Design books

As the Web evolves to incorporate new standards and the latest browsers offer new possibilities for creative design, the art of creating Web sites is also changing. Few Web designers are experiences programmers, and as a result, working with semantic markup and CSS can create roadblocks to achieving truly beautiful designs using all the resources available. Add to this the pressures of presenting exceptional design to clients and employers, without compromising efficient workflow, and the challenge deepens for those working in a fast-paced environment. As someone who understands these complexities firsthand, author and designer Andy Clarke offers visual designers a progressive approach to creating artistic, usable, and accessible sites using transcendent CSS.

In this groundbreaking book, you’ll discover how to implement highly original designs through visual demonstrations of the creative possibilities using markup and CSS. You’ll learn to use a new design workflow, build prototypes that work well for designers and all team members, use grids effectively, visualize markup, and discover every phase of the transcendent design process, from working with the latest browsers to incorporating CSS3 to collaborating with team members effectively.

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design:

Uses a visual approach to help you learn coding techniques

Includes numerous examples of world-class Web sites, photography, and other inspirations that give designers ideas for visualizing their code

The grid has long been an invaluable tool for creating order out of chaos for designers of all kinds—from city planners to architects to typesetters and graphic artists. In recent years, web designers, too, have come to discover the remarkable power that grid-based design can afford in creating intuitive, immersive, and beautiful user experiences.
Ordering Disorder delivers a definitive take on grids and the Web. It provides both the big ideas and the brass-tacks techniques of grid-based design. Readers are sure to come away with a keen understanding of the power of grids, as well as the design tools needed to implement them for the World Wide Web.
Khoi Vinh is internationally recognized for bringing the tried-and-true principles of the typographic grid to the World Wide Web. He is the former Design Director for NYTimes.com, where he consolidated his reputation for superior user experience design. He writes and lectures widely on design, technology, and culture, and has published the popular blog Subtraction.com for over a decade.
More information at grids.subtraction.com

The mechanics of Web design made easy for visual learners

An effective Web site combines good graphic design principles with a functional user interface. This colorful, step-by-step guide shows visual learners how to plan, develop, and publish a site, all with easy-to-follow lessons. Each task is illustrated with screen shots accompanied by numbered steps. You’ll learn all the tools and techniques for creating great-looking Web sites that users will love.

• Good Web design incorporates basic graphic design principles as well as the techniques required to make a site easy to navigate and user-friendly
• Those who learn best when someone shows them how will quickly get up to speed with the full-color screen shots and step-by-step illustrations in this visual guide
• Covers planning a site, creating eye-popping content with popular Adobe tools, building in functionality with HTML and CSS, testing the site, taking it live, and keeping it up to date
• Companion Web site features code and design examples for experimentation

If you find learning easier when someone shows you how to do something, you’ll quickly learn to build Web sites with Teach Yourself VISUALLY Web Design.

Trends in web design have been moving away from complex and technology-driven design and towards simpler aesthetics. Still, advances in technology, such as transparent images, better support for fonts and more flexible style sheets, have given designers more freedom in the use of images and typography. The 1000+ web sites featured in this ninth edition of the Web Design Index illustrate the latest trends in web design from around the world.

Exploring Web Design provides a valuable introduction to the design fundamentals at work in all well-designed Web sites. The result of an award-winning Web designer's mission to teach these building blocks in clear, direct, and non-technical language, this book delivers a solid design foundation in layout, typography, color, and usability. While recognizing the importance of Macromedia Flash ™ and JavaScript, the author stresses that success comes from understanding design principles and how they apply to the world of the Web. Not just another book full of tips and tricks for creating hip Internet graphics, Exploring Web Design teaches the design theory that is essential to knowing how and why to use those cool Web effects.

In Learning Web Design, author Jennifer Niederst shares the knowledge she's gained from years of web design experience, both as a designer and a teacher. This book starts from the beginning-- defining the Internet, the Web, browsers, and URLs -- so you don't need to have any previous knowledge about how the Web works. After reading this book, you'll have a solid foundation in HTML, graphics, and design principles that you can immediately put to use in creating effective web pages.
In the second edition, Jennifer has updated the book to cover style sheets and reflect current web standards. She has also added exercises that help you to learn various techniques and short quizzes that make sure you're up to speed with key concepts. The companion CD-ROM contains material for all the exercises in the book, as well as trial versions of Fireworks® MX, and HomeSite™ 5; Adobe ® Photoshop® 7, ImageReady® 7, and BBEdit 7.
Learning Web Design, 2nd Edition:

• Covers the nuts and bolts of basic HTML and style sheets, with detailed examples of formatting text, adding graphic elements, making links, creating tables and frames, and using color on the Web.
• Explains whether to use GIFs or JPEGs for different types of images, and includes important tips on optimizing graphics for web delivery.
• Provides dozens of web design do and don'ts, to help you make good web design decisions and avoid common beginner traps.
• Contains hands-on exercises throughout the book that allow you to try out new techniques along the way.

Unlike other beginner books, Learning Web Design leaves no holes in your education. It gives you everything you need to create basic web sites and will prepare you for more advanced web work. If you are interested in web design, this book is the place to start. After finishing it, you'll be ready for the author's bestselling companion reference, Web Design in a Nutshell.
Fireworks and HomeSite are trademarks or registered trademarks of Macromedia, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Adobe, ImageReady, and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.

"Create Killer Websites Using the Power of Modern JavaScript"

DHTML Utopia is an easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorial that will show you how to make your websites more slick, dynamic, and usable.

Add dynamic interactivity to your website with DHTML by combining the power of JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets(CSS), and the Document Object Model (DOM) to achieve bulletproof, accessible, standards-compliant, and aesthetically pleasing results that work on all browsers.

• Build fancy DHTML effects that can be instantly reused in any project
• Learn to code accessible JavaScript that won't trouble older browsers
• Make search engine friendly, multi-level, drop-down navigation menus
• Create usable forms that auto-complete, just like "Google Suggest"
• Build dynamic web applications using remote scripting techniques/Ajax

User experience design teams often suffer from a decentralized, blank canvas approach to creating and documenting a design solution for each new project. As teams repeatedly reinvent screen designs, inconsistency results, and IT teams scramble to pick up the pieces. Pattern libraries only go so far, suggesting general solutions to common problems instead of offering concrete, specific design treatments. At times, documented solutions turn into a costly mess of unclear expectations, unrealistic goals, and abandoned work.
Enter components, each of which represents a chunk of a Web page. Designers can produce wireframes, mockups, or markup far more efficiently reusing components based on an established design system. Rather than limit innovation, components enable designers to render solved design frameworks quickly and to focus on the problem at hand, drastically improving the quality and rate of production. In addition, teams develop a deeper baseline for collaboration, a platform for governance, and a structure for useful and predictable documentation.
This book defines the role of components and why they matter, maps out how to organize and build a component library, discusses how to use components in practice, and teaches a process for documenting and maintaining components.

With Pro iOS Web Design and Development, you’ll design websites and develop web applications for iPhone and iPad using web standards deployed with Apple's Safari browser.

Utilizing the very latest web and mobile technologies and releases, this book shows every web professional how to use HTML5 to do the heavy lifting, CSS3 to create the look and feel, and JavaScript to add program logic to their mobile sites and Web applications.

In addition, you’ll learn how to address the specific features made available through Apple's iOS, especially with regard to designing Web-based touch-screen interfaces.

Pro iOS Web Design and Development will help you deliver rich mobile user experiences without compromise by optimizing your sites for WebKit and Safari, the de facto standard for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

• Design an optimal website for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
• Use web standards to develop professional sites on Apple’s key platforms and see why this is important for Web developers and designers.
• Take advantage of Apple’s multi-touch screen technology in your Web apps, maximizing user experience and accessibility.
• Carry out usability testing for mobile websites and Web apps.
• Define an agile project flow optimized for mobile development.
• Use a cognitive approach to UI design using the laws of perception, color psychology theory, and the concepts behind positive and negative space.

Web designers who are interested in mobile Web design and/or mobile Web development; desktop developers who are interested in mobile Web application development; or any Web professional who wants to learn how to design and develop for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

1. Think Touch Mobile
2. Design Touch Mobile
3. Develop Touch Mobile
4. User Interface Design for Mobile Touch Devices
5. iPhone UI Design: Think Simple
6. iPad UI Design: Think Inverted
7. Web Standards for WebKit—Maximizing MobileSafari
8. Creating WebApps—Mobile Application Development
9. Working in Apple's Native Mobile Environments
10. Optimizing WebApps
11. Testing iPhone and iPad WebApps
12. Maximizing the Market for WebApps
13. Looking Beyond the Mobile Web to Ubiquitous Computing

This book provides an understanding of the principles of artistic design as they relate to the web, followed by the application of those design principles using Adobe® Dreamweaver and resulting in the ability to create effective websites. Tailored to users of either CS3, CS4, or the latest version of Dreamweaver, CS5, each chapter is comprised of three sections: new concepts; "reinforcing your knowledge" through projects and exercises; and a "build your own website" section designed to offer the reader the opportunity to build their own website using the concepts from each chapter. By the end of the book, the reader will have their very own website! The book starts with an introduction to the principles of design unique to the web, and then progresses to the incorporation of those principles into Adobe Dreamweaver for aesthetically pleasing web design. In fact, several chapters of this four-color, heavily illustrated text are devoted to web design from an artist's perspective. The author discusses understanding the psychological influence of colors, web typography and the voice of type, the principles of design as they relate to the web, and how to maximize the potential of the graphic programs the readers are already familiar with to create effective graphics, creative navigation, and more. This text brings the reader through the design stage from initial concept to graphic preparation, followed by the importing of graphics or whole pages into Dreamweaver for building the site and uploading it to the Internet. Although no programming knowledge is required, a chapter on HTML and other web programming fundamentals is included. A CD-ROM with images, sample web pages, and more accompanies the book. An instructor's resource kit is available upon adoption as a text.