The Art and Science of Web Design

Rating:
Summary: Nice to look at, but verbose and messy
Review:

A disappointment, given the author's guru reputation and the five star reviews here at Amazon.

All in all, an incoherent series of essays with no clear message and little practical advice, badly edited and badly proofread (a typo on every other page -- check out the bullet points on page 17) with umpteen unenlightening screenshots and illustrations ("Code", "Word" and "Pictures" in circles joined by a triangle -- hey! they're connected!)

It's too basic for techies (readers are advised to give alternatives when specifying font names...) but too cryptic for the novice or general reader ("Just as a good classification system will spawn prediction in information retrieval, a good integration structure will do the same with services" - -huh?)

The general-reader stuff is padded out with platitudes ("The Web may be growing fast, but its foundation stretches back through years..."), the nuts-and-bolts sections are far too specific to be useful (several pages are devoted to an IE-only method of dynamically resizing headlines, which is pretty questionable anyway) and most of the last chapter is taken up with ASP code for a specific database application.

The author also has an irritating predilection for long-winded tangential analogies (three paragraphs describing how David Copperfield uses diversionary tactics to do his magic) and unnecessary long words like "disambiguate", "heuristics" and "deconstruct".

Far better alternatives are Steve Krug's book Don't Make Me Think!, any of the O'Reilly Web books or Jakob Nielsen's website (...)



Rating:
Summary: I haaaaaaated this book!
Review: After reading several books on the science of web design (the Non Designer's Web Book, the Elements of Web Design, etc.), I was interested in seeing what this book had to say. Unfortunately, what it had to say was very little. Pretentious and self-consciously trying to appeal to the hip crowd, this book is just plain annoying in its writing style. The reviewer below me from England hit it right on the head-- the author never, ever gets straight to the point. Instead, he uses a lot of pretty, unnecessary verbiage just to state the obvious and the simple. Even more annoying is how the author coins these terms which I guess are supposed to be cool, but strike one as being highly pretentious, since they don't shed any light on what he's talking about. A great example is his coined phrase, "liquid web design," which is just another pretentious way of saying a web site that is built to adapt to different browser conditions. This term is annoying not only because the author could have just as easily used more commonly known words like "malleable" and "adaptable," but because you have to learn what he means if you aren't *hip* enough to know what "liquid web design" means. It's almost as if to understand this book you have to learn a new language only spoken by elitist, trendy techie hipster snobs who sit around at Starbucks and use words like "pro-active." This is an unnecessary extra step in trying to understand something as straightforward as web design. Terrible, annoying, and pretentious with a capital "P."

One star from me.

Rating:
Summary: Super Book
Review: As one of the other reviewers stated, this book is more about the common senses "whys" of certain web design approaches rather than a "how to" book. Nonetheless, understanding the "why" behind the "what" and "how" of appropriate web solutions is extremely importatnt if one is to design web experiences that are functional, practical, and enjoyable. This book does a better job of explaining "why" better than anything I've read. A must-have on any web designer's shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Some Art, but Where's the Beef (Science)?
Review: Based on the title, I was expecting a more thorough treatment of web design. Instead, I found a collection of Veen's experiences and opinions.

I did learn some useful tricks; however, these rules-of-thumb are common knowledge in today's web-design community.

I also found his writing style (including the many typos) distracting.

Rating:
Summary: Nothing beats a consistent interface to make people return
Review: Having a stylish and effective web site for your business is now a necessity rather than an option. For many varied, unusual and sometimes baffling reasons, it is very difficult to create a site that satisfies a sense of good style as well as a taste for commerce. Jeffrey Veen is an acknowledged expert in making web sites work and much of that expertise is captured in this book.
I was very impressed with his starting point that simple consistency is a virtue. While fancy displays are impressive at first sight, if it is not backed up by clearly understandable functionality, your captured eyeballs will not bring their brains and wallets along. The basics of page layout and design listed here are rules of thumb that you should violate only in the most unusual of circumstances.
One of the best points he makes refers to the magician David Copperfield. He notes that while the scantily clad women do provide entertainment value, their real purpose is to take your mind away from paying too close attention to the magic tricks. The same thing applies when designing web sites. If the page display proceeds in steps, the result is to render a powerful illusion of speed to the user. Therefore, while the primary concern must be the overall speed of the download, a secondary concern is to organize the page so that it appears to load quickly.
Veen also has all of the proper scorn for the tactics used by some online advertisers. Like him, it has always baffled me that someone would believe that the way to get me to buy something from their site is to mislead me into clicking to it. His disdain for those ads that mimic an operating system message is well deserved, although you would think that the poor return on their long-term click-through rates would tell the designers all they need to know.
The recent dot-com flameout and declining online revenues will have a positive effect on the quality of web designs. Some of the more deceptive and unusual sites will die their well-deserved death as their guerrilla marketing developers lose out in the competition for customers that will stay and pay. To succeed in the long term you occasionally have to be boring and uninspired, which to some means stable and dependable. If that is your goal when using your web site, then you should read this book.

Rating:
Summary: One made for Dog-ears
Review: Here's a book that's sitting on my desk and it's going to be there for good long time. I mark it up. A few weeks later I come back and look again. Good writers give you that. Yes, even about technical subjects, good writers deliver. This will be one of my dog-eared ones.

The graphics are done so well that I almost feel bad about marking it up. Colored tabs on each chapter make it easy to get back to particular sections. Screen shots of leading web sites are used generously when he's trying to make a general point of design. Full scripting to cover the examples under discussion are provided, in part, and then brought together as a whole. Well-developed and simple figures are used to make specific points. Each chapter contains several side-bars and other sections covering related information to the main.

The level of writing is aimed for someone with beginning level skills, but goes quickly to the more technical issues without leaving the reader behind. When Mr. Veen is leaving out information, as when he sidesteps error trapping for active pages, he points it out. The writing flows smoothly around what could easily be an unorganized collection of confusing hyper text jargon. I found myself reading through a section to find a quick answer to something I was working on, only to end up engrossed for an hour or more.

One of the most valuable parts of this book is the experience Mr. Veen brings to his discussions. "When I started out in this business years ago my first job was, in essence, to be a human Perl script," he states at one point before going on to describe how he, and others, went on to solve the problems of high maintenance sites. In another area he describes the business of information architecture and how it could mean success or failure for sites seeking to make a profit. For those of us who are seeking to make our way in the world of web design, few lessons could provide the knowledge that is presented here in clear and concise language.

Rating:
Summary: One made for Dog-ears
Review: Here's a book that's sitting on my desk and it's going to be there for good long time. I mark it up. A few weeks later I come back and look again. Good writers give you that. Yes, even about technical subjects, good writers deliver. This will be one of my dog-eared ones.

The graphics are done so well that I almost feel bad about marking it up. Colored tabs on each chapter make it easy to get back to particular sections. Screen shots of leading web sites are used generously when he's trying to make a general point of design. Full scripting to cover the examples under discussion are provided, in part, and then brought together as a whole. Well-developed and simple figures are used to make specific points. Each chapter contains several side-bars and other sections covering related information to the main.

The level of writing is aimed for someone with beginning level skills, but goes quickly to the more technical issues without leaving the reader behind. When Mr. Veen is leaving out information, as when he sidesteps error trapping for active pages, he points it out. The writing flows smoothly around what could easily be an unorganized collection of confusing hyper text jargon. I found myself reading through a section to find a quick answer to something I was working on, only to end up engrossed for an hour or more.

One of the most valuable parts of this book is the experience Mr. Veen brings to his discussions. "When I started out in this business years ago my first job was, in essence, to be a human Perl script," he states at one point before going on to describe how he, and others, went on to solve the problems of high maintenance sites. In another area he describes the business of information architecture and how it could mean success or failure for sites seeking to make a profit. For those of us who are seeking to make our way in the world of web design, few lessons could provide the knowledge that is presented here in clear and concise language.

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive Web Design Overview
Review: I could not put this book down. As someone who recently received education in multi-media web design I really liked the book because it gave a wonderful all-around picture of web design. It is easy to focus on one area (e.g. graphics) and forget to consider another area (e.g. download time). I would recommend this book for someone entering the field of web design.

Rating:
Summary: The Veen Factor
Review: I started making web pages back in the dark ages of 1996. In 1999 I was making streamlined web apps for Franklin that my coworkers and I used to make on the fly calculaitons and data lookups. Eventually, I was a staff web developer at schwab in san francisco and in tokyo, japan. I had heard of Jacob Nielson at useit.com, but only after using thousands of web pages and making hundreds of web pages myself and making dozens of web apps did I come across Jeffrey Veen's book "The Art and Science of Web Design." I cringed when I read that he wrote to avoid using images when you can use text. Everything seemed to be agains the grain and I felt like I was swimming up river as I read what Veen was writing, but only after years of experience have I learned to respect Mr. Veen and his infinite wisdom. A web site is only good if it achieves its purpose, which is access to information. And this occurs only through a site that possesses speed, simplicty, and clarity. Download speed is the most important, and meeting the user's expectations. A simple design that works is worth a bucket of gold. Only after making countless web pages have I finally taken Veen's philosophy to heart - make the web site simple and fast and don't dwell on the unnecessary frivolous pretty gifs and clutter that predominates on so many web pages. Simplicity. Speed. Clarity.
I hope that Jeffrey Veen writes another book. I highly recommend this book.
It's like Jeffrey Veen is a Web Philospher, and everything he wrote in the book is true, though for those raised on photoshop and obsessed with glossy web pages, it's hard to swallow the truth sometimes - less really is more. Make the site fast and make it simple.

Rating:
Summary: More a web design primer than the advanced text I wanted...
Review: I was disappointed by this book. I have read several articles by Mr. Veen and I'm familiar with some of his (and other's ) work on Webmonkey so I was looking forward to his insights. I've been working on the web as long as Mr. Veen and I wanted war stories and advice from a peer. Unfortunately this book is not what I expected. I expected a more advanced look at the issues and challenges of web design. His topics are huge, so why bog down with history and overview? If he had of assumed a baseline of tech and history knowledge then more meat could have been here (at least for me). Something beyond the brief web/browser history, professional anecdotes, overviews, and basic examples he provides. If you are very new to the web then this is probably a good book for you, but I think it speaks more to the newbie audience than to advanced readers. For what it is (a beginner's book), it is about a 4 star book). On the plus side I appreciated his advocacy of standards adherence and cross-browser support -- critical for beginners to hear in contrast to today's Flash/Shockwave-sodden web.