Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground: Amazon.ca: Curt Cloninger: Books

Product Description

From Amazon.co.uk

Fresh Styles for Web Designers provides a road map of contemporary Web design from which you can plan your path to Web design success, be it via imitation, adaptation or a previously untravelled route.

Curt Cloninger has very astutely categorised current trends in Web design into 10 "underground" design styles. What differentiates these styles from the corporate blandness that wallpapers most of the commercial Web is that their genesis is born of the passion for creative communication of their creators.

So if you're tired of the horizontal nav bar and hierarchical structure that typifies sites such as Microsoft, IBM and Yahoo, and yearn for something different, but workable in a commercial environment, this is where it's at. After all, as Cloninger puts it "The Web is not a database".

As well as deconstructing examples of design styles as diverse as "Gothic Organic", "Mondrian Poster", "SuperTiny Simcity" and "1950s' Hello Kitty" Cloninger identifies the main protagonists (often a single individual, or company) in their development. In addition there are techniques and tips showing how to produce some of the more definitive aspects of each genre.

But it is not a hands-on technical manual, this book will change the way you design as well as how you view the Web. Having read it, it's impossible to look at another site without seeing where it fits (or doesn't) in Cloninger's Web view. --Ken McMahon

Product Description

In a light and friendly voice, the author introduces the reader to new ways of styling websites. With specific examples for each of ten categories, he provides a wealth of techniques for the designer who wishes to apply these approaches in their own work. The styles are broken down into ten categories, which are:

Gothic Organic School
Wireframe Icon School
Lo-fi Grunge School
Paper Bag School
Mondrian Poster School
Pixelated Punk Rock School
1950's Hello Kitty School
HTMinimaLism School
DraftingTable/Instruction Manual School

Super Tiny SimCity School Further explorations in the book help designers determine which style choices would be most appropriate when changing the look of their own sites.

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Customer Reviews

36 Reviews

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Average Customer Review

3.7 out of 5 stars (36 customer reviews)

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3.0 out of 5 stars The Box and You, Oct 7 2003

By

Jess - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground (Paperback)

I'm a developer. I program. I make the html that makes the pretty pages. I figured that this book would help me come up with some designs (for those oftentimes rare moments that I'm given a design project). I'd impress the boss and get more design projects. It didn't quite work out that way.

This book made me feel like I was in design class. A basic page and its "template" was defined, and then there were more examples that if you squint and shook your head, then you could see it fits that template. I don't think it's so black and white. If so, then they aren't that fresh, are they?

If someone is stuck for design ideas, I'm not sure this book would necessarily help since it's giving more templates. We're trying to move away from looking like everyone else, right? But some ideas for colors did come from this book, so that's good.

I enjoyed the idea of boiling down a lot of web designs into a few basic themes, templates, etc. but think that doing so might make it that much harder to break out of the box and be fresh. Or, if you're like me, once you know the rules, you can break them more easily.

I also liked the little bit of a history lesson that came with this design class. It's quite amazing what some people did with their websites back in the day, and quite amazing how not so far they have come.

Perhaps this book would be better for the true designer and not so much for the developer wanting to be a designer.

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4.0 out of 5 stars has its faults, but still rocks, Sep 27 2003

By

Sarah Jade (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground (Paperback)

I love this book. I am a student in webdesign and I had no idea what to expect when our teacher asked us to buy this book. when I started flipping through it and read a bit about the gothic organic style, I fell in love instantly.

one problem designers often run into (including myelf), is that once we come up with a good style, we tend to use and re-use it a lot. we get too comfortable with it. this book allows you to explore other techniques and break out of your shell.

sure, I wouldn't follow it word for word. some things have always annoyed me, such as cross browser/platform capabilities, window sizes, loading time, functionality and so on. this book doesn't think much of it. but this doesn't mean we can't use elements of the styles described and reflect the general essence of it in our own works.

I challenge you to at least try each style. just make a layout and navigation scheme, with no content. just to get a feel of the style. don't think about browsers, window sizes and whatnot. then place these layouts in your portfolio and see what your potential employers think of it.

it is quite challenging, but the result is amazingly refreshing. this book is a must-have for every webdesigner to break out of their rut.

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1.0 out of 5 stars Panned it, Sep 3 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground (Paperback)

You CAN judge a book by its cover artwork. Yes, the cover art is supposed to make one think of Seattle grunge, but undoubtedly it also will remind you of what that refrigerator must smell like. Nice pictures, nice layout, nice presentation, but pretty much useless if you want realistic ideas that you can use, let alone implement, in the corporate world (and BTW, the corporate world does extend to rockers like the Stones). If you really want to take a look at the book, go down to your nearest Big Box bricks-n-mortar storefront and thumb through it there.

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Most recent customer reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Fresh? Nope, a Little Stale Around the Edges.
I bought this book for the same reason many did, inspiration and to get out of the design rut I felt myself in. Read more

Published on July 15 2003 by J. Mueller

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Ideas for New Designs
Like most books of this genre, "Fresh Styles" is useful for those in the web design business and less helpful for companies and clients that are ecommerce focused. Read more

Published on Dec 18 2002 by Mark S Hall