Designing for the Web (Paperback)

~ Jennifer Niederst (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A handsome and practical book, chock-full of useful tricks and tips for WWW graphics design, Although the book was created for already-experienced graphics designers moving to the Web medium, there's plenty of good information for novices as well. This book is especially strong in helping you solve the mysteries of working with transparency, interlacing, imagemaps, and bit-depths to create effective and compact images that work on the web. Recommended!

Product Description

Designing for the Web introduces you to the unique considerations of Web design and gives you the basics you need to hit the ground running. Although geared toward designers, this book covers information and techniques useful to anyone who wants to put graphics online. It explains how to work with HTML documents from a designer's point of view, outlines special problems with presenting information online, and walks through incorporating images into Web pages, with emphasis on resolution and improving efficiency. You'll find a step-by-step tutorial on putting together a Web page from scratch, pointers on creating graphics that are optimized for the Web, tips on using background images and colors in Web pages, recommendations for reducing download times of images, and instructions for transparency and interlacing to Web graphics. This book also discusses the impact of different browsers and platforms on your design, explains how HTML tags are used for design, and offers guidelines on navigational and orientation aids, as well as on conceptualizing your Web site as a whole.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (January 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565921658
• ISBN-13: 978-1565921658
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,222,511 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book for beginners to Web design, January 9, 1999

By	J. T. Tokarz ([e-mail]) (Richmond, VA) - See all my reviews

I found this book by accident in the library when I was starting the process of designing our office's web site. Because I was a rank beginner to the world of web design (although I knew the PC, Windows 98, Microsoft Office, FrameMaker, PageMaker and a little Photoshop), I needed some hand-holding to get my feet wet. This book was better than anything else I found for that task.

There are other web design books I like (like Roger Black's book on Adobe Press) but this is the best one I have seen for the person who literally knows nothing about the topic.Yes, it was written in 1996 and is somewhat dated for the person who wants to be cutting edge, but you have to crawl before you can run, and this book got me through the crawling stage so I could start to feel comfortable with the concepts I would need to work with my Adobe (and now Macromedia) software.

The writing style is crisp and clean and right to the point. I read it in three hours.

Try this book if you don't know anything about web design, then take a look at Roger Black for one designer's viewpoint on design issues. Once you have those two books under your belt, the author's latest book, Web Design in a Nutshell, would be a great next step.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book on web graphics concepts and fundamentals..., August 26, 1998

By	Robin Duggan ([e-mail]) (Frederick, Maryland) - See all my reviews

I found this book to be a great way to become familiar with the range of issues that come to bear on incorporating graphics into a web page. Despite the exclusive use of Photoshop in the examples, the concepts are explained in such a way that makes it easy to identify the same graphic-editing techniques needed to be used with other software such as Paint Shop Pro, my graphic editor of choice. Good clear explanations and excellent examples do a great job of illustrating how "tweaking" things like the color depth and color pallete affect file sizes, download times, and picture quality. Originally, I kept renewing this book from my local library until I finally just bought my own copy. A great book!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great inexpensive book to get you started in web design, March 25, 1997

By A Customer

Although the book is oriented around Photoshop on the Mac (which is even better if you use a Mac), the concepts are universal. The book is visually pleasing, very informative (especially on graphic formats), and an inexpensive way to get started