Customer Reviews

Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I just purchased the book, and find it to be a valuable resource for the baffling topic of liquid layouts. It "set me straight" on some basic concepts and I particularly liked the way Zoe explained the pros and cons of the various layout choices. For this reason, I will refer to it before beginning a new project to help me me make some design decisions. Also, she provides some examples for dealing with some of the issues that must be considered when working with liquid layouts(such as strategies to use for graphic comps). I also think it's a good blend of theory and actual exercises ... I have found that some books have too much of one or the other. For anyone ready to move beyond the fixed-width layout, I highly recommend it. I was very happy to see a very comprehensive book that dealt specifically with liquid layouts, written by someone who is an expert in this particular area. However it's not for the fledgling web designer (and the author clearly states this in her introduction).

I've been struggling with css and getting it to behave. I went to the bookstore and must have poured through about 15 or so css related books. I was looking for a step by step guide through the process and instantly grabed this book up as the one to beat. I walked away with 3 books to the register. This book was first on my list to read. Flexible Web Design has helped me get over the learning curve answered a lot of my biggest questions and cured most of my css hangups the first evening I cracked the book. You explain it very well like a friend sitting down with you. You don't take anything for granted, your very meticulous yet the explanations flows easy and comfortably at the same time, How did you do that? I highly recommend this to designers going from table layouts to css and need a comprehensive crash coarse that will get you up and going quickly with lots of tips, strategies and design considerations.

Thank you so much for getting this out there.

This is a fantastic book (very well written too) for those wanting to know how to properly create layouts that really work and accommodate for your target users. If you are serious about your interface layout, then this book is very well suited and is a must read. The author clearly discusses the proper usage/application of the various layout techniques like fixed, liquid and elastic. It's great to also know that accessibility is not forgot and taken into consideration wherever relevant. A great author who knows how to teach, guide and develop clean and clear layouts.

After having read multiple articles from Smashing Magazine, A List Apart, and other blogs that have articles on both liquid and elastic layouts, I was really blown away with how much information was in this book. It definitely pays tribute to how much time Gillenwater must have invested in writing 'Flexible Web Design.' It's a truly excellent CSS book, and I'd recommend it to anyone who tries to use CSS Frameworks for laying out web pages instead of hand-coding. Out of all the CSS books I've read, this one was by far the most informative.

Praise Zoe Mickley Gillenwater for authoring a superb book. For website owners who want their sites to expand to fill the browser window (viewport), she offers liquid and hybrid layouts. For those who want their websites to expand to match the browser's text size, she offers elastic layout. For everyone, she shows how to minimize the occurrence of the dreaded horizontal scroll bar. Her examples and exercises are intuitive; they follow a natural progression in complexity and utility. Finally, she demonstrates how to achieve these results without compromising on search engine optimization (i.e., by maintaining ideal source order).

Score:
5 stars: Overall
5 stars: Benefits and outcomes
5 stars: New information, especially elastic layout, blending background images and faux columns
3 stars: Paradox of Choice: Segregating the layout choices into their own sections would have helped this reader. I quickly gravitated toward an elastic layout using all floats in ideal source order. I would have preferred less discussion of liquid layouts, negative margins and compromised source order.
5 stars: Credibility. The author's website - [...] - implements a flexible, hybrid layout as she describes in the book.

I always look for the most explicit books that also raise the bar. Needeless to say I am pretty difficult to please. Well, Flexible Web Design is the type of book you find once every five years. There is not one chapter in this book where the reader isn't wowed! It's not a tutorial book, it's a book of revelations. How can someone master all those aspects, gathered it seems from articles and web papers on the topic? We've got to praise the author's synthetic mind. If you want to reach mastery in CSS you will find no equivalent or better book for sure. Once read and assimilated (a hands-on project is included), this book will place the reader above most CSS designers out there. A great advantage in this economy's job market.

Great book. Hard to put it down. The explanations are very concise and enlightening for a sometimes confusing area of web design. Good pointers. Quick to get to the nitty gritty of elastic and liquid design. Just what I was looking for.

Thanks for the help.

The biggest two flaws that this book has is that it wasn't published many years ago and not all web designers have a copy of it. There isn't much that can be done about the first of these and the situation regarding the second will resolve itself gradually as more web designers find out about the book and buy a copy. This book goes into great detail on a number of important techniques for styling web pages with CSS that will be useful to anyone creating web pages. The step by step approach not only shows you how to solve the specific layouts that the book covers but also show very clearly the approach to take to resolve the layout of any web page with CSS.

Not only do the examples in the book provide solutions to many real world problems with web page layout but copies of all the code are available to download allowing you to use these solutions for your own web page designs without having to rewrite it. The book sets out a number of clear objectives with respect to liquid layouts, elastic layouts, hybrid layouts, handling space and backgrounds, and even how to make foreground images more flexible and it shows with extremely clear step by step how each of these objectives is achieved. The book even takes into account the earlier steps in the design process and how to prepare all through the design process so that you will not have to backtrack to achieve the desired end result.

No assumptions are made as to what tools you will be using to create your content or what browser that your visitors will be using to access it. Also, while the book deals specifically with flexible layouts, it acknowledges that fixed layouts also exist and may be more appropriate in certain situations.

In the acknowledgements in the front of the book the author thanks a number of really well known people in the field of web design who have inspired and taught her. I am sure that many future works which provide similar acknowledgements will include this author's name in their list.

I bought this book while I was reading Teach Yourself HTML, so you can tell I have nearly no experience with web design. No matter, I followed the instructions and changed my sites from fixed sizes to scalable in a day.

This book is AWESOME!

I know that my site isn't going to win the WEB-E awards, but it has graphics, audio files, tables, photoshopped pictures and is something I was completely incapable of doing before I picked up this book. I had been thinking of taking college courses because I wanted to get into the web world and it seemed inaccessible. I majored in Cultural Anthropology, so I'm a bit behind the technology wave.

The sites I created were creationsbycrouch and huknowsphotography so far.

It isn't accessible any more. My sites are up and I've offered to make more sites for friends. I grow and learn daily and I'm having fun!

I also bought Teach Yourself PHP and MySQL. I haven't started down the PHP path yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Books like this one are amazing, because they let completely unschooled people like me into the web. The drawback, as mentioned in one of the reviews, you need to know HTML code to apply the information from this book. It assumes you already know how to put width into your HTML and that all you need to know is how to make it fluid.

Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS
Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS

Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS teaches you exactly what the title would suggest. Zoe Mickley Gillenwater walks you through the theory and logic behind designing with CSS to create fluid design choices.

The book is very heavy in theory, so much so that the 9 chapter book has 3 chapters of pure theory before ever getting to the meat of how CSS can help you create the designs and layouts that Zoe suggests are best for each situation. Finally in chapter 4 you will get a brief exposure to the life of CSS in the design process, but it is short lived.

Don't get me wrong, theory is a very important part to design work, and development in general. You must first know where you are going and why you are going there, or you will certainly end up in a place that you never intended. However, I felt that this book was a little heavy on the theory. More examples would have been nice as well.

A little about Zoe. Zoe is the design services manager at the University of North Caronlina Highway Safety Research Center, and leads the design and development of dozens of information-rich web sites. She focuses on aesthetics, usability, and best practices.

Overall the book is a short read, and in the end you will surely understand why you will pick between fixed, fluid and elastic designs, and if you are careful you will even know how to program those styles with CSS.

You can pick up Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS at Amazon.com or at the publisher's website newriders.com