two web design books : [©james mcnally, 2001]

published at Digital Web, November 2001 (web site)

Web Design Essentials, Second Edition, by Maria Giudice and Anita Dennis. Adobe Press, 127pp. US$40.00, Cdn$61.50.

Robin Williams Web Design Workshop, by Robin Williams, John Tollett, and David Rohr. Peachpit Press, 372pp. US$39.95, Cdn$59.95.

These two recent releases from Peachpit Press (Adobe Press books are published by Peachpit) are aimed at web designers of varying levels of experience. They are primarily visual books without a lot of code examples, and seem focussed, for the most part, on the issues involved in preparing graphics for use on a web page. Both books discuss graphical issues such as the web-safe palette, gamma differences between the Macintosh and PC platforms, and creating animations.

Web Design Essentials (hereafter referred to as "Essentials") is more strictly a guide to using Adobe software products to accomplish these tasks and so has more detailed step by step instructions. This is useful, provided the reader has all these complex and expensive software packages. Although Essentials discusses general issues, it would be difficult to use the book without owning at least Adobe Photoshop. Robin Williams Web Design Workshop (hereafter called "Workshop") is a more comprehensive look at the process of web design and authoring. It tries to take a more platform and tool-agnostic approach, though both books tend to focus on WYSIWYG web tools like Dreamweaver and GoLive, which in the long run tend to keep their users in the dark about the details of HTML.

Essentials takes a task-oriented approach, using each two (or sometimes four) page spread to break a particular task into steps. Each is well laid out, with plenty of screenshots and even keyboard shortcuts for the more advanced user. The book contains more than 50 of these tasks, and although one wouldn't need all of them, there is certainly enough here to make any web designer's life easier. The only disadvantage is that some of the tasks require a specific Adobe software package (ie. Adobe LiveMotion, Illustrator, GoLive, Photoshop, Acrobat) and the majority of readers will not own all of these programs. Also, at just over 120 pages, the book will seem a bit pricey to those who don't immediately find tasks with which they need help.

Workshop immediately feels like a better value. At three times the length, for about the same price, there is simply more information here. However, Williams and Tollett have previously published two editions of The Non-Designer's Web Book (the most recent edition in 2000), and some of the content is repeated between the two books. Like her other title, Robin Williams Design Workshop (Peachpit Press, 2001), this book is most useful as a showcase of real world design, with explanations of the decisions behind the design choices and of the process itself. There is good information here on the design workflow and working with clients, though in an effort to keep the book focussed on as many people as possible, the design examples have a certain simplicity and even a sameness about them. I would have liked to see a few different designers' contributions just to give the reader some idea of the variety of design techniques that are used to create effective web sites.

In summary, I'd recommend Robin Williams Web Design Workshop for just about anyone, but especially for the user who has mastered the basics of web design and is looking for easy to understand information about the more advanced aspects of creating graphics for their web pages. For the more advanced designer with a specific problem (or two) to solve, Web Design Essentials fits the bill nicely. Both books seem aimed at "designers" instead of "programmers" with the drawback that neither discusses web design at the level of code. Despite this weakness, both books are written and laid out in a friendly and approachable style and contain a wealth of useful information.

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