Web Site Graphics: Navigation

The Web Site Graphics series is a rich collection of successful web site design work selected by designers for designers. Each book in the series focuses on an important facet of graphic design online. Created for both professional and graphic designers new to the web, the Web Site Graphics series offers a complete and affordable resource of web site design inspiration.

Web Site Graphics: Navigation—Learn what makes an interactive site compelling—whether simple buttons and sliders or animated gifs and fly-throughs. This volume features inspiring approaches to navigation created by Web-design trendsetters. From the streamlined and classic to the avant-garde, striking examples of many styles of layout are collected in this unique volume.

Part of a series of small but excellent showcase books, Web Site Graphics: Navigation features Web sites that excel at moving users through their pages. These sites show alternatives to the now commonplace left-side vertical navigation bar. They include eye-catching horizontal bars, arrays of rollovers, color-coded systems, drop-down menus, scrolling Shockwave bars, simple yet elegant text navigators, and many other methods.

Among the standouts is Kjetil Vatne Graphics + Design, with its vibrantly colored pages and circular site tree. The site has changed since the book was researched (it is now called KVAD V5 [www.kvad.com]) and is even more impressive in its navigational design. Also impressive is the "anti-navigational" site Funny Garbage (www.funnygarbage.com), where random clicking is the foundation of navigational strategy. Frogdesign (www.frogdesign.com) displays a scrolling timeline of the company's history across the bottom of each page. The viewer uses a small slider to control forward and backward motion and a popup menu for a site map.

There are a lot of good ideas in Navigation; the authors have chosen carefully, and they explain which aspects caused each site to be chosen. "Navigation is not just a set of links: it is a way of thinking about and structuring a site so that information, illustrations, or documents always feel like they are within reach, not buried far away or impossible to find."

This is not a how-to book. Rather, it's more like a gallery of Web sites that are so well-designed as to make you sit down and take notice. --Angelynn Grant

Topics covered: screen captures of many Web sites showing innovative uses of navigational techniques in Web design, with captions explaining why each site was chosen and listing artistic credits; an index with the names and addresses of all design firms involved.