Web Design Essentials

Amazon.com
Web Design Essentials is part of Adobe's Professional Studio Techniques series, which features wide-format books that lie flat on your desk as you work through step-by-step instructions and peruse tips on using Adobe's popular software titles. Books in this series are very well written and illustrated. They tend to stay on the front of the bookshelf for many years, long after version upgrades, often remaining invaluable.

This book concentrates on using Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 8.0 and GoLive 4.0 to create Web sites, pages, rollovers, batched icons, animations, and many other useful, creative, and up-to-date elements. These tips will not only add spark to your Web design, it will also speed up production time. The techniques are contributed by several professionals using examples from their own projects. This "many chefs" style ensures that the ideas are fresh, clever, and fairly simple, yet still yield big results.

For example, Jason Kottke of kottke.org shows a step-and-repeat trick in Photoshop for building 3-D text without any fancy plug-ins. Florian Fangohr of hotstudio.com explains how to use ImageReady to create droplets: batch-processing drag and drop actions. He also gives a short tutorial on how to create "remote" rollovers (also known as "pointer" rollovers) in GoLive.

Some techniques have uses outside the realm of Web design. For example, Noreen Santini (hotstudio.com) charts out Photoshop's blending modes, and Sandra Kelch (theispot.com) offers a demonstration on using the Magic Wand tool to select and replace colors.

The book organizes tasks into three categories of difficulty, though none should prove troubling to beginners. And some of the tips, especially the animations, aren't clear. These caveats aside, Web Design Essentials makes a handy addition to any studio library. --Angelynn Grant

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
No single tool is broad enough to handle all of today's web design tasks. Most designers are working to become comfortable with several -- a web page layout tool, at least one image creation/editing tool, a tool for creating animations, movies, and so forth. What's more, a single graphic or design process is increasingly likely to bounce between one tool and another, as the designer shapes, executes, refines, and publishes it.

To streamline the learning process, many designers choose to rely primarily on tools from a single vendor, with similar interfaces. If you've chosen to cast your lot with Adobe's web design and graphics tools -- Photoshop, LiveMotion, GoLive, ImageReady, and Illustrator -- you ought to check out the one book that brings them all together: Web Design Essentials, Second Edition.

Lead author Maria Guidice is creative director for HOT, whose clients include Agfa, Apple, and Microsoft; her work's been profiled in Communication Arts, Print, and Publish. Together with Anita Dennis, she's organized the entire site design lifecycle into modular, two-page step-by-step recipes, while at the same time creating a four-color book with powerful visual appeal.

Unlike some similar books we've seen, the step-by-step procedures don't stretch out endlessly towards the distant horizon. Most are ten steps, or fewer. They're exceptionally well written and edited. As a result, even though the chapters are organized around levels of web designers' experience, with simple procedures first, even relative novices should be able to handle more sophisticated procedures without much trouble.

You'll start with professional techniques for planning your web site with Adobe's products. Guidice, Dennis, and their guest designers show you how to plan your site with flowcharts that show a user's path through your content; how to manage your site's content; and how to automate complex tasks with Actions.

You'll also learn how to create and use Droplets (one of our favorite features: You can place a droplet on your desktop, then drag a stack of files onto it, batch processing them according to whatever actions and settings are stored in the droplet).

Next, Web Design Essentials, Second Edition offers expert guidance on preparing graphics. You'll walk through converting raster images to vector graphics, selecting and replacing colors, shifting colors to the web-safe palette -- even expanding the web-safe palette without significantly compromising it. Guidice and Dennis show how to judiciously dither parts of an image, how to create drop shadows, tile background patterns, even create the appearance of static motion.

There's a full chapter on managing type (from anti-aliasing to simulating HTML text in graphics; creating quick text effects to working with cascading style sheets). Then, it's on to making the most of tables and frames: image slicing with ImageReady; building complex image maps; creating graphical frames for text; and more. Perhaps the most useful techniques: how to make a framed site searchable, and how to design graphically effective web forms.

Web Design Essentials, Second Edition concludes with in-depth coverage of animation and rollovers -- everything from slicing images for an "animated" download, to conventional animated GIFs, to DHTML animations and animated movies. You'll learn how to use blending modes to create rollover effects; how to combine animation and rollovers; even how to design remote rollovers (you know, roll your mouse over one location, and a graphic appears somewhere else on the page).

Whether you've bought Adobe's tools one at a time or in the Adobe Web Collection bundle, they're far more than the sum of their parts. This book will show you solutions you'd never learn in a book focused on just one of them.(Bill Camarda)

--Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced products and services. He served for nearly ten years as vice president of a New Jersey-based marketing company, where he supervised a wide range of graphics and web design projects. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Part of the Adobe Essentials series, Web Design Essentials, 2nd Edition showcases the very best in professional Web design techniques in practical detail. Web designers will learn how to combine Adobe Photoshop, LiveMotion, GoLive, ImageReady, and Illustrator to create eye-catching, “sticky” Web sites and graphics, using an assortment of step-by-step tips that can help you take full advantage of all of Adobe’s tools. Laid out in a glossy, 4-color format, readers will learn how to plan and manage site content, prepare graphics, manage type, animations, rollovers, and more.

SYNOPSIS

This cookbook of graphics techniques includes step-by-step instructions for getting the best results from Adobe Web applications including Photoshop 5.5, GoLive 4.0, Illustrator 8, Acrobat, and ImageStyler.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews

Professional designers offer tips for using Adobe softwarePhotoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, and LiveMotionto create Web sites. It's not a guide to design or a software tutorial; rather, it explains how, why, and when to use specific techniques for creating graphics, managing type, working with HTML, creating animations and rollovers, and automating site management. Brief step-by-step instructions are accompanied by screen shots and illustrations. A reference section provides information on color palettes, blending modes, channels, and style sheets. Wide format: 12x9. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Internet Book Watch

Comprised of web design techniques and advice from seasoned experts, Web Design Essentials: Professional Studio Techniques covers all aspects of Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Adobe ImageReady 2.0, Adobe Illustrator 8.0, Adobe GoLive 4.0, Adobe Streamline 4.0, and Adobe AfterEffects 4.1 for building effective websites. Readers will learn how to slice images for complex HTML tables, crate animated GIFs and DHTML animations, master Cascading Style Sheets, design JavaScript rollover effects, optimize graphics and images for the Web, plan and manage site structure and content, automate routine production tasks, control color in GIF graphics, enhance HTML tables and frames, and prepare navigational graphics and interfaces. Web Design Essentials is ideal for the novice web designer and has much to offer even the experienced user dealing with workflow, layout, and post-production issues at all levels on either Macintosh or Windows systems.

Internet Bookwatch

Maria Giudice and Anita Dennis' Professional Studio Techniques Web Design Essentials provides expert advice on advanced web design features; from slicing images for HTML tables to using JavaScript rollover and GIF graphics formats. All the basics are here for advanced web functions.

ACCREDITATION