A Web Designer's Recommended Reading List

Table of Contents

Designing Large-Scale Web Sites: A Visual Design Methodology, by Darrell Sano
Creating Killer Web Sites, by David Siegel
Universal Web Design: a comprehensive guide to creating accessible web sites, by Crystal Waters
Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML 3.2 in 14 Days, Professional Reference Edition, by Laura Lemay
<designing web graphics> How to Prepare Images and Media for the Web, by Lynda Weinman
Creating Great Web Graphics, by Laurie McCanna
Photoshop Type Magic, by David Lai & Greg Simsic

Designing Large-Scale Web Sites: A Visual Design Methodology
Darrell Sano		There will come a time for you when web site design issues are more important than trying out that cool new Java app or ActiveX object or tweaking that kikrad animated GIF. When you are ready to learn about consistent design of large, complicated web sites, this is the book you should seek out and read from cover to cover. Here are the chapter titles: 1.  Introduction 2.  Preliminary Design Preparation 3.  Designing the Organizational Framework 4.  Applying Visual Design for the Web 5.  Visual Design Workshop 6.  Reading List

Creating Killer Web Sites
Are you a trendoid wannabe? Then this is the perfect book for you, from the creative imagination of the man perhaps best known for his disdain for horizontal rules and buttons with beveled edges. His essay The Balkanization of the Web is quite influential. In spite of all this, the book manages to be cool, interesting, and instructive, although his disdain for the importance of access issues is a bit off-putting. Here are the chapter titles: 1.  Form versus Function 2.  Third-Generation Sites 3.  Preparing Images 4.  Laying out Pages 5.  Rendering Type 6.  A Page Makeover 7.  A Storefront 8.  A Hotlist 9.  A Personal Site 10.  A Gallery 11.  Creative Design Solutions 12.  A PDF Primer 13.  Beyond HTML 14.  Appendixes 15.  Index		David Siegel

Universal Web Design: a comprehensive guide to creating accessible web sites
Crystal Waters		If you feel the need to temper your maniacal zeal for bleeding-edge web esthetics with a solid grounding in web accessibility issues, then this is the book for you. If you don't feel that need, then you need to read this book for your own good, for insight into how the other 20% live. It doesn't make good business sense to ignore the 20% of your customers who, for one reason or another, have difficulty with your site design.   introduction 1.  elements of the web experience 2.  navigational rules & options 3.  graphic enhancements 4.  page sizes 5.  text transformations 6.  forms & functionality 7.  putting it on the table 8.  frames 9.  sound bytes 10.  movin' & shakin' 11.  color & contrast 12.  the importance of HTML 13.  the text-only option 14.  downloadables 15.  accessibility review & resources 16.  Web TV 17.  assistive technology & legislation i  connections

Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML 3.2 in 14 Days, Professional Reference Edition
This is not just a paint-by-numbers book to learn HTML. In addition to giving the reader a thorough grounding in HTML 3.2, the book devotes about 200 pages to intermediate and advanced topics such as CGI programming, JavaScript, Java, Plug-Ins, Embedded Objects, Server-side Includes, Server Security, Access Control and Authentication. The appendixes provide scores of URLs which point to more in-depth sources of information about HTML and related topics; Language References for HTML, JavaScript, Java, ActiveX and Visual Basic, a cross-browser comparison of HTML, colors by name and hex value, and MIME types and file extensions. Finally, this book can also be used to promote fitness for sedentary web developers: it weighs almost seven pounds. Here are the chapter titles: 1.  Getting Started: The World Wide Web and You 2.  Creating Simple Web Pages 3.  Doing More with HTML 4.  Images and Backgrounds 5.  Multimedia on the Web: Animation, Sound, Video, and Other Files 6.  Designing Effective Web Pages 7.  Advanced HTML Features: Tables and Frames 8.  Going Live on the Web 9.  Creating Interactive Pages 10.  All About CGI Programming 11.  Interactive Examples 12.  JavaScript 13.  Java, Plug-ins, and Embedded Objects 14.  Doing More with Your Server 15.  Creating Professional Sites		Laura Lemay

<designing web graphics> How to Prepare Images and Media for the Web
Lynda Weinman		Here we have a book about web design from the digital artist's point of view. It's great to have nicely organized content, but without efficient and compelling graphics, you'll end up with web pages about as interesting as Acquisitions of Biology. Biotechnology. Microbiology. Here are the chapter titles: 1.  Browser Hell! 2.  Cross-Platform Hell! 3.  Making Low-Memory Graphics 4.  Color Palette Hell! 5.  Fun With Hex 6.  Making Background Patterns 7.  Making Irregularly Shaped Artwork Using Background Colors 8.  Making Irregularly Shaped Artwork Using Transparency 9.  Typography for the Web-Impaired 10.  Fun With Alignment 11.  Horizontal Rules! 12.  Bullets-o-Rama 13.  Hot Spots 14.  Table Manners 15.  Dynamic Documents 16.  Toons and Tunes 17.  Pre-Visualizing Web Pages 18.  HTML Templates for Designers

Creating Great Web Graphics
This book provides a lot of cookbook-level detailed instructions about how to design graphics for the web, and covers both Photoshop and PhotoPaint techniques. Here are the chapter titles: 1.  The Importance of Being Anti-aliased, or Why Being Fuzzy is Sharp 2.  Making Those Clever Little Colored Ball Icons 3.  Creating Icons with Beveled Edges, or Icon Designing Like a Pro 4.  Creating Seamless Pattern Tiles, or Why Seams are the Visible Panty Lines of Graphics 5.  Using Color and Bringing Down Contrast, or Not Inducing Painful Migraines in Your Readers 6.  Scanning for the Web, or Bringing Contrast Up, and Looking Good at Low Resolution 7.  Giving Graphics Interesting Edges, or There's More to Life Than Rectangles 8.  Indexing Colors and Creating Transparent Gifs, or 8 Bits is Enough 9.  Creating Floating Type, or the Shadow Knows 10.  Importing and Exporting, or Little White Lines, Serrated Edges, and other Amusements 11.  Speeding up Your Work Without Caffeine or Other Artificial Stimulants 12.  Your Favorite Cartoon Character Has a Very Good Lawyer		Laurie McCanna

Photoshop Type Magic
David Lai & Greg Simsic		This book is chock full of nifty Photoshop tricks for fancy text described in cookbook fashion. This was the book that helped me figure out how to create a "burning chrome" logo. Type variations and effects include: Assemblage, Background, Beveled, Bitmap, Blurred, Chiseled, Chrome, Credit Card, Cutout, Earthquake, Electric, Embossed, Embroidered, Flaming, Gel, Glass, Glowing, Gradient, Halftone, Liquid, Marquee, Melting, Moving, Neon, Overgrown, Painted, Patterns & Textures, Peel-Away, Perspective, Pillow, Plastic, Pop-Up, Reflected, Rough Edges, Rubber Stamped, Shadows, Shattered, Smoke, Stitched, Swirling, Three-D, Transparent, Underwater, VDT Type, and Wet Cement. Here are the chapter titles: 1.  Introduction 2.  About This Book 3.  Photoshop Basics 4.  Type Effects and Variations 5.  What's on the CD-ROM 6.  Contributor's Listing