Web Design Studio Secrets

Have you ever visited a spectacular Web site and asked yourself, "How did they do that?" Well, stop wondering and start learning with Web Design Studio Secrets™. Authors and Photoshop masters Deke McClelland and Katrin Eismann, along with fourteen leading Web designers, share with you the insider tricks they use to create cutting-edge sites. This essential guide to building better Web pages covers important topics such as working with type and color, site management, implementing JavaScript, DHTML, VRML, and Flash on your pages, and much more.

The CD-ROM that accompanies Web Design Studio Secrets features demos of Photo Animator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and free Photoshop plug-in trials. You also get plenty of sample artwork as well as interviews with today's leading digital artists.

If you could call up some Web designers on the phone and pick their brains, the resulting bits of wisdom from those conversations might be a lot like this book. Web Design Studio Secrets profiles 15 designers, with brief rundowns of their careers and their insights on designing for the Web. Less a how-to and more like a collection of conversations, this book nevertheless includes bits of code, down-and-dirty instructions for applications such as Photoshop and Flash, and plenty of specific tips and color screen shots. A companion CD-ROM includes phone interviews with the designers, in QuickTime format.

Designer Jeffery Zeldman's chapter on font usage and CSS is excellent. It offers advice and spotlights some great Web sites on these subjects--like The Little Shop of CSS Horrors (www.haughey.com/csshorrors). Neil Robertson explains the JavaScript behind rollovers and Lisa Lopuck does a nice job explaining tweening GIF animations. Lopuck's lesson in Flash animation, however, is too cursory a tutorial for beginners yet too elementary for those intermediate users looking for something more. Paul Ingram's discussion of Flash is more helpful, although it's not so detailed that beginners won't still need their manuals.

While coverage of HTML in the book is fairly basic, the subject of DHTML fares better. Thomas Noller's Defy the Rules (www.defytherules.com) Web site uses a constant parade of layers to describe Adobe software. However, Noller's chapter only allows a peek over the designer's shoulder; readers don't really learn how to hand-code DHTML or incorporate it into pages created with Web-layout applications.

Some parts of the book seem dated in this second edition. A number of chapters teach formerly complicated processes for tasks that are now easy--optimizing GIFs, for example. Also, at least one interviewee on the CD-ROM says HTML editors aren't useful, citing PageMill as an example. This conversation clearly precedes the advent of the Dreamweaver and GoLive editors. These parts of the book and CD-ROM should have been replaced in the new edition by hints on how to use these major Web design applications more effectively. --Angelynn Grant

Topics covered: Interviews and biographies of 15 Web designers (including tips on HTML, DHTML, and GIF and Flash animation), storyboarding and planning a site, managing Web sites, working with databases, choosing navigation strategies, and publicizing a site. The CD-ROM includes demo software for Extensis and Macromedia, freeware and shareware, QuickTime interviews with designers, links to helpful Web sites, and project files referenced in the text.