In a light and friendly voice, the author introduces the reader to new ways of styling websites. With specific examples for each of ten categories, he provides a wealth of techniques for the designer who wishes to apply these approaches in their own work. The styles are broken down into ten categories, which are:
Gothic Organic School
Wireframe Icon School
Lo-fi Grunge School
Paper Bag School
Mondrian Poster School
Pixelated Punk Rock School
1950's Hello Kitty School
HTMinimaLism School
DraftingTable/Instruction Manual School
Super Tiny SimCity School Further explorations in the book help designers determine which style choices would be most appropriate when changing the look of their own sites.
Wow, this is a fun book. If you spend a lot of time on Web design and suffer occasional burnout, Fresh Styles is the inspiration booster shot you need to get you back to the keyboard to whip up something new. Perhaps you'd like to try "gothic organic" or "pixelated punk"? Author Curt Cloninger, who's written for the Web developer forum Alistapart.com, defines 10 "underground" Web styles using case studies of several Web sites, and discovers what makes them not just cutting edge but marketable, too. These site designs not only mimic print design, but embrace the medium of the Web with all its flaws (browser incompatibilities, sluggish download times, varying viewer operating systems, and screen resolutions).
All 10 of the design styles discussed in this book sprang from a dissatisfaction with the status quo, a love of the Web as a medium, and a passion for evocative, communicative design.
With such fun chapters as "1950s Hello Kitty Style" and "Paper Bag Style," hundreds of screenshots, and techniques for achieving these looks, Fresh Styles isn't just an inspiring kick in the pants but a cookbook/resource as well. Not everything here conforms to usability wisdom; for example, pages may not bookmark because they're in designer-defined pop-up windows or the entire site is one big Flash file. But the author encourages readers to go beyond the universally practical: "Go ahead and fiddle while Rome burns."
There are ideas here you may never have thought of using. The 8-bit gifs in the "SuperTiny SimCity Style" are the opposite of most designers' layered Photoshop creations. A link points to the perfect Web tutorial on how to get them right. For the "Lo-Fi Grunge Style," think Raygun, complete with TV scan-line effects and "that smudged, misprinted look." A sidebar shows how to mimic a noisy TV signal by placing scan-line patterns on their own Photoshop layer.
Grooviness is what this book is all about: groovy narrative, groovy illustrations, and a groovy layout by Carlos Segura. It's got a good vibe that makes you think that the future of the Web may not be so bleak after all. --Angelynn Grant
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Use it as a reference frequently:
I was in Mr. Cloninger's class in college and was very hesitant over picking up this book. He after all had written it and was using us as his guinea pigs to make his sells increase, right? Wrong! This book is fantastic. I still continue to reference it every time I go in to design a webpage. It's full of humor (check out his dedication at the front) and quirky wisdom. The book is showing its age now with some of the browser displays, but he told me recently that he's coming out with an updated version... more info
The Box and You:
I'm a developer. I program. I make the html that makes the pretty pages. I figured that this book would help me come up with some designs (for those oftentimes rare moments that I'm given a design project). I'd impress the boss and get more design projects. It didn't quite work out that way.
This book made me feel like I was in design class. A basic page and its "template" was defined, and then there were more examples that if you squint and shook your head, then you could see it fits that template. I... more info
has its faults, but still rocks:
I love this book. I am a student in webdesign and I had no idea what to expect when our teacher asked us to buy this book. when I started flipping through it and read a bit about the gothic organic style, I fell in love instantly.
one problem designers often run into (including myelf), is that once we come up with a good style, we tend to use and re-use it a lot. we get too comfortable with it. this book allows you to explore other techniques and break out of your shell.
You CAN judge a book by its cover artwork. Yes, the cover art is supposed to make one think of Seattle grunge, but undoubtedly it also will remind you of what that refrigerator must smell like. Nice pictures, nice layout, nice presentation, but pretty much useless if you want realistic ideas that you can use, let alone implement, in the corporate world (and BTW, the corporate world does extend to rockers like the Stones). If you really want to take a look at the book, go down to your nearest Big Box... more info
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