Featuring:

ISBN 1-56205-532-1

$50.00

New Riders Publishing

<designing web graphics>

by Lynda Weinman

Expert designer shares valuable secrets on web graphics.

Lynda Weinman's <designing web graphics> is a "bible" around our house. You'll find everything you need to know about designing web graphics for the World Wide Web in this book. <designing web graphics> is a personal tutor for anyone interested in designing Web graphics.

Lynda's step-by-step instructions are easy to understand, the book is loaded with high-quality screen-shots and graphics while the text is anything but boring. Whether you're a beginner or a Web designer, you'll learn new techniques and shortcuts which take the headache out of designing graphics for the Web.

Invaluable is Lynda's Browser-Safe Color Chart, which identifies 216 browser-safe colors which do not change between Macs, Windows and Win96 platforms. The chart is organized by color, with RGB and hexidecimal translations on each color swatch.

Also, you'll find full color palette charts (organized by hue and value), Web design resource sites, templates for beginners and all the tools, guides, HTML and online resources for designing Web pages.

Lynda's writing style is fun to read, especially her chapters on what she calls "Browser Hell!", "Cross-Platform Hell!" and "Color Palette Hell!". The book is divided in two sections-- Background Information and Lessons. In the first section, Lynda gives you the skinny on browsers, cross-platform compatibility, color palettes, file formats and creating small image files. While the second part of the book is a tutorial containing exercises and examples from working with hexadecimal color values to using transparency and aligning graphics.

A CD-ROM (Win/Mac) is included with the book. The software is organized in three folders and contains a collection of online resources and hotlinks, image files, background patterns, clip-art, shareware, freeware, demos and more.

Whether you want to maximize the speed of your Web graphics, or minimize the amount of work required in creating graphics, <designing web graphics> is just the book you're looking for. At $50, it is a worthwhile investment (and looks cool on the book shelf).

After you've finished <designing web graphics>, it's time to read Lynda's sequels: <deconstructing web graphics> and <coloring web graphics>. Don't miss my upcoming reviews!