WebDesignBookReview Archives - Page 15 of 21

Dreamweaver 8 Visual Quickstart Guide

DW8 VQS Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith is about to be released. I’m recusing myself from writing a review of this book because I helped a little bit with it. I’m very familiar with the previous editions of the book by J. Tarin Towers, having worked on the students’ editions, and will say that I think the version by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith promises to be a big improvement. If you had rejected this book as a text for a Dreamweaver-based class before, be sure to check out the new edition.

One is enough

Business and the world are changing fast. High tech has been the impetus for this and serves as a model for rapid adaptation. The music business, the long distance business, the mail order business, the broadcasting business, the publishing business: there are many examples of business models that have radically altered in the last few years. Not all the changes have been easy for business or even wanted by business. Some companies have dragged themselves kicking and screaming into new ways of doing things.

All it takes is one successful effort. One site successfully and legally selling songs for 99 cents is all it takes. One long and demanding waiting list for hybred cars is all it takes. One overwhelming response to a political fund-raising website is all it takes. Change follows.

I’ve talked about Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things before. One of the stories in this book is about a Ford Motors plant where they planted grass on the roof, opened the windows for fresh air on the assembly room floor, and discovered that they not only saved a bundle on energy but had better productivity and happier employees. I notice that Ford is the only American auto manufacturer willing to make the leap into hybred techology. If they are successful, change will follow.

There are businesses that resist change and don’t seem capable of looking for new ways of doing things. The oil companies seem to fit that category. It is as if oil companies don’t breathe the same air or drink the same water that everyone else on the planet does. It is as if oil companies have no emotional intelligence. Remember the book Emotional Intelligence : Why It Can Matter More Than IQ from 1997? One of the stories in this book was about how researchers set out a treat (for the sake of argument, we’ll say it was a marshmallow) for a child. Then they told the child that they were leaving the room for a minute and if the child would wait until they came back there would be more marshmallows. Or they could eat the marshmallow immediately. If they chose to grab the one there now, there would be no more later on. The researchers considered it a sign of emotional maturity for the child to wait for the promised marshmallows instead of grabbing the one that was immediately available. Oil companies seem to want that marshmallow right now, and the future is forgotten.

Somehow we have to show these folks the way. All it would take to help the oil companies out of this immature attachment to a brain-dead business model is one successful gas station with a pump dispensing biofuel and a line down the street of eager customers. All it would take is one energy company selling fuel made from soybeans from Missouri to be more profitable than an energy company selling oil made from petroleum drilled in the Middle East. All it would take is booming sales of energy efficient cars or energy efficient homes or energy efficient applicances. If business can’t exercise the emotional maturity to do something because if is right and good for the population in general, we have to win them over with success.

A new book is In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders of the Twentieth Century. This book talks about contextual intelligence, or the ability to understand the period in which you live and exploit its opportunities. Here’s an example. I sometimes drive across Texas from San Antonio to El Paso through the heart of nowhere on Highway 10. My XM radio works fine the whole trip. My Sprint phone service is spotty at best. Should my car break down in the middle of the south Texas desert, would I want to listen to music or phone for help? That’s a failed opportunity. One successful phone service that works everywhere is all it will take to change things. What is that one thing: VOIP, wireless-everything-everywhere? Whatever it is, it’s coming from some company with the contextual intelligence to figure out what’s needed and provide it.

The petroleum industry, the boxcar-sized auto makers, these are businesses that don’t show much contextual intelligence. They are like politicians who shoot themselves in the foot by making statements like "the Geneva Convention only applies to them, not to us." Leaders with such a startling lack of contextual and emotional intelligence are doomed to failure. Grabbing for that one visible marshmallow while refusing to turn just slightly to the side to consider other ideas is not successful problem solving behavior. Clinging to an old and harmful paradigm is like diving over a cliff along with the other lemmings running beside you. Stop and look for that one new way, just one, that will work and be a change for the better.

Accessibility, CSS, standards: these ideas are not harder and more expensive to implement. They are current best practices and should be taught as such. But once you’ve finally figured them out, don’t insist that they are the only way, because that one new thing may come along and stand the web design world on its head at any moment.

Review: Adobe Illustrator CS2 Gone Wild

Adobe Illustrator CS2 Gone Wild by David Karlins with Bruce K. Hopkins (Wiley, 2005) begins by announcing itself as a different kind of book that pushes Illustrator in new directions. The book is not intended as a basic Illustrator book and provides none of the usual basics like workspace descriptions or tool descriptions. Instead, readers are expected to be experienced Illustrator users who want to try some new (and wild) projects and learn some new techniques.

Several of the projects in the book make use of Illustrator CS2’s new Live Paint and Live Trace features, but old familar Illustrator features are put to new uses in the book’s pages as well. In keeping with the “gone wild” theme, the book’s tone is light and humorous.

There’s no CD with project files. Readers are expected to take the ideas and techniques featured in the book’s pages and turn out creative new illustrations of their own. There’s an emphasis on adapting the techniques with your own creativity in the book’s pages, rather than a slavish set of step-by-step instructions leading to a finished illustration that must look exactly like the example.

One thing I loved (you know me) about this book was a small project at the very end of the book that sets up some illustrations in CSS layers for a mouseover show and hide area on a web page. Illustrator generates the CSS for this! I don’t know how good the CSS is, or how much extra HTML code gets generated in the process, but I’m very happy to see graphic tools moving in this direction, even if the implementation isn’t yet perfect. If anyone has tried this with Illustrator CS2 and can point to a web page where I can see it in action, I’d love to know about it.

The cover image on both the wiley.com site and the amazon.com site doesn’t match the cover on the book I received, so be sure you are getting the Illustrator CS2 version of the book if you buy it. If you are teaching an advanced Illustrator class, you should check this book out.

Review: PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites

PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites : Visual QuickPro Guide by Larry Ullman is the 2nd Edition of this book. Ullman has written several books about PHP and MySQL as well as the earlier edition of this book explaining the two used together.

The explanations for beginning users of both PHP and MySQL are clear and easy to follow. As you might imagine, the beginning chapters of the book are introductory in terms of both PHP and MySQL. By Chapter 7, the reader is using PHP with MySQL to execute queries and perform other functions. The Web Application Development chapter explains hidden form inputs, editing records and understanding HTTP headers. There is a chapter on cookies and sessions and a security chapter. Three example chapters give the reader an example of a content management system, a user registration system, and an e-commerce system.

The book is clear, well-written and easy to follow. I would recommend it for classroom use.

Having said that, I should mention a book that one of my friends who teaches PHP and MySQL says is her favorite book. I haven’t seen this one myself, but she likes it because each concept has a two page layout: one concept, two pages, you’re done. The book she likes is PHP 5 : Your visual blueprint for creating open source, server-side content (Visual Read Less, Learn More).

The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering

Dori Smith contacted me recently about appearing in a panel she is putting together for the SXSW Interactive Conference in March, 2006. The panel topic is about the issue of the comparative invisibility of women in the web design field.

If it didn’t take 15 minutes to read aloud, I’d like to read The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering to the people attending the panel. Not because the book has anything at all to do with web design. It doesn’t. Because the book has a lot to do with the way women think and accomplish things. In this children’s story, a couple of grandmothers standing silently in a park say they are saving the world. Soon other women are standing silently in parks to save the world. Their silence creates change that leads to hope and a better world.

I think a lot of women who run web design companies, write web design books, and host helpful web sites are like these silent grandmothers. They are doing what they are doing without any ado or noise, but the result is change for the better.

Alas, I won’t be reading it aloud at SXSW. But I urge you to check it out anyway and see what it has to say about women’s ways of doing.

Cradle to Cradle

Here’s a book that has nothing to do with web design, but I can’t help mentioning it because I think it is important. It is written by William McDonough and Michael Braungart and is called Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. The book is about a new idea called “eco-effectiveness” which I think creates as revolutionary a change in thinking as the change we went through when we read Silent Spring. The beautiful thing is that it doesn’t explain how to be less bad about the environment. It explains how to be good to the environment and create abundance and wealth while being good.

Review: The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightment for the Web

The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag is a valuable book. It would not serve as the basis for a semester’s curriculum, but is a resource to augment the curriculum. I suggest you make students engaged in any form of visual communication for the web aware of this book.

The premise of the book is to discuss some of the designs from CSS Zen Garden. Sometimes the discussion is visual, sometimes it is technical. Depending on the design being deconstructed, the discussion might deal with anything from classic design principles, typography, Photoshop techniques, CSS techniques, browser filtering, creating thematic elements, best practices, semantic HTML, or even the creative process itself. The authors took an all-inclusive approach to visual design, and delved into everything from the importance of negative space to the uses of negative margins.

I found it to be the kind of book that sparked a good deal of creative thought in me, causing me to to consider how an idea or technique could be used in my own work, and sending me to the computer to try things out myself. My graphic design skills are meager at best, so any new way of improving the graphical appearance of my sites is always fascinating to me. In particular, many of the techniques used on CSS Zen Garden involving background images seem within my powers, so I read slowly with frequent pauses for pondering.

Since each example at CSS Zen Garden uses the same HTML, the discussion of many of the examples dealt with the array of creative ideas and CSS layout techniques used to present the page in unique ways. Technically speaking, there is a vast amount of knowledge about CSS worked into the exploration of each design.

In the history of the development of the web, CSS Zen Garden represents a major world-shaping milestone. CSS languished on the fringes before CSS Zen Garden demonstrated its possibilities. Now, all-CSS sites are more and more common, even mainstream. If you are trying to bring your students into a standards-based, all-CSS world, this book will help you show them the way.

As an aside for those of you who were interested in my previous post Why colleges should stop teaching Fireworks as a primary web design tool, take notice of the way this book presents the image files used to make up a site’s graphics. Not as a layout to be sliced up and exported to HTML, but as a set of related graphics that can be used individually to build a look.