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InteractiveDesign2

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interactive web site pages sample book

This is a stylish – nay, glamorous portfolio of Web page design. InteractiveDesign2 collects the best in graphic creativity from interactive environments generated over the past two years. Two hundred illustrations are featured, including color reproductions of websites, CDROMs, kiosks, and other interactive media. The companies featured include big corporations such as Coca-Cola and Mercedes Benz, National Geographic magazine, film studios, plus IBM, Sony, and Adobe. The majority are saturated with art work and heavy graphic design. But the odd thing is that they are imitating magazine advertising and the cinema screen, rather than maximising the essence of the Web page.

web page designMost of these sites look very attractive printed out on the page – but they take an age to download. The level of interactivity varies. A lot of the sites, when I visited them, have homepages announcing that you need Shockwave and a Flash plug-in just to view what’s beyond the entry screen. These are obviously not businesses who want to make things easy to attract lots of visitors or clients.

Some crashed the browser, whilst others such as Gucci and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – a rare case where horizontal scrolling seems to work – worked seamlessly, making a very stylish presentation.

Amazingly, none of the sites is credited with a URL. If you want to see the site live in action, you need to work out an address from the title bar or you could make a guess from the name.

There is no commentary or analysis. Designers are listed in an appendix, but it’s a bit of a fag matching names to their work, and there is no informative backup to any of this. You simply have the graphic images to inspect, plus some skimpy designer credits.

You’ll get lots of graphic design stimulation just from looking at the pages of the book. But for fuller value, you’ll need to work out those URLs and look at some of the stunning effects created on screen.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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B. Martin Pedersen (ed) InteractiveDesign2, New York; Graphis, nd, pp.256, ISBN: 1888001925

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Internet Marketing and Promotions

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practical guide to e-Commerce on a budget

We are living in the middle of a gold rush. It’s the worldwide exploitation of the Internet as a medium of commerce. Companies like Amazon.com and CD-Now have jumped from spare-room start-ups to multi-million dollar enterprises whilst other people have been deciding whether to upgrade their software. It’s claimed that many people are making a quick fortune. But if you lack pots of start-up investment capital, how can it be done? Internet Marketing and Promotions shows how.

Internet Marketing and PromotionsPeter Kent and Tara Calishain have produced a guide which is a follow-up to the best-selling Poor Richard’s Web Site. These are do-it-yourself on-a-budget tips from people who really have done it themselves. They kick off with a few remarks on Internet trading, pointing to the opportunities, the pitfalls, and the need for realism and hard work. Only after this do they go through the technical requirements for creating a good Web presence.

The ‘Poor Richard’ approach means that a lot of the programs they recommend are shareware, cheap, or even free. It’s all very practical, and aimed at the average reader with answers to basic questions such as ‘Where do I get this? How much does it cost? How does it work?’

After an introduction on information management, they go through the complex issues of preparing Meta-tags and submissions to search engines in great detail, then cover all the other available avenues for promotion. These include newsgroups and mailing lists, creating your own newsletter, banner ads, and email advertising. When something doesn’t work or isn’t worth the trouble or expense, they’ll tell you quite frankly. This sort of approach will appeal to the small-scale entrepreneur, who normally has to put up with business advice which involves raising $50M in stock market floatations.

There’s a very useful section on tracking your results which cuts through a lot of the mystification and encourages us to be sceptical about hyperbolic claims. Did you know that a normal page with one picture counts as two hits – one for the text, the other for the graphic? Those sites with twenty buttons on the homepage claiming 10,000 hits a week are actually getting 500 real visitors.

Unlike many of the other books on Net commerce available, theirs is based on the results of practical experience. They tell you what’s worked for them; they’re prepared to reveal their mistakes; and at every stage they will say ‘This worked for me, but here are some alternatives – and here’s a free option. It’s written in a breezy, straightforward style without ever slipping into marketing-speak or nerdish jargon. I particularly liked some of the sparky colloquialisms which seem to echo the tone of Tara Calishain’s weekly newsletter: “Don’t get blindsided by a no-brainer”

They deal with the very latest feature of Net commerce – setting up affiliate programs, in which you are paid a 5-15% commission on the purchases of customers you send to somebody else’s site. There are also a lot of free services which will track and update references to your website on Internet traffic, plus email promotion services – all listed, complete with up-to-date URLs. This is amazingly valuable information. They also spell out how to use email and mailmerge programs for effective press releases, and they end with a variety of strategies for [shock-horror] selling:

What are most new Internet marketeers reading? They’re reading mostly geek stuff…setting up Web sites, and creating web pages

What they’re not reading is how to do business on the Internet, and Kent and Calishain offer a bracing antidote to this nerdishness. Their argument is that if you want to move Widgets, you have to take a step beyond the self-indulgence of good design which has no effect.

A neighbour of mine has a web site which is so elementary it might have been designed by a teenager using a Dummies primer over the weekend. But he’s shifting £500,000 of a single product each year from an attic room in his house. He won’t win any prizes for design, but he’s grasped the principles of Net marketing. These authors would be proud of him – and as a matter of fact he’s mentioned in the book. You see – it can be done!

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Peter Kent and Tara Calishain, Poor Richard’s Internet Marketing and promotions: How to Promote Yourself, Your Business, Your Ideas Online, Colorado: Top Floor, 1999, pp.404, ISBN: 0966103270

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Learn HTML in a Weekend

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step-by-step tutorials in HTML page design

Can you really learn HTML in a weekend? Well, Steve Callihan doesn’t make any rash claims. He only sets out in this beginner’s guide to cover the basics – leaving you to fill in the finer details with later practice. The book is written with the assumption that you have a relatively free weekend. You do some preliminary reading on Friday evening with some basics about hypertext and the basics of a web site. Saturday morning is devoted to the elements of HTML tags, how to create headings, paragraphs, and breaks. It’s organised to teach you what each code does and to give you an overview of HTML.

Learn HTMLSaturday afternoon is described as optional. It deals with some of the refinements of aligning text on the page, wrapping text round images, and dealing with font sizes, colours, and faces. If you have the stamina to keep going, Saturday evening is a ‘bonus’ session covering tables. Don’t take this timetable too seriously. Anyone who can master tables in one evening should apply immediately to the Nobel Prize Foundation.

Sunday morning is devoted to frames – perhaps a section which beginners can skip, because frames are no longer even thought to be a good idea by most web design theorists. The afternoon session on forms is likely to be far more useful, and the evening ‘bonus’ session on graphics will be even more popular. I followed this in detail, since I’ve never been strong on graphics, and it proved to be a straightforward tour through making 3D buttons with Paint Shop Pro.

The book is well illustrated, and there’s a CD with the usual array of free and shareware editors and browsers, so you have all that’s required here to make a start. It truly could be done in a weekend – but why not take a little more time and get it right.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Steve Callihan, Learn HTML in a Weekend, Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1999, pp.425, ISBN 0761518002

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Learning Web Design

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Illustrated and comprehensive introduction to HTML

Jennifer Niederst is a specialist trainer in web design. Her last book, Web Design in a Nutshell, is a best-selling reference guide to the subject. Learning Web Design is her latest – a manual that covers all the basis of HTML design – from a detailed explanation of coding to the principles of good navigation and information design. So what makes this introductory guide any different to the dozens of others that are available?

Learning Web DesignWell, it’s a very handsome production, with every point well illustrated by screenshots and the appropriate code. She also shows how to achieve each major effect using three popular editors – Dreamweaver, GoLive, and FrontPage. But the main strength here is the attractive balance she has struck between tuition and visual presentation.

Her pages are surrounded by indented notes, sidebars, and pull-out boxes offering tips and special workarounds. This form of presentation makes learning lighter and easier. And she’s especially strong on explaining graphics.

I particularly like her approach of explaining details which don’t get mentioned in more official guides. For instance, if you wish to colour a link, the font colour tag must be placed inside the link, otherwise it won’t work.

She also reveals lots of tips, tricks, and workarounds for overcoming some of the frustrating limitations of HTML. I was very glad to pick up a neat trick for creating pop-up windows using a small JavaScript – which answered a current problem on quiz answers I have been designing.

The book ends with a very brief glimpse at advanced techniques using style sheets, and streaming audio and video files. This is one which will appeal to beginners and trainers. Work your way through the tutorials, and you could have a reasonable site up on the Web within a few days.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Jennifer Niederst, Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2001, pp.388 ISBN: 0596000367

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Making Digital Type Look Good

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illustrated guide to new digital typography techniques

This is a stunningly attractive book. It jumped off the shelf first time I saw it, and after reading it, I’m more in love than ever. Part One offers a history of digital typography and shows how it works. Bob Gordon discusses the features that go into the design of type – the anatomy, rendering, technology, and fine tuning. This is a quick history lesson and a valuable tutorial in basic typography. He gets through the basics quickly, then concentrates on type in the digital age – how it is rendered on screen, in print, and even how it is created, down to pixel level.

Making Digital Type Look GoodThis part also explains those terms you have seen mentioned but never quite understood – such as bitmap, antialiasing, and rasterization. He clarifies all the complexities of font technology in a very straightforward manner – showing how tracking, kerning, and hyphenation can be used to good effect.

What makes this book such a visual treat is that every double-page spread is a work of exquisite design in its own right. The pages are designed on a consistent grid; they are deeply ‘layered’ and colour-coded by subject; the colouring is elegantly restrained; and every detail is illustrated with beautifully-chosen examples.

Part Two shows a a range of classic and contemporary font designs. These range from Bembo and Bodoni to Rotis and ITC Stone. Each font is described, illustrated, and shown with hundreds of examples of styles and setting values. There are also tips on how to set each font to best advantage, using tracking and kerning.

Making Digital Type Look GoodPart Three looks at display type – both on the printed page and the computer screen. He discusses customised font design – making your own font sets using software such as Fontographer and Pyrus. There is a thorough round-up of how the latest font technology is being used on the Web. This involves font-embedding, which is now much more easily achieved than it used to be. Then he concludes with a review of the most innovative font foundries and contemporary designers – such as Neville Brody, Matthew Carter, Zuzana Licko, and Adrian Frutiger.

The really successful feature of this book is that it will appeal to beginners and professionals alike. For those new to typography it offers a visual masterclass of design examples, and for the seasoned practitioner, it is a technical guide to the latest techniques. For anybody interested in good design, it is an example of book production raised to the level of an art form.

NB: The UK and the US editions have different jacket designs and different ISBNs.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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Bob Gordon, Making Digital Type Look Good, London: Thames and Hudson, 2001, pp.192, ISBN: 0500283133

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MTIV: New Media Design

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new media design principles, plus tips on inspiration

Hillman Curtis is one of the new generation of multi-media designers – with a background in writing and rock music rather than art college. This is his credo on the process of professional new media design – which is centred on listening carefully to what clients want, and helping them to articulate their ideas. It’s a glamorous production, with big margins, glossy paper, and double-spread photos.

New Media Design In the first part of the book he spells out his approach to designing and managing projects. He gets his stimulus from magazines, movies, and other people’s Web sites, collecting examples of good design for inspiration. One of the main purposes of this book is to communicate this personal enthusiasm – which he does very well.

You feel as if you’re only a couple of steps away from your own award-winning designs. The down side is, he doesn’t go into any technical detail on how to do it. In the central section of the book he gives examples of the people whose work has inspired him – graphic designers Saul Bass, Kyle Cooper and Joseph Müller-Brockman, painter Mark Rothko, plus film directors David Mamet and Sydney Lumet.

I’ll visit a gallery, buy or borrow a few CDs, see a couple of movies, and study my favourite movies on DVD. I’ll read art history, film theory … and of course I immerse myself constantly in design books and magazines.

It’s interesting to note how the possibilities of motion and the Web has led to these Flash designers thinking of themselves as directors of sixty second movies which must deliver a theme, plus a coherent and complete experience.

When it comes to the technical matters discussed in part three, he hands over the baton to other writers, so what we get is a series of essays from experts. These are on colour theory, design with grids, font construction, and Web page layout. These are quite useful primers, particularly if you want a quick introduction to HTML and XML. He also includes a chapter on usability from Steve Krug’s excellent Don’t Make Me Think, and a there’s a finale encouraging would-be movie makers to try their hands at digital video.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Hillman Curtis, MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2002, pp.240, ISBN: 0735711658

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New Systems in Design

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contemporary international web design

This portfolio presents a body of new systems in design work for the Web that is seeking to redefine the nature and scope of design practice. It is based on the productions of more than thirty-five international studios, and is presented in three categories.

New systems in DesignThe first – Code – shows how designers are using the computer as a tool to become creative programmers. The second – Generic – shows designers manipulating objects from the ordinary and everyday world to produce projects that are off-beat and refreshing. The third part – Disjunction – features work that aims to provoke, to question, and to advance a designer’s particular agenda, whether political, social, or even personal.

It is mainly composed of screenshots from avant guard web sites, samples of distressed modern typography, and reproductions from the pages of contemporary graphics display books. You may not be surprised to hear that this often means banal subjects, retro styling, and unreadable text.

There are also examples of architectural plans and sketches, maps, street signs, posters, fashion photography, book design and public signage, commercial advertising, and photography.

It represents what seems to me like a masochistic school of graphic design. In most cases, every effort seems to be made to alienate rather than to charm or please the viewer.

And yet just occasionally a gem shines through – such as the pictures of beautiful pleated garments created by the Japanese designer Issey Miyake, and the examples of public signage in Rotterdam.

It will probably appeal to young designers and those people who want something provocative for the coffee table.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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Christian Kusters and Emily King, Restart: New systems in graphic design, London: Thames & Hudson, 2001, pp. 176, ISBN: 0500282978

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Poor Richard’s Web Site

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web site design and maintenance on a budget

This publication has an interesting history. Peter Kent is an author of best-selling titles, yet when he wrote Poor Richard’s Web Site, a plain folk’s guide to the most rapidly expanding part of Information Technology, publishers didn’t want to touch it. He therefore released it himself in the form of Word files on disk. This fortunately led to print publication, in which form it now comes to us in a new second edition, swathed in well-deserved commendations.

Poor Richard's Web SitePart I offers four introductory chapters on choosing an Internet Service provider and domain name. This is very logical, but somehow I think its position at the front of the book might deter readers who want to more rapidly approach the meatier and less abstract matter of planning and designing their site. Part II on the creation of a site is where the book really comes to life. He covers the basics of the site and its purpose.

There’s an introduction to HTML; choosing authoring tools; making the site interactive; and how to use auto-responders and email to enhance commerce generated by your pages. He includes a brief guide to the many sources of information which are available free on line. Lots of resource centres are listed for HTML editors, scripts, and graphics. A beginner would save the price of the book in the space of two or three downloads.

Part III deals with the commercial aspects of registration and promotion. He offers multiple sites to check your pages for browser compatibility – an important feature during the on-going browser wars. The going gets a little complicated when discussing CGI scripts – but he does his best to be reassuring.

His approach is emphatically clear, logical, and (as his rum sub-title claims) full of common sense. At every stage of his exposition he points to examples. There’s a list of award-winning sites, and even a list of the worst – some of which are quite funny. He’s certainly done the spadework of analysing Web sites on behalf of the reader, and in this respect this publication is very good value as a guide and a source of reference. The inclusion of so many Web addresses is particularly useful for UK readers who (paying for local telephone calls) can’t afford to surf freely for this information like their US counterparts.

The first edition was written two years ago. Quite a bit has changed since then. There are better ways to connect, better and more software is available, and there are more services out there. This new edition covers the basics, but it also discusses newer issues like registering and modifying your domain name, the additional service offered by Web hosting companies, and how to use e-mail more effectively. It’s a shame that there’s no bibliography, because he mentions en passant a number of useful-sounding publications. However, by the time you read this they might have been added to the book’s own web site, where the 800 plus links are listed.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Peter Kent, Poor Richard’s Web Site: Geek-free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low Cost Web Site, Colorado: Top Floor, second edition, 2000, pp.418, ISBN 0966103203

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Search Engine Optimization

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how to maximise page rankings with search engines

I bought this book on search engine optimisation (SEO) because I trust Peter Kent’s work. His best-selling 2000 work Poor Richard’s Web Site was well-written, clear and friendly advice, and he spells out technology in a way which is easy to understand. He starts out here by explaining how search engines do their work, then provides a quick overview of how to optimise pages. This is an intelligent approach, because the details of SEO can become quite complex, and people fixing their own sites rather than paying an SEO agency will want to get on quickly with the job.

Search Engine Optimization The process is one of gradual adjustment and refinement. It involves choosing the best keywords, creating good content, making submissions to the SEs, and generating incoming links. Each of these topics is then explained in greater detail. He always offers suggestions of free software and services where possible, and the resources mentioned are all listed at the book’s own web site. The only paid-for software he recommends is WordTracker which helps you to identify the most appropriate keywords for your site.

Most of the advice is perfectly straightforward and easy to follow – though it requires a great deal of your patience and time. It involves giving pages accurate descriptive titles, creating content which matches the description of what’s on offer, and avoiding tricks and anything which tries to put one over on the search engines

On the use of frames he is quite unequivocal. Don’t do it! But just in case you have done so, and can’t really change your site, he shows you how to eliminate the worst problems. The same is true for dynamic pages generated from databases, and for cookie-based navigation systems.

But then just to prove that he’s not being unnecessarily stuffy, he does have a chapter on how to trick the search engines – albeit after listing several reasons why you should not use them. These include stuffing keywords, making text and links hidden on the page, duplicating pages, making doorway pages, plus tricks with redirects and cloaking.

Next he deals with the business of submitting your site to the search engines – putting a lot of his emphasis on creating a sitemap. Once again he gives lots of convincing reasons why you should use the free submission systems and avoid the paid-for services.

He explains the way the system of page ranking works and why it is important that the pages of a site contain as many links as possible. This leads naturally to the difficult business of finding people who will link to your site. We get several link-swap offers a day on this site, but most of them turn out to be from what are called link farms – which search engines don’t like.

By the time he reaches the shopping directories he has to admit that all this link-building and site-promotion is a labour-intensive business. So there’s a section on how to get other people to do it for you!

© Roy Johnson 2010

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Peter Kent, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, Indianapolis: Indiana, Wiley, 4th edition, 2010, pp.382, ISBN: 0470881046

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Secrets of Successful Web Sites

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business strategy and management of web design projects

David Siegel is a Web design guru who made his name with the best-selling Creating Killer Web Sites. That was a manifesto on graphic presentation: this is his thesis on the organisation and management of web design projects. The first part of the book offers fifteen case studies; the second part is a methodology of web site design. This takes into account the business and strategic issues of making a site effective, as well as the technicalities of colour, page design, and navigation. The book will appeal to individual designers who want to create their own business – those people with ambition to move from the spare bedroom into their own office.

Secrets of Successful Web SitesThe case studies deal with companies such as Land Rover, National Geographic, Virgin, Porsche, a brewery, and a university. There’s also a fascinating account of the origins of Salon web magazine and how it functions. These are lively mini-essays which reveal the secrets of good business strategies – as well as some of its dangers and pitfalls.

The later chapters describe the planning and design strategies used on a typical web project. At its centre is the project or development web site – where prototypes, help files, and work in progress are posted for comment.

He takes his analysis right through to the launch of a web site, and even the fine details of whose names should appear in the credits. It’s full of interesting tips, such as getting clients to agree on structure and navigation before introducing colour – which is very subjective and almost always causes disagreements.

He’s very good on writing business proposals: how to work out what to charge, and what details to take into account when drawing up estimates for a job – as well as how to spot danger signs.

There are also some useful tips on contracts of agreement and copyright of work . These are backed up with downloadable template documents at the book’s own web site.

So, like his Killer Web Sites, this is full of thought-provoking ideas expressed in an energetic and ‘committed’ style. It’s also a beautifully designed and printed book. Anyone who is interested in e-commerce and web-based business will be interested in what he has to offer.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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David Siegel, Secrets of Successful Web Sites, Indianapolis (IN): Hayden Books, 1997, pp.304, ISBN: 1568303823

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