Robin Williams Web Design Workshop [Paperback]

Although Dreamweaver, GoLive, Photoshop, and other applications are mentioned (Flash even gets its own chapter), the book covers the gamut of Web design and technology issues rather than focusing on an individual application.

Each chapter is divided into sections, often no more than a couple of pages long. The chapter on Backgrounds, the area of a Web page that seems to attract the worst design crimes, shows you how to avoid "the heartbreak of bad background design" in no less than eight sections.

In many books this subject would be lucky to get eight paragraphs, Robin Williams Web Design Workshop uses a clear two-column layout and plenty of real-life example screenshots to get the message across. Some pages consist only of captioned screenshots providing a great source of visual ideas.

There's a good balance between purely design-related issues and the technical stuff. Subjects like search engines, embedded fonts, DHTML and forms are given a thorough overview highlighting the main issues, and links to sources of more in-depth information are often to be found at the end of the chapter.

If see yourself more as a designer than a programmer, but want a working knowledge of current Web technologies from a book that you can read away from your computer, this is it. --Ken McMahon

Robin Williams has taught millions what makes for good design and why, never forgetting that most of us don't speak jargon--and she does it all with a disarming sense of humor. Now Robin, with coauthors John Tollett and Dave Rohr, translates the principles of creative, effective design to the Web in Robin Williams Web Design Workshop.

Learn from these pros everything you need to know about Web design, including the ways that color, fonts, clip art, photographs, and layout can work together to create the visual impression you want. Robin doesn't just tell you about good Web design, she shows you, walking you through every step of the design process, from site planning and layout to navigation design and functionality--the book is illustrated with hundreds of full-color examples. Like Robin herself, Robin Williams Web Design Workshop strikes the perfect teaching balance, combining theory and real-world experience, all wrapped up in a colorful, engaging package.