Designing for the Web | O'Reilly Media

Designing for the Web Getting Started in a New Medium

By Jennifer Niederst Robbins
With Edie�Freedman
First Edition
Pages: 180
ISBN 10: 1-56592-165-8 | ISBN 13: 9781565921658

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Book description

Designing for the Web gives you the basics you need to hit the ground running. Although geared toward designers, it covers information and techniques useful to anyone who wants to put graphics online. It explains how to work with HTML documents from a designer's point of view, outlines special problems with presenting information online, and walks through incorporating images into Web pages, with emphasis on resolution and improving efficiency.
Full Description

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!

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Media reviews "This delightful little book is the perfect introduction to designing for the Web for the professional designer. From overviews of browsers and servers and Web pages in 'how the Web works,' through basic HTML, browser-safe palettes, hypertext links, Web-specific design techniques and considerations, graphic file formats, image resolution, type on the Web, using Photoshop, Freehand, and Illustrator to create Web graphics, bit-depth and file size, transparency, interlacing, imagemaps, Web tricks, and site planning, this book gives clear, practical information in short, sweet, easy-to-read tutorials. Even the layout is mostly a pleasure.

"Get this book if you're curious about designing for the Web, and want a gentle introduction to help you hit the ground running. Even long-time Web designers can enjoy this less-is-more overview." --Bliss Sloan, Book Review, AOL Desktop & Web Publishing Forum

"This book is an excellent teaching tool. For example, it offers numerous pages of color photographs where the author shows the novice the visual results of saving the same graphic file with different bit combinations of color ranging from [eight] bit down to one bit and then including JPEG compression with the total size of each file listed. The reader can very quickly see that photographs and other graphics can maintain quite high levels of quality with files that are comparatively small and therefore fast to deliver. This slim but content heavy volume concludes with a set of compact but useful tutorials, ranging from setting page background colors to the addition of forms. Sources of useful software and various Web add-ons are also pointed out.

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