Amazon.com Review
Part of a series of small but excellent showcase books,
Web Site Graphics: Navigation features Web sites that excel at moving users through their pages. These sites show alternatives to the now commonplace left-side vertical navigation bar. They include eye-catching horizontal bars, arrays of rollovers, color-coded systems, drop-down menus, scrolling Shockwave bars, simple yet elegant text navigators, and many other methods.
Among the standouts is Kjetil Vatne Graphics + Design, with its vibrantly colored pages and circular site tree. The site has changed since the book was researched (it is now called KVAD V5 [www.kvad.com]) and is even more impressive in its navigational design. Also impressive is the "anti-navigational" site Funny Garbage (www.funnygarbage.com), where random clicking is the foundation of navigational strategy. Frogdesign (www.frogdesign.com) displays a scrolling timeline of the company's history across the bottom of each page. The viewer uses a small slider to control forward and backward motion and a popup menu for a site map.
There are a lot of good ideas in Navigation; the authors have chosen carefully, and they explain which aspects caused each site to be chosen. "Navigation is not just a set of links: it is a way of thinking about and structuring a site so that information, illustrations, or documents always feel like they are within reach, not buried far away or impossible to find."
This is not a how-to book. Rather, it's more like a gallery of Web sites that are so well-designed as to make you sit down and take notice. --Angelynn Grant
Topics covered: screen captures of many Web sites showing innovative uses of navigational techniques in Web design, with captions explaining why each site was chosen and listing artistic credits; an index with the names and addresses of all design firms involved.
