Overview
Designing for the Web: Getting Started in a New Medium gives you the basics you'll need to make the transition to Web page design. It is geared toward designers who need to hit the ground running.
This book won't teach you how to design. Instead, its aim is to give you the information you need to adapt your skills to the Web. It's a quick-start guide to introduce you to the Web and the unique considerations of Web design. Although the book is aimed at designers, the techniques in this book are useful to anyone who wants to put graphics online.
In this book you'll find:
- A brief introduction to the Web
- A step-by-step tutorial on putting together a Web page from scratch
- Pointers on creating graphics that are optimized for the Web
- Recommendations for reducing download times of images
- Instructions for transparency and interlacing to Web graphics
- A discussion of the impact of different browsers and platforms on your design
- A listing and demonstration of the HTML tags used for design
- Tips on using background images and colors in Web pages
- Guidelines on navigational and orientation aids, and on conceptualizing your Web site as a whole
Designing for the Web is written by designers who were pioneers on the Web. Accumulating the basic facts and special tricks for effective Web design was a slow, gradual process. This is the book they wish they had when they were just starting out: one that would quickly teach them the lay of the land, so they could concentrate on what they enjoyed doing most — designing!
Editorials
Ray Duncan
Getting Started in a New Medium
The typical O'Reilly book has a clean but spare -- even spartan -- style, well-suited to its technically sophisticated content. Designing for the Web, heavily illustrated in full color, with an unconventional form factor, breaks the O'Reilly mold in a number of ways. In fact, the book makes me think of a flower child that wandered into a convention of Hewlett-Packard sales engineers -- it is warm, amiable, and relaxed, but occasionally expresses a certain amount of surprise at its surroundings.
The principal author, Jennifer Niederst, is a former book designer for O'Reilly with a great deal of hard-won experience in the Web trenches. She helped create O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator, an early commercial Web site later sold to America On-Line, and subsequently designed the highly-regarded Web Review published by Songline Studios. Niederst covers all the bases, but has an altogether different perspective on the Web than the average nebbish programmer-author.
The book starts out with a quick overview of basic HTML tags and the general structure of an HTML document. Discussions of the creation of Web graphics follow, including many useful tips and techniques related to resolution, transparency, palette optimization, and image maps. The step-by-step examples rely on the Macintosh version of Adobe Photoshop. The final section covers the most commonly used HTML tags in more detail, organized by functional group.
Designing for the Web is an eminently practical introductory book of just the right length and orientation for the would-be Webmeister. With the investment of only a pleasant hour or two, the novice will have acquired the critical mass of information that is needed to get off the ground, but will also be alerted to many key issues from the outset: graphics performance, browser dependencies, and cross-platform gamma differences, among others. The hefty 1000-page tomes of Webmaster arcana can be browsed later, as needed.-- Dr. Dobb's Electronic Review of Computer Books