Design books

This is our selection of contemporary award-winning video campaigns and websites. The YouTube phenomenon is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the presence and importance of video on the web today. Everywhere you surf, videos abound; with increasing bandwidth speeds come more and more possibilities for the moving image to find its place in every nook and cranny of the web, whether to sell products or entertain or both. This book brings together a number of award-winning campaigns and websites produced for top brands worldwide, demonstrating the connection between the worlds of television and internet.

The dot.com crash of 2000 was a wake-up call, and told us that the Web has far to go before achieving the acceptance predicted for it in '95. A large part of what is missing is quality; a primary component of the missing quality is usability. The Web is not nearly as easy to use as it needs to be for the average person to rely on it for everyday information, commerce, and entertainment.
In response to strong feedback from readers of GUI BLOOPERS calling for a book devoted exclusively to Web design bloopers, Jeff Johnson calls attention to the most frequently occurring and annoying design bloopers from real web sites he has worked on or researched. Not just a critique of these bloopers and their sites, this book shows how to correct or avoid the blooper and gives a detailed analysis of each design problem.
Hear Jeff Johnson's interview podcast on software and website usability at the University of Canterbury (25 min.)
* Discusses in detail 60 of the most common and critical web design mistakes, along with the solutions, challenges, and tradeoffs associated with them.
* Covers important subject areas such as: content, task-support, navigation, forms, searches, writing, link appearance, and graphic design and layout.
* Organized and formatted based on the results of its own usability test performed by web designers themselves.
* Features its own web site (www.web-bloopers.com)with new and emerging web design no-no's (because new bloopers are born every day) along with a much requested printable blooper checklist for web designers and developers to use.

Solve your traffic troubles and turn browsers into buyers

When web design expert Ben Hunt set out to quantify the difference between an ordinary web site and a great one, he expected to find the key in design simplicity. But when his team more than doubled the conversion rates for a wide range of sites, they identified simple yet powerful solutions involving design, copy, appropriate analysis, classic optimization techniques, and targeted testing. You'll find the fixes easy to implement, and they're all right here.

• Understand the essentials - your market, your proposition, and your delivery.
• Create a site that is seen by the right people, provides a compelling experience, and generates the desired action.
• Learn how to use testing to improve your site's conversion rate.
• Discover the holistic nature of web site optimization and why multiplicity matters.
• Examine dozens of simple techniques for building traffic, engaging your audience, and crafting effective calls to action.
• Combine creativity with analysis for the best possible results.

Ben Hunt is Principal Consultant for Scratchmedia Ltd. He operates webdesignfromscratch.com, which provides tutorials and advice to over 120,000 web developers each month. Ben has been designing, coding, and producing web sites for clients worldwide for more than 15 years, and is considered a leader in the web usability industry.

Forewords by Ken McCarthy, founder of the System Seminar, and Drayton Bird, Drayton Bird Associates.

The Photoshop Anthology is full-color, question-and-answer book for Web Designers who want to use Photoshop to build Websites and create better looking web graphics more effectively.
The book covers:

• Photoshop interface tricks & shortcuts
• Basic Skills: Transparencies, rounded corners, blending images, matching colors and more
• Buttons: Creating buttons and tabs in various shapes and form factors
• Backgrounds: Making various gradient and textured backgrounds
• Creating text effects, texturing and shadowing text, wrapping text around a curve, and more
• Adjusting Images: Removing blue tints, darkening and lightening images, fixing red-eye, removing dark shadows, sharpening images and more
• Manipulating Images: Creating fish-eye effects, removing imperfections, making product shots for ecommerce and more
• Creating Web Interfaces: Best practice & time saving ideas including how-tos on slicing images, creating rollovers, and more
• Advanced: Generating thumbnails, animated GIFs, bulk watermarking, sharing Photoshop Actions and more

Additionally, the book will walk you through the entire process of designing a Website in Photoshop - from using layers to keep organized to using the slice tool to create individual Website elements.

Take the industry-standard image editing powerhouse, Adobe Photoshop, and pair it with a professional-quality Web-site development tool, Adobe GoLive, and what do you get? A solution for creating innovative, imaginative, dynamic Web-site designs with exponential powers. Naturally, with all these capabilities user skill is also part of the equation. That's why Adobe Photoshop 5.5 Web Design with Adobe GoLive 4 is essential reading (and viewing). Lavishly illustrated, this gorgeous book covers the ins and outs of using both applications as well as ImageReady and ImageStyler that together form the suite of Adobe Web tools. It's all here, from the basics, such as organization and navigation techniques and Web color management, to each application's explanation of unique strengths, along with illuminating suggestions from renowned Web designers.

This work demonstrates the power of Flash. Many of the web's most eye-popping sites are created using Flash, a program which allows for total creative freedom and maximum interactivity. In its early years, Flash was used mostly for artistic and design sites, but more recently large corporations - even Citibank - have turned to Flash. This guide rounds up the very best and most innovative sites using 100 per cent Flash navigation.

Would you like an overview of the state of the art in web design in a specific field? Web Design Index by Content provides exactly that: every year, 500 new designs are selected and grouped in more than 20 categories, such as architecture, art, fashion, food, IT, music, photography, product catalogues, etc. Two pages from each site are included: an opening page and a page representative of the nature of the site. The accompanying CD-ROM allows you to view the designs on screen and to access the entire sites online. The Pepin Press/Agile Rabbit Editions web design indexes are international best-sellers, with about a quarter of a million copies sold worldwide.

For courses in Flash and Web Design. Flash is the perfect tool for creating immersive, interactive, and animated Web site design, and Flash Web Design teaches you to use it to its full potential. The book is broken into two sections: The Essentials and Case Studies. The Essentials section covers the basics of Flash production, illuminating how and why Flash works. The second section is a series of case studies and deconstructions based on projects and problems the author has faced with his clients. Each of these case studies begins by getting the reader to think about the processes and ideas behind specific designs. Flash Web Design is geared toward professional Web designers and content creators who want to make their site stand out from the typical noise of the Web. This book assumes readers have some experience with Web design and animation, but it does not assume previous work with Flash.

Master VISUALLY Web Design offers you complete visual reference covering Web design strategy, and HTML and JavaScript basics. It also equips you with Web design principles, usability, graphics, multimedia, and servers, all of which will make you a master of Web Design. Learn from real-world design examples and hundreds of screenshots all in a wonderfully illustrated two-color layout. Included with the book is a CD that includes Web site templates designed by authors, Carrie Gatlin and Michael Toot. Other included features are examples of the most popular web designing tools, Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, Fireworks, GifBuilder, CuteFTP, Fetch, HomeSite, and BBEdit and a fully searchable e-version of the book.

Few designers have explored the intersecting worlds of design and QuarkXPress as thoroughly as best-selling author Michael Baumgardt. Luckily for us, he reveals his expertise here to show designers how they can create more effective designs using QuarkXPress. The focus in this volume is on the work, and indeed you'll find plenty of examples of other designers' work in these pages: to illustrate important concepts, serve as starting points for readers' own projects, and inspire. The first section of QuarkXPress 6 for Print and Web Design focuses on desktop publishing, tackling important topics such as working with text, preparing images, and choosing colors-all from a designer's perspective. The second section shows you how you can use QuarkXPress 6's powerful new Web capabilities to design great Web sites. Along the way you'll encounter interviews with top designers, numerous practical tips, and a chapter full of design tricks: Pick an effect (drop shadow, transparency, and more), and see how it was created. Essential reading for anyone who's interested in stretching their designs--and imagination--with QuarkXPress.