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Zen of CSS Design, The: Visual Enlightenment for the Web
- By Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag
- Published Feb 17, 2005 by Peachpit Press. Part of the Voices That Matter series.
- Copyright 2005
- Dimensions: 8-1/2 X 9-1/4
- Pages: 304
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-321-30347-4
- ISBN-13: 978-0-321-30347-9
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Product Author Bios
Dave Shea is the creator and cultivator of the highly influential CSS Zen Garden Web site (www.csszengarden.com). As well as being a member of the Web Standards Project, Dave is the owner and director of Bright Creative, and he writes about all things Web for his daily weblog, mezzoblue.com. With over 6 years of experience working on the Web, Dave is a leader of the new generation of Web designers that believe in responsible Web design.
An author, instructor, and Web designer, Molly E. Holzschlag has written over 27 books related to Web design and development. She's been coined "one of the greatest digerati" and deemed one of the Top 25 Most Influential Women on the Web. There is little doubt that in the world of Web design and development, Molly is one of the most fun and vibrant Web characters around. As a steering committee member for the Web Standards Project (WaSP), Molly works along with a group of other dedicated Web developers and designers to promote W3C recommendations. For more about Molly, check out www.molly.com.
Proving once and for all that standards-compliant design does not equal dull design, this inspiring tome uses examples from the landmark CSS Zen Garden site as the foundation for discussions on how to create beautiful, progressive CSS-based Web sites. By using the Zen Garden sites as examples of how CSS design techniques and approaches can be applied to specific Web challenges, authors Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag provide an eye-opening look at the range of design methods made possible by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). By the time you've finished perusing the volume, you'll have a new understanding of the graphically rich, fully accessible sites that CSS design facilitates. In sections on design, layout, imagery, typography, effects, and themes, Dave and Molly take you through every phase of the design process--from striking a sensible balance between text and graphics to creating eye-popping special effects (no scripting required).
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Interview(s)
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167 of 175 people found the following review helpful
A most unique and inspirational book..., By
This review is from: The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Paperback)
If you've already picked up the basics of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and want to see what is *really* possible, check out The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag (New Riders). This is a unique book...Chapter List: View Source; Design; Layout; Imagery; Typography; Special Effects; Reconstruction; Closing Thoughts; Index This book covers the topic of CSS in an unusual fashion. Dave Shea came up with the idea for a web site called csszengarden.com. The basic premise is to have a standard HTML file, complete with class and id tags that can not be changed. The goal is to then use a CSS style sheet to apply unique styles and graphics to the page, resulting in some stunning visual displays of web design. But the basic thing to remember is that the page content doesn't change, just the CSS design file that's applied to it. Shea and Holzschlag take some of the more unique designs that have been submitted and use them to explain... Read more
55 of 56 people found the following review helpful
Not exactly what I expected, By
This review is from: The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Paperback)
This book should probably be called A Portfolio of CSS Design. It contains lots of nice pages showing examples of some lovely CSS design. However, it doesn't present enough constructive information to really help you. Tell me exactly how the page put to together rather than some obscure problem which the average CSS user is unlikely to encounter. I don't know who this book is aimed at. There's not enough in it for it to be a tutorial book and while it's nice to look at, is this any better than viewing the actual web pages on the Internet?
39 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Let's review, one more time, By
This review is from: The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Paperback)
This is important to understand: this is not a book that will teach you the fundamentals of CSS. Repeat, NOT a primer on CSS. Rather, it is a book aimed at users who want to write or improve the aesthetics of their website by incorporating CSS. For that reason, it is fairly solid. Most of the premises are fairly basic and straightforward, covering the usual elements of type, layout, images, grids, etc. It is a decent resource for ideas and perhaps some alternative ways to approach building or rebuilding your site (using CSS presumably). Advanced designers would probably want to look elsewhere for ideas, theories and techniques.If you want to understand what CSS is really about, in terms of writing it (to make your site as pretty as the examples in this book) you should turn elsewhere, like Eric A. Meyer's book on the subject. And you can easily check out the publisher's website and probably see everything you need to that is in this book. |
Praise For Zen of CSS Design, The: Visual Enlightenment for the Web
4/1/2005
Alaskan Apple Users Group
" The book demonstrates to graphic artists that you can have just as much control, or more, using CSS not tables. I wanted to read this book because as technology speeds forward, I felt that I should try to keep up in both code and beauty of graphic design. It tickled my imagination to think a bit different. I finally got the connection between CSS and beautiful web sites. CSS was no longer just a concept to control text."
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