and restoration of Elizabeth Twining’s celebrated catalog of botanical illustrations from 1868, Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants enhanced with interactive illustrations, descriptions, and posters featuring the illustrations designed by Nicholas Rougeux.

Each of the 160 illustrations was restored from the original scans to be as colorful as the plants they depict, which involved carefully adjusting the colors and cleaning up spotting and other markings on the scans to produce clean images without altering the underlying original illustrations.

After restoration, every plant that was referenced in the original illustrations’ legends was carefully outlined to create hotspots that correspond with the accompanying descriptions. This process alone took one to four hours per image and the entire project took four months to complete.

Byrne’s Euclid. A complete reproduction of Euclid’s Elements by Oliver Byrne from 1847

A reproduction of Euclid’s Elements by Oliver Byrne from 1847 that pays tribute to the beautiful original design and includes enhancements such as interactive diagrams, cross-references, and posters.

This site was created to bring Byrne’s colorful edition to life by making it available to a modern audience by reproducing the entire book online so it would be accessible to anyone with modern equipment and flexible design as true to the original as possible. Each diagram was created by tracing the originals and ensuring their dimensions and relationships stayed true to Euclid’s geometric principles. Proofs accompanying each diagram have been enhanced with clickable shapes to aid in understanding the shapes being referenced.

PICTURESQUE VIEWS OF SEATS of Great Britain and Ireland

This reproduction was created in an effort to breathe new life into an aging classic and make it more widely available. The original books are still available from many sellers but many are missing a couple of volumes and while they’ve been excellently preserved over the past 100+ years, the illustrations have weathered with time. By restoring them and reproducing them here, the hope is that others will enjoy taking a journey across Great Britain and Ireland to explore beautiful architecture.

Many of the buildings mentioned still stand today. Each illustration is accompanied by an interactive map showing its location, rough approximation of the vantage point from where it was drawn, and links to explore satellite and some street-level views. Links are also available to read more about the history of each seat.

As you can see, different types of content can be optimized and designed well. So, you can use it as inspiration. Where can you create interactive and beautiful user manuals? Use an online documentation tool. I would recommend you ClickHelp. Here is the TurboCAD Documentation Portal example who uses ClickHelp: