Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
I tried, I really tried..., January 20, 2000
I wanted to like this book, but just couldn't bring myself to. Yes, it's beautifully designed and printed, but somehow too beautifully, almost suspiciously so. Yes, its reads like one long ego-trip/advertisement for Mr Black, but that doesn't mean it might not have some useful content. But finally I had to decide that this is a very shallow piece of work. Mr Black, from the evidence presented here, seems to have propelled his web-design career by stating the obvious. Using classic fonts, bold imagery and elegant design to communicate ideas isn't exactly revelatory stuff. Managing your staff in such a way that they talk to each other isn't exactly MBA-worthy, either. Even if we can forgive the self-promotion, I'm not so sure about dressing up a book on simple design principles as some kind of web-design bible, especially as this book is woefully lacking in any technical detail. For what its worth, if you want a good beginners guide to designing for the web, you can do worse than Lynda Weinman and Jacob Neilson. After that, dissect the source code of any sites you particularly admire.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
First-year design principles + a lot of hot air, April 24, 2000
By A Customer
I had a lot of problems with this book beginning with its misleading title. "Web Sites That Work" makes it sound like you can expect some technical information. Not so. There's basically nothing here that actually tells you how to produce a web site that works. There are almost no references to HTML, web-safe colors, CSS, or any other technical aspects of web design. Authored by "ROGER BLACK with Sean Elder", the book is structured like a long softball interview with questions for and quotes from Black & members of his design firm. I found this profoundly irritating; it was distracting and it made the book seem transparently self-serving. As for the content: lots of largely irrelevant glossy photos, not a lot of actual information imparted. If you're looking for a retrospective of Black's career, and lots of pictures of his big pumpkin head, you'll love it. But otherwise there's not a lot here. Black gets around issues like file size & optimization by ignoring them, claiming that everyone will have broadband by the end of 1998 anyway. So he feels free to use big-ass graphics with ludicrous download times to mimic print design. It's 2000 and I don't know about you but I still have a modem. Which may be why I never visit any of the sites that Black designs. And regarding Black's vaunted classic design principles, ANY first year course in design, or basic graphic design text, will teach you everything this book does and more-- and you won't have to swim through Black's heavy egocentric pontification to do it. And how about the design? The book is heavy, expensive, and somewhat pleasing to the eye, but ironically enough it's not designed very well! There's not much organization and a lot of the pictures seem randomly placed on the page. My final judgement: 50% of this book slams everyone else trying to do web design for doing it wrong; 40% of the book lards praise on Black & his lackeys for their approach to design. The other 10% is the useful information that managed to sneak through. I got it on clearance for $2, which is about what it's worth in my estimation. It would be nice if there was a book that taught web programmers about classic design principles-- including how to implement them successfully on the web. But Roger Black's book isn't it.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Lots of flash, mostly trash, January 14, 2000
Although this book is very pretty with lots of ink, thick pages, and nice graphics, I thought that the information value was very low. All of the information that was worth anything could have fit in a magazine article. This book seems to be a "look how cool Roger Black is" book, and it even has a little section in the back all about Roger Black, in case you didn't catch it from the rest of the book. Roger Black's Web work is very nice, so he has a lot to brag about, but this book should not have been the way to go about it. Although his Web design may work for certain audiences, there's much more to it than this very opinionated (and limited) version. He should stick to magazine design. Don't waste your money. This book is not only over-priced because of the flashy presentation, but it's not even worth the content.
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