Painting the Web

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 655 pages
• Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc. May 1, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 059651509X
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0596515096
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.5 inches
• Weighs: 2.6 pounds

Product Description
Do you think that only professionals with expensive tools and years of experience can work with web graphics? This guide tosses that notion into the trash bin. Painting the Web is the first comprehensive book on web graphics to come along in years, and author Shelley Powers demonstrates how readers of any level can take advantage of the graphics and animation capabilities built into today's powerful browsers. She covers GIFs, JPEGs, and PNGs, raster and vector graphics, CSS, Ajax effects, the canvas objects, SVG, geographical applications, and more -- everything that designers (and non-designers) use to literally paint the Web. More importantly, Shelley's own love of web graphics shines through in every example. Not only can you master the many different techniques, you also can have fun doing it. Topics in Painting the Web include: GIF, JPEG, PNG, lossy versus lossless compression, color management, and optimization Photo workflow, from camera to web page, including a review of photo editors, workflow tools, and RAW photo utilities Tricks for best displaying your photographs online Non-photographic raster images (icons and logos), with step-by-step tutorials for creating popular "Web 2.0" effects like reflection, shiny buttons, inlays, and shadows Vector graphics An SVG tutorial, with examples of all the major components Tips and tricks for using CSS Interactive effects with Ajax such as accordions and fades The canvas object implemented in most browsers Geographical applications such as Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, with programming and non-programming examples Visual effects such as forms and data displays in table or graphics Web design for the non-designer Graphics are not essential tothe web experience, but they do make the difference between a site that's functional and one that's lively, compelling, and exciting. Whether you want to spruce up a website, use photographs to annotate your stories, create hot graphics, or provide compelling displays for your data, this is the book for you.

About The Author
Shelley Powers has been writing about technical topics--from the first release of Java to the latest graphics tools--for more than 12 years. Her recent books, all published with O'Reilly, have covered the semantic web, Ajax, JavaScript, Unix, and now the world of web graphics. She's an avid amateur photographer and web graphics aficionado who enjoys applying her latest experiments on her many web sites.

Reader Reviews
In spite of the huge number of graphics on the Web, the practice is surprisingly underserved in terms of the literature. Of course, there are design books, books on software, but these focus on best use of a product. The nuances and requirements for the Web are harder to find. This book is a practitioner's book. And, it's a quite personal work. Written in a conversational style, it's easy to read. The author covers a wide range of tools which she uses on a regular basis. That includes a variety of less-familiar open source tools. There is a great deal of HTML, CSS and JS code related specifically to graphic representation. It's really convenient to have this foundation in one place. At first glance, one might be surprised at the detail given to techniques of Photoshop and other tools. But again, as a practitioner's book, it reflects the techniques useful for specifically Web design. It's handy to have these in one place for reference. Because it is a rather personal work, there will be emphases that one might change. There is a significant amount of space spent on SVG -- which, although a standard, I think is problematic because of the lack of inherent support in IE and Adobe's discontinuation of the plug-in. In any case, weighing in at 638 pages, there's a lot of good information, regardless of one's personal opinion. The focus is on traditional and standards-based HTML programming. The author does broach the canvas object -- a part of the HTML 5 standard which provides another route to animation on the desktop. However, IE8, at the time of the book's writing, didn't support this object. There is no coverage of Flash, and Silverlight is mentioned simply to identify another non-standard MS approach. Indeed, both Adobe and MS focus their energies on Flex/Flash/AIR and Silverlight technologies respectively to provide a richer Internet experience. As fits a book on graphics, illustrations are in color. This adds a lot to the vitality of the read, and helps portray information in a useful way. As the author notes, no one book can address the many issues related to web graphics. This book is of a different character than Weinman's Designing Web Graphics.4. Though in need of an update, that volume presents a more structured and a complementary perspective to the present. In any case, it's a good addition to the Web designer's bookshelf.