Deep Sites: Intelligent Innovation in Contemporary Web Design

The proliferation of books on web design has buried the many critical issues that have emerged over the last two or three years.

New technologies and applications, along with ever-more-sophisticated compression techniques and broadband services, have accelerated the growth of the web and the number of its users―and given rise to a number of crucial issues. Now, for the first time, comes an intelligent book on the defining principles of cutting-edge web design. The book is organized by critical areas of web design:

Interface: It took about a century for the young art of book printing to realize that it needed page numbers to facilitate easy navigation through the book. Roughly a decade after the large-scale development of the web, designers and developers are still searching for the best way to navigate cyberspace.

Typography: Once static forms now have to be re-invented from scratch when applied to on-screen media to accommodate time and motion.

Animation: With the advent of streaming media, growing bandwidth and leaner data, the web will become a serious competitor to television. The design implications are manifold and center on the problem of combining 'print' and 'TV' environments into new formats

Community: Virtually everyone can be the editor of their own web 'zine. The explosive growth of personal and community homepages has spawned entirely new approaches―crude, candid, innocent and outrageously diverse―that have begun to exert their influence on professional design

Authoring: Dozens of editorial and design software tools make it possible for complete dilettantes to create websites of considerable complexity and quality.

Deep Sites will lead a large audience directly to the key practitioners and to the underlying principles that make their work so significant. Illustrated in color throughout

Max Bruinsma is a leading international critic of graphic design. Former editor of Eye magazine (London), he is now based in Amsterdam.