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Curt Cloninger

Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground Paperback – August 1, 2001

by Curt Cloninger (Author)

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Filled with vivid color illustrations, this guide for Web designers describes in detail some of the latest visual ideas from the experimental design subculture. Each of ten chapters explores a distinct design type, such as 1950s Hello Kitty style, pixilated punk rock style, and the minimalist aesthetics of HTML purists. Web addresses for sites representative of each style are found at the ends of the chapters. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Print length

211 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Waite Group Pr
Publication date

August 1, 2001
Dimensions

7.75 x 0.5 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

0735710740
ISBN-13

978-0735710740
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Wow, this is a fun book. If you spend a lot of time on Web design and suffer occasional burnout, Fresh Styles is the inspiration booster shot you need to get you back to the keyboard to whip up something new. Perhaps you'd like to try "gothic organic" or "pixelated punk"? Author Curt Cloninger, who's written for the Web developer forum Alistapart.com, defines 10 "underground" Web styles using case studies of several Web sites, and discovers what makes them not just cutting edge but marketable, too. These site designs not only mimic print design, but embrace the medium of the Web with all its flaws (browser incompatibilities, sluggish download times, varying viewer operating systems, and screen resolutions).

All 10 of the design styles discussed in this book sprang from a dissatisfaction with the status quo, a love of the Web as a medium, and a passion for evocative, communicative design.

With such fun chapters as "1950s Hello Kitty Style" and "Paper Bag Style," hundreds of screenshots, and techniques for achieving these looks, Fresh Styles isn't just an inspiring kick in the pants but a cookbook/resource as well. Not everything here conforms to usability wisdom; for example, pages may not bookmark because they're in designer-defined pop-up windows or the entire site is one big Flash file. But the author encourages readers to go beyond the universally practical: "Go ahead and fiddle while Rome burns."

There are ideas here you may never have thought of using. The 8-bit gifs in the "SuperTiny SimCity Style" are the opposite of most designers' layered Photoshop creations. A link points to the perfect Web tutorial on how to get them right. For the "Lo-Fi Grunge Style," think Raygun, complete with TV scan-line effects and "that smudged, misprinted look." A sidebar shows how to mimic a noisy TV signal by placing scan-line patterns on their own Photoshop layer.

Grooviness is what this book is all about: groovy narrative, groovy illustrations, and a groovy layout by Carlos Segura. It's got a good vibe that makes you think that the future of the Web may not be so bleak after all. --Angelynn Grant

From the Back Cover

In a light and friendly voice, the author introduces the reader to new ways of styling websites. With specific examples for each of ten categories, he provides a wealth of techniques for the designer who wishes to apply these approaches in their own work. The styles are broken down into ten categories, which are:

* Gothic Organic School
* Wireframe Icon School
* Lo-fi Grunge School
* Paper Bag School
* Mondrian Poster School
* Pixelated Punk Rock School
* 1950's Hello Kitty School
* HTMinimaLism School
* DraftingTable/Instruction Manual School

Super Tiny SimCity School Further explorations in the book help designers determine which style choices would be most appropriate when changing the look of their own sites.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Waite Group Pr (August 1, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 211 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0735710740
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0735710740
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.83 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.75 x 0.5 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,443,682 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,225 in Network Storage & Retrieval Administration
- #4,865 in Graphics & Multimedia Programming
- #6,362 in Web Design (Books)

Customer Reviews:
30 ratings

About the author

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Curt Cloninger

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Curt Cloninger is a writer, artist, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His art has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition and performance venues include Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Granoff Center for The Creative Arts (Brown University), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (Asheville), and the internet. His essays have been published in Performance Research, Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, Textshop Experiments, and on ABC World News. His writing and art may be accessed at lab404.com, playdamage.org, and deepyoung.org.

Customer reviews

5 star		47%
4 star		12%
3 star		16%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star		25%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Eric Oehler

Hit or miss

Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2001

Verified Purchase

I'll start by saying that some of the sites in the book are absolutely beautiful. Some of them are cutting-edge, fresh, and as Cloninger advocates, fun.
But for a lot of them, "fun" turns to "frustrating" mind-bogglingly quickly. Several of the sites are electronic works of art that have incomprehensible interfaces and infuriating functionality.
I realize the emphasis of this book is sort of the anti-Neilsen, but there is, and has to be, a line of practicality in web design that just shouldn't be crossed. A beautiful website is not something that someone can hang on a wall, it's something a user is supposed to use. Neilsen gets too draconian in one direction, and Cloninger goes too far in the other. Reality is somewhere in between.
Several of the sites detailed, however, don't suffer from these problems. The "Mondrian" and "HMLMinimalist" sections are almost Neilsen-ite in their simplicity. The problem lies in some of the recommendations that Cloninger makes on how to execute such a site - the code he puts forth is often a bit sketchy and not always standards-compatible (use a new standards-complaint browser, you get a mess. Use and old browser, you get a mess).
Overall, the book is somewhat useful, somewhat not. As inspirational material, it's grand. The sites are beautiful and complex. As a "how-to" manual, the advice given is often less-than-good. Couple this book with "Don't Make Me Think" and the ORA book on CSS and you will have a much better chance of developing a workable, elegant site.

15 people found this helpful

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PSo

Take this book for what it is...a great inspiration source

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2001

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When I read this book, I was immediately captivated by the sites it presented. This book is not meant to be a Web bible and the writer does not say this anywhere...instead, the styles and case studies he presents are meant to show you what can be done with the web instead of the typical bland boxy website.
This is possibly the best web design idea book I have seen b/c it shows the reader plenty of examples and styles and gives basic tips on how to achieve that style. The most important thing the book does is it opens the reader to styles that he/she probably wasn't even aware of.
I totally disagree with the reviewer below that gave this book 1 star...the style names are a playful way of presenting some of these websites. And when you go through the examples, the sites in each category definitely do have similarities...so categorizing the sites is not faux pas by any means.

9 people found this helpful

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Ivan M

10 years later, an instructive look into the history of the web

Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2011

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Cloninger is an expert chronicler, detailing every style with useful "real art" references, and classifying the unclassifiable. Ten years after the publication of the book, it's easy to see which styles didn't age well, but it's also humbling to see some styles hold up very well, above and beyond even current trends.

In an increasingly saturated industry, "Fresh Styles" offers not only a choice of potential directions, but also a glimpse into the incredibly innovative web design scene at the start of the 21st century. Highly recommended.

Helpful

J. Mueller

Fresh? Nope, a Little Stale Around the Edges.

Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2003

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I bought this book for the same reason many did, inspiration and to get out of the design rut I felt myself in. I was tired of going onto the web design newsgroups and hearing about tables versus css and non-validating pages and usability and browser compatibility.
It was nice to see someone advocating something that might not have been coded "by the book." That thumbed its nose at "fuddy duddy" web design. But this book careened a little too far off the path for my taste.
I was taken aback that anyone could suggest, as this book did, that the designer was being "playful" by hiding navigation elements. This is just bad web design, no matter whether you are designing a web page for a cutting edge alternative rock band or for a law firm.
The section on Sim City smashes any theories of usability all to hell. I was literally raked over the coals in a web design newsgroup for committing the unpardonable Sin of specifying pixel sizes. I'd love to see those same people review the sites featured in this book. Especially any site based on the Sim City design... 8px? Uh, yeah, RIGHT! You sure better know who your audience is before you undertake wild site designs like most of the ones featured here.
And entropy8 -- or more accurately, its new incarnation, entropy8zuper.org ... I'm invoking the rule my mother taught me long ago: If you can't say something nice....
I'm not sure how much this book would help anyone who designs web pages for a living. It's a nice coffee table book, but it's not a book that will sit beside any of my other HTML or web design books. No, they won't have it. And neither will I.
Now, I'm off to e-Bay to see if I can unload this four-day old unrefrigerated fish.

6 people found this helpful

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Jnetti

Great book for web styles and understanding how sites are ...

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2014

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Great book for web styles and understanding how sites are designed if you are new to design. Newer books are out there and web site action requires more insight and instruction than this book offers. But used for the purpose of gaining insight and ideas it is fabulous and worth having.

Helpful

Mark S Hall

Great Ideas for New Designs

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2002

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Like most books of this genre, "Fresh Styles" is useful for those in the web design business and less helpful for companies and clients that are ecommerce focused. The designs are incredibly but are heavy on graphics, images, and other elements that are frequently not beneficial to business sites. However, the book does chronicle designs that are really innovative and beautiful to look at. Very artistic and creative styles that will push the world of web design forward which it really needs at this point in time (tiring of the standard 'portal' look that is so popular).

One person found this helpful

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Laura-Leigh Palmer

Great idea book!

Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2012

Verified Purchase

Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground Great idea book! After checking it out of the library I wanted a copy of my very own. Besides a source of inspiration it was interesting to see the development of web design. I teach and having names for various styles and discovering their development has been very helpful in introducing this material to students just starting out.

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