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Web Design Garage
This is not a primer, tutorial, or concept-bound book. It is meant to provide practical guidance and solutions to the most common Web design issues dealt with by Web designers. Author Marc Campbell, offers a set of 86 topics about Web design problems and solutions. The format for nearly all of the 86 topics is to highlight a design challenge, then offer solutions using pictures, examples, and code snippets. Although a good and quick read from beginning to end, the book can be read piecemeal for information and guidance on a specific issue. One can pick and choose topics depending on interest or need.
There are no traditional chapters, only a set of design topics of relatively short length organized into 8 general categories. Those categories include design and usability topics, layout, images, text, links, forms, and two others -- one of miscellaneous items, the other an explanation of basic Web-design material. There is also an index and a short glossary of HTML, CSS, Web, and graphics-related terms.
The fundamental theme of the book is that design and usability are, or should be, the same thing. Usability is paramount, of course, but the author's approach to Web design emphasizes creating a "sense of place": good design unites pages so that they look like they belong together.
This is not an earth-shattering idea, but like most of all of the design treatments, the goal is to design pages which make it easy for visitors to use the site. Many good design virtues are virtually invisible to the casual user. There is a confluence of design and usability; it's only when a design element doesn't work well that it comes to the attention of the user, and that's something to avoid. The author shows by example how design and usability are intertwined.
There are a handful of themes which guide the book. Admirably, the author emphasizes for every design element a concern for accessibility. Many of the design guides refer to accessibility by screen-readers and non-graphic browsers. A second major concern is for compliance with contemporary Web design standards as those promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium. Consequently, there is much emphasis on the separation of page structure from content, where CSS is used for structure and HTML is used for content. A contrast of HTML and CSS formatting is highlighted in many of the chapters.
There is a large handful of sections which express HTML and CSS formatting differences on page layout, text and image positioning, and other Web design elements. There is clear discussion on how to work with Javascript and stylesheets. The emphasis is on "forward-looking" coding, i.e., clean, standards-compliant, and accessibility conscious. Campbell offers an experienced designer's insights on choices to be made in design components. There is much value for both inexperienced and seasoned designers.
Each topic is richly expressed with clear and straightforward text, illustrations, screenshots, and sidebars on a variety of related matters. There are sidebars throughout titled "FAQs" and "Geekspeak," explaining concepts or terminology for the less-knowledgeable reader. Then there are those called "Tips" which usually offer an insight to practical problems, especially dealing with browser-compatibility issues. There are many useful tables and charts indexing specific tag attributes, with examples. In addition, and most useful, are the "Toolkits" which are sample code snippets. It would have been nice to have the code snippets available for downloading from the publisher's Web site.
This is a dense volume containing all sorts of information useful for the "garage" web designer. For some reason, the depth and weight of the content is reflected in the book itself, which is remarkably heavy, weighing in at a well-produced 29 ounces.
There are many books available on basic Web design, but this one is unusually clear and well-expressed. This is the type of book one keeps handy in the bookshelf next to the computer to access for quick solutions to everyday Web design problems.
You can purchase Web Design Garage from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I don't know about everyone else, but at least this is a book that sounds pretty good without costing 25+ dollars. It seems you can't find a single technical book thats also affordable, so I'd think about pick this one up if only for that.
the toothpaste is frozen
Sure, that's another extreme. But personally, 'hip-looking, style-lade' usually implies some jerk using lots of very fancy colors to totally obfiscuate any usefull content the site has, including taste.
Style matters a lot, but I find it stylish to have a website with a clean look, not all kinds of fancy (read 'hip') colors and stuff. The same reason I like the look of for example XFCE over Windows XP. I know it's comparing apples to pears but XFCE generally looks clean and quite frankly attractive though be it grey, on the other hand Windows XP tends to just look overly 'hip' messy and ugly.
Making a 'hip' site that looks good is relatively easy, building an attractive site is a big challenge. There are ways to make a grey concrete house look really attractive.
But ofcaurse, this is just my humble opinion.
I've currently got the 'Actionscript 2 Garage' book on my safari bookshelf, and it seems to suffer from the same lack of focus. Its tone of voice is intended to suggest matter-of-factness (is that a word?) but in fact the book has lots of gaps and covers topics very unevenly. There is no information there that isn't available in other books, only the style is (slightly) different. It does indeed seem to aim for the 'guys working in web design who think O'reilly books are boring' demographic.