Rating: 
Summary: Web Design Essentials: yep, it's essential...
Review: A logical flow with tips and techniques from preparing graphics to animations and image maps, this book provides a user-friendly yet thorough introduction to website design. The book is laid out in something of a lesson format similar to the Adobe Classroom in a Book series, and is a perfect reference to those "how do I..?" questions. Many Web experts provide the techniques, which are labeled as easy/intermediate/advanced. For the beginner, Web Design Essentials is not a huge, intimidating manual, yet it shows techniques that produce high-quality websites. For expert codeheads, this book is simply the icing on the cake. In all, an essential book to improve a web designer's technique.
Rating:
Summary: Web Design Essentials: yep, it's essential...
Review: A logical flow with tips and techniques from preparing graphics to animations and image maps, this book provides a user-friendly yet thorough introduction to website design. The book is laid out in something of a lesson format similar to the Adobe Classroom in a Book series, and is a perfect reference to those "how do I..?" questions. Many Web experts provide the techniques, which are labeled as easy/intermediate/advanced. For the beginner, Web Design Essentials is not a huge, intimidating manual, yet it shows techniques that produce high-quality websites. For expert codeheads, this book is simply the icing on the cake. In all, an essential book to improve a web designer's technique.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely essential for the serious Web Designer
Review: As anyone in the Internet industry knows, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Image Ready and Adobe Illustrator form part of the essential tools that anyone who is serious about a web site design has to know how to use. Complementing these are others such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Flash, and a handful of Open Source tools. This book focuses on VERY practical tips on how to fully exploit Photoshop's Photoshop, Image Ready and Illustrator to do some very common tasks which are required from a Web designer on a regular basis. These are complemented by Adobe's Go Live and Live Motion, which -in all honesty, in my opinion- have been displaced by Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Flash, in their respective fields (makes you wonder how would a merge between Adobe and Macromedia look like!) Anyway, back to the point: the book (although not too clearly stated) is mostly useful for the beginner-to-intermediate audience, as the accomplished designer will find most tips hereby included something he/she already knows. The book is extremely well laid out and broken into sections, which makes it easy to follow, and it clearly signals levels of difficulty of the different tasks explained. Sections which (for the reasons already mentioned) I did not find as useful, were related to active images, which is not the area where Adobe stands out most. Other than that, I'd say it's a must have.
Rating:
Summary: Ideal for the novice web designer
Review: Comprised of web design techniques and advice from seasoned experts, Web Design Essentials: Professional Studio Techniques covers all aspects of Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Adobe ImageReady 2.0, Adobe Illustrator 8.0, Adobe GoLive 4.0, Adobe Streamline 4.0, and Adobe AfterEffects 4.1 for building effective websites. Readers will learn how to slice images for complex HTML tables, crate animated GIFs and DHTML animations, master Cascading Style Sheets, design JavaScript rollover effects, optimize graphics and images for the Web, plan and manage site structure and content, automate routine production tasks, control color in GIF graphics, enhance HTML tables and frames, and prepare navigational graphics and interfaces. Web Design Essentials is ideal for the novice web designer and has much to offer even the experienced user dealing with workflow, layout, and post-production issues at all levels on either Macintosh or Windows systems.
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous book!
Review: I am a print and web designer and I found that this book was really helpful. I liked how the chapters were divided in a logical progression, and how the tips within each chapter were ordered from simplest to most difficult. The tips on LiveMotion were a bit challenging for me, however...I think there could have been some finessing of that section. Nonetheless, the book is lovely to peruse with its colorful and diverse styles of artwork. The layout was clean and I was able to follow along with the tips pretty easily. I agree with the previous reviewers that this book might not be for a beginner, but as an intermediate to power-user, I think the tips, and the book as a whole, were quite worthwhile.
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous book!
Review: I have been in the web design feild for about a year and thought i could add to my abilities to use Adobe products by buying this book. WHAT A JOKE!! It is ridiculously fragmented, the screen shots do not match what you see (I have the current versions and older versions of adobe products), and they dont explain anything. they just list what to do. not WHY you are doing it, or WHAT you are doing, just lists. IT IS TERRIBLE. I spent several hours wasting my time trying to get something useful out of this book before I threw it in the garbage. Unfortunately, I was unable to take anything positive from this book. $... down the drain.
Rating: 
Summary: THIS BOOK IS TERRIBLE
Review: I have been in the web design feild for about a year and thought i could add to my abilities to use Adobe products by buying this book. WHAT A JOKE!! It is ridiculously fragmented, the screen shots do not match what you see (I have the current versions and older versions of adobe products), and they dont explain anything. they just list what to do. not WHY you are doing it, or WHAT you are doing, just lists. IT IS TERRIBLE. I spent several hours wasting my time trying to get something useful out of this book before I threw it in the garbage. Unfortunately, I was unable to take anything positive from this book. $... down the drain.
Rating: 
Summary: Probably Not What You're Looking For
Review: I recently purchased the Adobe web package that includes GoLive, Photoshop, Illustrator, and LiveMotion. I happened across this book and though by the title, "Web Design Essentials", that it would be a good introduction to how these four software titles integrate. However, I think a better title for this book would be "Tips & Tricks for Very Experienced Users of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc..." The book is directed at Web Design professionals that perhaps don't understand everything about the software they are using every day. The reason is, I believe, put very well in the introduction in this book that I will transcribe here: "Now that we've told you what this book has to offer, it's also important to share what it doesn't. This book won't teach you: how to design - what makes a good layout, how to compose color, and so on - and it's not a tutorial for the various applications we cover. Rather, [this book] will teach you how to use Adobe's tools to implement your creative vision..." So the book doesn't help you to get familar with the software at all. It assumes that you are very well familar with these products already and are looking to optimize your work style. And to be truthful, it doesn't even do *that* very well in my opinion. The book is full of a bunch of disjoined lessons on various topics that are covered in Adobe's help files or in the User Guides that came with the software. It seems that if you are not familiar with industry terms (what is a 'comp' anyway?) then this book might provide a good glossary for you, but the lessons, well, I can't see them helping TOO much. So, in closing, if you are looking for a book that shows you how the four software titles are connected, if you are looking for a book that will take you through the web site creation project using specifically Adobe software titles, then this is not the book for you. To the author (if you all read this): I believe that you will find a wider audience if you created a sample web site (download Macromedia's Dreamweaver and check out the tutorial, it's amazing!) from start to finish using all the common, and perhaps a few not so common, elements present in mainstream websites today. In this manner, you'll show your readers how to use the software and from chapter to chapter, lesson to lesson, it will make SENSE. Disjoined non-related lesson after lesson won't help people learn the software. I realize you didn't aim this book at newbies such as myself, but unfortunately there was no review for me to see before I bought the book. I gave the book two stars instead of one because while I found the content to be not applicable to me, the book itself is quite beautiful, although oddly sized. Here is a list of the major topics and most of the chapters that follow them: 1. Creating Web Graphics
Tiling a Background
Selecting and Replacing Colors
Using Select Color Range
Dithering Part of an Image
Expanding on the Web-safe Palette
Managing Page Elements with Layer Styles
Mapping Made Easy
Previewing Rasterized Graphics
Creating Artwork with Transparency
Background Transparency in Web Grpahics
Drawing a Navigational System
Creating Flexible Drop Shadows 2. Managing Type
Formatting Type for Comps
Previewing HTML Text in Comps
Designing Images with Type
Transforming Type Using Vectors
Preserving Type in Bitmaps
Enhancing Type wtih Layer Effects
Spedifying Fonts for Web Sites
Understanding System Fonts 3. Web Page Layout
Slicing Images for HTML Tables
Optimizing Slices
Making Image Maps
Creating Image maps in GoLive
Designing Forms
Creating Framed Web Pages
etc... 4. Active Elements
Animating GIFs
Creating Complex Animations
Importing Artwork for Animation
Creating Animation Styles
Animating with DHTML
Animating Rollovers
etc. 5. Management Techniques
Using Actions to Automate Tasks
Using Droplets to Automate Tasks
Using Layer Sets to Mange Files
Using PDF's to Proof Comps 6. Reference
Understanding Color Palettes
Creating a Master Palette
Understanding Blending Modes
Understanding Channels
etc..
Rating:
Summary: All the basics for advanced web functions.
Review: Maria Giudice and Anita Dennis' Professional Studio Techniques Web Design Essentials provides expert advice on advanced web design features; from slicing images for HTML tables to using JavaScript rollover and GIF graphics formats. All the basics are here for advanced web functions.
Rating: 
Summary: Helpful but not for the advanced
Review: This book is a good resource type book for me. I have done web design before. The book has a pretty good Hex/RGB Conversion Chart in the back. It has a nice glossary. It even has a good chart on understanding style sheet attributes. It is not one of my favorites mainly because it was not the kind of book i was looking for. It's good for those who are just beginning and have some knowledge of how to use Photoshop, illustrator, golive, and Livemotion. If you have never touched these programs this is not the book to get. If you have you might find out some things you didn't know. It's a great book for the right price. i would not spend a lot of money on it, I'm cheap like that. However i am keeping mine for the Hex/RGB chart and maybe some later references.
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