Customer Reviews

Web Design Studio Secrets

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book is a compilation of "real-world" techniques of a dozen "real-world" web designers. I think all the folks interviewed (that's right, the two "authors" are really just editors/interviewers) are very talented, but the information they give leaves one thinking whether they really divulged any trade secrets.

The book describes a lot of web-layout and design techniques, but unfortunately many techniques do not go deep enough. For example, I bought the book to learn intricate table layouts, but the chapter on tables just rehashes what every non-beginner web designer already knows and does. How about information on how table elements interact as well as things like merging cells and spliting cells, which can be very, very tricky to handle?

Overall this can be a useful reference.

This book presents analysis and how-did-they-do-that descriptions of numerous aspects of Web page design and production. The first two chapters covering general design issues and navigation are exceptionally good and should be read by anyone who makes Web pages. These chapters stress the overall need for usability and speed and discuss why sites that don't take their audience into consideration are unsuccessful. The remaining chapters are each geared to specific aspects of Web design that may be of interest to graphic artists designing for the Web; they cover such topics as Web graphics, fonts, animation, multimedia, and 3D worlds. In fact, some of the chapters are so specific that they may not be comprehensible to readers who don't work with Adobe Photoshop every day. The book includes a CD that has interactive examples and demo software for some of the design products mentioned in the book.

While the overall quality of the book is quite good, the technical chapters on HTML and JavaScript are rather weak- -new users of either of these languages won't find these sections very illuminating, and experienced users won't find many new tips either (the example figures showing HTML code are barely legible). The chapter on Web type starts off by considering usability issues, but soon turns to snazzy ways to make an artistic point, seemingly forgetting the needs of users (as well as search engines, which read only real text, not animated gifs or Shockwave). The book is definitely geared towards graphic artists, almost assuming that the readers are working on high-end Macintosh computers. Certainly, any graphic artist designing for the Web will find tremendous value in this book, as well as general readers interested in Web design.

Many of the techniques described in this book are yesterday's techniques. Tables for precise layout? C'mon -- what about Cascading Style Sheets?

The video chapter is a particular embarrassment. No coverage of QuickTime 3.0's ability to deliver movies for different bandwidths. And the AFI may use VDO, but no one else does! Realvideo and Netshow are FAR more popular.

Read this book for a look at how some designers do things. But don't read it if you're looking for the most current information.

PRIOR EXPERIENCE REQUIRED, NOT FOR BEGINNERS Being a coder(living in a beige world,) I was looking for a book that would help me change my first two web sites to look more professional. I have looked at several books that claimed they would be the answer to my needs, only to return them after a very brief review (My thanks to amazon for being understanding on this subject).

I don't claim that this book will fill that void, but it does provides all of us coders and faded designers a different perspective, a designers perspective of web site development. This book provides countless snippets of code to support those web sites being featured in each chapter. The designers explain what their goals were for each web site, why they did a particular feature, and in many cases some lessons learned during there development. All of these designers are worth reading. There perspectives on development provided fresh ideas to achieve my goals of creating professional looking web sites. My only complaint is the same complaint I have with all computer books, the cost.

A-yuh. Not much new in this one but it makes a nice coffee table book. The price is awe-inspiring considering the content is pedestrian and available in most beginner-to-intermediate web design books you probably already own but have never bothered to finish reading. Not recommended unless you don't have any books on this subject, in which case I would recommend for starters "Web Design in a Nutshell : A Desktop Quick Reference" by Jennifer Niederst. And if you really need pretty pictures, you can find them all live on the web.

Some web development topics are covered nicely, but the book as a whole is somewhat disorganized and in places lacking. Much of the graphic information is Photoshop-specific. Both the reader level and the preface imply that the book is not for beginners to HTML, but fully into the book (Chapter 5), basic tags are discussed.

On the bright side, there are a few good tidbits compiled from designers of some impressive sites, and it is a quick read.

This book is worth the reading for anyone in the industry as it keeps you focused on what's important, the user. Books that give accounts by other designers are more desirable than those by a single author attempting to "spew" his or her view of "what is proper web design."

Though I thought the accompanying CD was rather weak, I appreciated being able to see the visual aspects of how the designers put the sites together, as well as reading their thoughts on it.

There's a good variety of topics covered, though some of the more technical ones may have been disserviced by the lack of space to adequately delve into the specifics.

In all, it's worth it for any designer to have in his or her library.

A lot of very useful info in a small book. I'm less than half the way through and I've already learned enough to make it worth the investment to me. The chapter on Using Tables was just what I needed. I would recommend this book to other beginners who are still trying to make sense of it all.

This is a good book for beginners to get some overall concepts formulated of what things are possible on the web and some good clues as to how to acheive that end. No real tutorials offered and you should have other texts or the web to glean that info...

I used this book to do things on a web page that I never had even thought of doing. I have a rotating object done with an animated GIF. They recommended a more complex method, but I did it simple and without a quicktime plugin. Also I updated my javascript based on one chapter, to ensure that what works on NS, will not die on IE. I also discovered how to stretch the center of a page and keep a constantly sized margin. On the whole the book has some great ideas. Use it as an ideas book, rather than a training manual!