Design books

“While you’re reading Neuro Web Design, you’ll probably find yourself thinking ‘I already knew that…’ a lot. But when you’re finished, you’ll discover that your ability to create effective web sites has mysteriously improved. A brilliant idea for a book, and very nicely done.”
— Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think!
A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Why do people decide to buy a product online? Register at your Web site? Trust the information you provide? Neuro Web Design applies the research on motivation, decision making, and neuroscience to the design of Web sites. You will learn the unconscious reasons for people’s actions, how emotions affect decisions, and how to apply the principles of persuasion to design Web sites that encourage users to click.
Neuro Web Design employs “neuro-marketing” concepts, which are at the intersection of psychology and user experience. It’s scientific, yet you’ll find it accessible, easy to read, and easy to understand. By applying the concepts and examples in this book, you’ll be able to dramatically increase the effectiveness and conversion rates of your own Web site.

This is the must-have book for designers who want to expand their skills and improve the quality of their designs. Learning CSS technology and continually improving one's design and developer skills is essential for every Web designer in today's marketplace. The goal of Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates is to educate beginning-to-intermediate Web designers on the various issues involved with Web design through general discussion, case studies, and specific tips and techniques. Using easy-to-understand language and concepts, the book teaches designers and developers how to create professional-quality CSS-based designs. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is explored, giving the reader a strong, basic understanding of how to get sites to rank better in search engines. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) also is explained, helping the designer create a more efficient site for the users who are already visiting. You'll get the benefit of the author's experience. With more than 15 years of experience as a Web designer for Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, and small businesses alike, Eccher has learned numerous tips and techniques of the trade and discloses them here, saving you time and aggravation by alerting you to potential pitfalls.

CSS3 is the technology behind most of the eye-catching visuals on the Web today, but the official documentation can be dry and hard to follow. Luckily, The Book of CSS3 distills the heady technical language of the CSS3 specification into plain English, so you can get started on your next project right away.

With real-world examples and a focus on results, The Book of CSS3 shows you how to transform ordinary text into stunning, richly detailed web pages fit for any browser. You'll master the latest cutting-edge CSS features, like multi-column layouts, borders and box effects, and new color and opacity settings. You'll also learn how to:

• Stylize text with fully customizable outlines, drop shadows, and other effects
• Create, position, and resize unlimited background images on the fly
• Spice up static web pages with event-driven transitions and animations
• Apply 2D and 3D transformations to text and images
• Use linear and radial gradients to create smooth color transitions
• Tailor a website's appearance to smartphones and other devices

From the simplest blog layout to the most feature-rich web portal, The Book of CSS3 puts the whole wide world of web design at your fingertips. The future of web design is now—what will you create with it?

5 Reasons to Start Using CSS3 from the Author

1. Device-responsive pages
   The big growth area of web browsing is on smartphone and tablet devices such as Android, iPhone and iPad. New media features and page layout modules in CSS3 let you make pages which respond to the capabilities of the device that's viewing them, automatically optimizing your content for multiple screen sizes and giving your visitors a tailored experience.


2. Eye candy!
   CSS3 brings web documents to life without complicated JavaScript. Rotate, scale and skew page elements in both two and three dimensions, add smooth transitional animations to elements when their values change, and go even further with keyframe animations which give you fine control over the behavior of your page elements.


3. A better reading experience
   The web was made for reading text, but for years we've had to use a handful of fonts in a very conservative way. CSS3 brings the power to use any font you wish, to decorate the text with drop shadows and outlining, plus new ways of laying out the text such as in multiple columns, like a newspaper or magazine.


4. Easier to maintain
   Using CSS2.1 usually means adding images (and extra markup) to your documents in order to achieve what should be simple effects. Something as basic as adding rounded corners to an element can mean using up to four extra empty elements to accommodate the graphics required to fake the appearance. CSS3 was created to address just these problems, so you can add rounded corners, drop shadows, gradient backgrounds and much more without writing unnecessary markup or creating multiple image files -- meaning a lot less work to make and maintain your documents.


5. Cleaner code
   The greatly expanded range of selectors in CSS3 means you can add special formatting to links depending on their destination, loop through long tables and lists, even select form elements depending on their current state -- all without having to clutter your code with surplus class attributes.

The perfect place to learn how to design Web sites for mobile devices!

With the popularity of Internet access via cell phones and other mobile devices, Web designers now have to consider as many as eight operating systems, several browsers, and a slew of new devices as they plan a new site, a new interface, or a new sub-site. This easy-to-follow friendly book guides you through this brave new world with a clear look at the fundamentals and offers practical techniques and tricks you may not have considered.

• Explores all issues to consider in planning a mobile site
• Covers the tools needed for mobile design, in particular XHTML and CSS
• Shows you how to plan for multimedia, e-commerce, and marketing your site, including adding audio, video, and social networking
• Provides real-world examples and tips to help you avoid common pitfalls

If you're contemplating Web design in a mobile world, start first with this practical guide.

How many times have you visited a Web site and thought that you could do a better job if only you had the knowledge and skills? Or perhaps you have a great idea for a Web site but don’t know how to get started? What was once exclusively a task for professionals, Web designing, has become more accessible to amateurs, thanks to loads of handy software. With Web Design For Dummies, you will be able to design your own Web site like a pro.

Web design requires many programs to make a Website attractive and fun, including:

• Using Web editors like Dreamweaver
• Image editing tools like Photoshop elements
• Drawing utensils like Illustrator
• Background markup and scripting languages like HTML and CSS

This fun guide covers all of the topics that every aspiring Web designer should know. This book offers advice on:

• Designing for your audience
• Building a solid framework for easy navigation
• Creating appealing graphics that work with the site
• Choosing the proper type and colors
• Tweaking the HTML to make everything work correctly
• Applying next-step technologies including JavaScript
• Parlaying your skills into paid work

With expert guidance from Lisa Lopuck, a pioneer in interactive media design and the Senior Producer at Disney, you will be creating superb Web pages that will charm and impress all of your visitors!

Essential Skills--Made Easy!

Create professional-quality web sites in no time with help from hands-on tutorials. Fully updated to cover the latest technologies and techniques, Web Design: A Beginner's Guide, Second Edition, explains how to analyze site requirements and create a web-development proposal to plan and document your project. You'll learn how to design an attractive, easy-to-use web site, focusing on key issues such as color, layout, navigation, typography, and images. Discover how to incorporate JavaScript, cascading style sheets (CSS), HTML/XHTML, Flash, and more to take your design from mockup to code. Boosting web site traffic through search engine optimization, e-mail design, and online advertising is also covered in this fast-paced guide.

Designed for Easy Learning

• Key Skills & Concepts--Chapter-opening lists of specific skills covered in the chapter
• Ask the Expert--Q&A sections filled with bonus information and helpful tips
• Notes--Extra information related to the topic being covered
• Tips--Helpful reminders or alternate ways of doing things
• Annotated Syntax--Example code with commentary that describes the programming techniques being illustrated

Ready-to-use code at www.mhprofessional.com/computingdownload

Wendy Willard is a designer, consultant, writer, and educator who has been involved in web design for more than 13 years. She is the author of HTML: A Beginner's Guide, Fourth Edition, and other books.

"Web Design for Teens" focuses on the creation and design of Web sites. Using HTML and some basic Web design programs, the book teaches the reader how to skillfully go from a blank slate (such as in Notepad) to a professionally designed Web site. As more and more teenagers and preteens learn about Web sites early in their school years, there is clearly a market for this teen-focused book. Schools are teaching HTML and Web design as early as fifth and sixth grade. Starting with the basics, readers learn the components of a clean web site and what goes into it. Readers then continue on to HTML, Web site design and to how to purchase a domain name as well as host a Web site so others can view it on the Internet. Readers will also be able to take the lessons from the book and build upon them to create even better and more complex sites. In addition, the book provides some directions on how to expand a Web site through JavaScript, Perl, or other scripting languages. Written from the perspective of a teen who, himself, has found success in the world of technology, this book appeals to the young reader in an informative, yet accessible, tone.

Web designers must wear many hats. Among books on Web design, Web Design All-in-One For Dummies is the one that helps you successfully wear all those hats without losing your head.

Full-color illustrations and five self-contained minibooks show you how to be a graphic designer, creative organizer, visual communicator, markup language technologist, and cutting-edge trendsetter, all in one. This book helps you lay the groundwork, follow design rules, test your site, register a domain name, and much more.

• Getting Started covers planning, defining your target audience, choosing the right software, and more
• Designing For the Web acquaints you with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, plus how to choose a layout and optimize graphics
• Building Web Sites gets down to nuts and bolts: putting text, images, hyperlinks, and multimedia files together, organizing content, and building navigation systems
• Web Standards & Testing teaches you how to test and validate so everyone can enjoy your site
• Publishing & Site Maintenance helps you get your site online and keep it current

Web Design All-in-One For Dummies also helps you learn how to choose a Web editor and graphics program, how to make your site accessible to the widest possible audience, and when it’s time to call in a pro like author Sue Jenkins. It’s just what you need to start and manage a great site.

There’s a real connection between craftsmanship and Web design. That’s the theme running through Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design, by bestselling author Dan Cederholm, with a chapter contributed by renowned Web designer and developer Ethan Marcotte. This book explores CSS3 that works in today’s browsers, and you’ll be convinced that now’s the time to start experimenting with it.
Whether you’re a Web designer, project manager, or a graphic designer wanting to learn more about the fluidity that’s required when designing for the Web, you’ll discover the tools to create the most flexible, reliable, and bulletproof Web designs. And you’ll finally be able to persuade your clients to adopt innovative and effective techniques that make everyone’s life easier while improving the end user’s experience. This book’s seven chapters deconstruct various aspects of a case-study Web site for the Tugboat Coffee Company, focusing on aspects that make it bulletproof and demonstrate progressive enrichment techniques over more traditional labor-intensive methods.
Subjects covered in this book include:

• building for unanticipated future use

• progressively enriching designs using CSS3 properties

• using RGBA color for transparency with an alpha channel

• modular float management

• crafting flexible frameworks

• fluid layouts using grid-based design principles

• craftsmanship details on typography, jQuery, and shifting backgrounds

There are a lot of books out there covering CSS and HTML, but this one stands out from the crowd by combining all the best aspects of reference and tutorial books — it teaches everything you need to know to design great web sites, and moves at a fast pace, eschewing unnecessary theory and obscure details. It is designed so that any level of web designer or developer will find this to be an essential guide.

It teaches the basics of CSS and HTML before quickly moving on to cover in depth all of the essential areas of web design, include forms, tables, typography, layout, browser quirks and more. It also includes complete case studies to inspire readers, and reference sections, so readers can quickly look up syntactical details.

It is also bang up to date, covering support of the newest standards in all the latest browsers.