Customer Reviews

Visual Design for the Modern Web

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The Web is a huge topic. There's HTML, CSS, JavaScript, graphics standards, PHP, Perl, Ruby, SQL, HTTP, Apache, and the list goes on. Creating a basic consumer site these days can easily involve a dozen technologies, each of which has its own complexities. And that doesn't even touch on the business side, which is, after all, the reason for having a site in the first place. Let alone the interface.

No one book can cover it all, or even attempt to do so. Instead, authors need to choose a goal, and try to do a good job with it. The goal of this book is clear enough: to give people an overview of the main tasks they need to accomplish to create a basic static Web site for a small company, a family, a nonprofit, or whatever.

The book succeeds at that. The first thing you notice when you look at the table of contents is that the book is not organized around technology. There's not a chapter on HTML, another on CSS, and so on. Instead, the book is organized around the attributes of a good site. For example, the navigation chapter shows how to achieve good navigation, talking about affordances, link states, link reliability, and so on. The chapter mixes together HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, just as any real navigation system mixes together different technologies. The book keeps the focus on the thing that matters: the user's experience.

To my way of thinking (such as it is), that is the way it should be. The book focuses on the ends FIRST, and then shows what means can be used to achieve those ends.

A common scenario is that people read books on HTML, CSS, and JS, and then start to create sites. The problem is, although they know how to create a link, they don't know when to create one, or why to create one, or the difference between a useful link and a less useful one. They know the tools, but not how to use them well. The results are less than professional.

That is what Visual Design for the Modern Web is for. Once you learn what an <a> is and what a CSS class is, this book will show you how to use them to create a good user experience.

This should not be the first book you should buy. Buy HTML for Dummies (or some such) first, and play around. When you get ready to do some real work, then buy Visual Design for the Modern Web.

There are some things I don't like, but not many. The waterfallish design model in the first two chapters could be replaced with something more clearly prototype based, maybe with more examples of design documents thrown in. There could be a little more server-side stuff added as well. Otherwise, it's hard to motivate the material on forms. Perhaps a little bit of PHP. Maybe two scripts, one showing how incoming data is appended to a file, and another showing how the file data is output to a page. Just enough to show how forms can help business processes run.

In summary, a good book if you've learned some basic tech, and now want to know what to do with it.

Normally I wouldn't put too much effort to be negative about a book (there's too much negativity in the world and it's damn hard to write a good book) but I had to post some remarks on this title. For a brand new publication this book is filled with horrifically out-dated information, some of if completely wrong. I expect a *lot* more from New Riders.

A few examples:

- In many places the technique discussed and coding examples are completely ignorant of current standards and best practices. In one section the author describes using tables for layout and describes how to use sliced images to create pixel-perfect layouts. Inline CSS is everywhere, because "external files make for unwieldy examples".

How many out-dated techniques can you find in the following sentence?

"In order to accomplish multiple discrete rollovers on what starts out as a single image, we break the image apart into slice (rectangular pieces) that are seemlessly reassembled into an HTML table."

- There are lots of plainly wrong information scattered throughout the book. Just one example:

"PNG ... is a newer graphic format intended eventually to replace GIF for everything but GIF animation (because PNG doesn't support animation). PNG won't replace the JPG format, because PNG is not ideal for continuous-tone images such as photos." (what about 24-bit PNGs?)

"In general, designers who are artists first, web developers second, often prefer sketching the comp in an image-editing program rather than creating a skeletal HTML page." Oh really?

New Riders books tend to be of a higher quality than the average technology book, but this one falls way short. A book that supposed to deal with "the modern web" should present modern approaches and ideas. This book reads like it was written in 1999.

"Visual Design for the Modern Web" is an exploration of alternative web design solutions both old and new.

BACKGROUND FOR CREATIVE THINKING
In some cases, there's esoteric knowledge not documented commonly in other web books, like the "color math" displayed on generating Hexcode tints. While this is not a critical skill (there are online generators to solve this), it is interesting and thought provoking. Sometimes, you need to know history and theory to choose the APPROPRIATE solution instead of the PERFECT solution. There is a difference. Appropriate is suiting or fitting. Perfect is flawless. Flawless has a big price tag in web project workload. "Good-enough" web engineering has it's place and this book is about making those important choices between delivery, quality, and price.

CHOOSING HOW YOU BUILD WEBSITES
If you believe in perfect solutions for everything, this book is NOT for you. It is NOT for perfectionists or web standard Nazis --but more for creative thinking and exploration of possibilities. This book is about alternatives and making choices. It's also based on the authors personal journey in learning how to build a sturdy website. This perspective is important.

ALTERNATIVE WEB SOLUTIONS
This is a menu of real-world alternatives. You can't use every solution presented in this book but the concepts will expand your horizons and improve your toolbox. It will point you in directions for more information. This book is more than just a starting point for beginners. It has encyclopedic value for seasoned designers and programmers to "think" about "why" they use certain methods. Is new technology better than older proven methods that actually still work? You're invited to find out.

FRESH IDEAS FOR SIMPLER WEBSITE PROBLEM-SOLVING
I do not view the book's content as stale in any way. It does explain "vintage" ideas that need revisiting for unrealized potential in today's web environment. Complexity is not the goal. Read it and think.

As the author of Visual Design for the Modern Web, my goal in writing was to teach design principles, not CSS. While it's true that I didn't always follow the latest in the rather complicated Web standards, that was a conscious choice in order to keep the code simple and the focus on the elements of design. After all, a single book can't teach every aspect of web design. I also firmly believe there is a place for table-based layouts as long as designers respect the needs of screen readers, and that PNGs aren't ideal for photos because of their size. Of course, opinions may vary.

If you're looking for a title on CSS and Web standards, I recommend Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards (2nd Edition); however, if your objective is to learn how using traditional design principles can help you create better Web sites, than I believe that you will find a great deal of useful information in my book.

This book reminds me of Joe Burn's book "HTML Goodies". In both cases the author has been thrown in the deep end to teach a subject that they know nothing about and has had to learn as they go. In both cases they have used what appears to work rather than learning the right way to do it. In both cases they have written a book about what they have learnt. In both cases the approach that they have taken to coding is far from being the right way. Joe's book is now looked on as a good set of examples of how not to code a web page. Perhaps Penny's book will end up being looked at the same way.

In some ways this is unfortunate because Penny seems to really understand what needs to be taken into account in both the analysis and design phases of creating web sites and is only let down in the area of how to implement the design. The word "Modern" in the title is certainly a misnomer when you consider that many of the techniques presented were considered to be outdated several years ago.

I will admit that unlike most of the books that I review where I read the book through from cover to cover, I only got about a third of the way through this one and so perhaps the rest of the book is better. Unfortunately the first part of the book contained so much wrong information that I just couldn't bring myself to read any further.