ERCB: Web Publisher's Design Guide

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Vital Statistics

Title	Web Publisher's Design Guide for Windows
Author(s)	Fahey, Mary Jo and Brown, Jeffrey W.
Publisher	Coriolis Group, Inc.
City	Scottsdale, Arizona
Copyright	1995
ISBN	1-883577-61-6
Pages	432
Price	$34.99

Title Web Publisher's Design Guide for Macintosh

Author(s) Fahey, Mary Jo

Publisher Coriolis Group, Inc.

City Scottsdale, Arizona

Copyright 1995

ISBN 1-883577-63-2

Pages 406

Price $34.99

Tricks of the Graphics (Web)Masters

Do not be put off by the mind-boggling ugliness of the cover of the Web Publisher's Design Guide! This book, which is available in two parallel versions for the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, will be highly useful to every beginning Webmaster and Web site designer.

The Web Publisher's Design Guide starts off with a quick introduction to HTML tags, document hierarchies, and navigation aids. That level of information you can find almost anywhere. The body of the book, however, is devoted to detailed instructions on how to use industry standard tools such as Quark Express, Adobe Photoshop, and DeBabelizer to process images and create special effects. Here are the headings from just a few successive pages:

Creating a "banner graphic" or "splash screen"
Linking a thumbnail GIF to an external JPEG
Wrapping text around a photo
Controlling text wrap with HTML
Fading an image into the browser background
Creating a tiled background
Creating a "full bleed" photo background with larger tiles
Creating a silhouette on an image background
Creating a drop shadow
Creating a blue duotone with Photoshop

Even if you get just one of these techniques from this book when you need it instead of having to figure it out the hard way, the book will have more than paid for itself.

The last part of Web Publisher's Design Guide discusses the preparation of image maps, animation, video clips, 3D graphics, and sound clips, and the configuration of Web browsers for the various helper applications that handle special data types. The book also includes pointers to Web on-line tools, popular public domain or shareware graphics tools and editors for the Mac and PC, and Web or FTP sites for downloading.

Each version of the book comes with a machine-specific CD-ROM. The Macintosh CD-ROM just contains a folder of icon and button bitmaps and a score or so of public domain/shareware programs such as Clip2GIF, Fetch, FlattenMooV, GIFConverter, Imagery, JPEGView, SoundMachine, and Sparkle. These programs are all easily obtained from the Web or user groups, so the CD-ROM is essentially superfluous. The CD-ROM for the Windows book, on the other hand, reflects a great deal more effort on the part of the authors and adds significant value. It offers a large number of graphics tools and Internet utilities, along with a variety of buttons, icons, and clip art including sound and video.

-- Ray Duncan

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