Head First Web Design
An excellent book introducing many concepts of web design in a friendly way making this an excellent choice for those wanting to start learning how to design web pages.
My Rating: 
Pros
- Includes many practical ideas for designing a site to meet your client's visitor's needs.
- Shows the benefits of doing preliminary planning on paper
- References many web sites that provide useful assistance
- Covers many different aspects of design.
- Even includes a section on business and how to quote on doing design work.
Cons
- Seems to think screen resolution is important and completely ignores browser viewport size.
- Suggests some ridiculously small paper and card sizes.
- Can't spell "complementary".
- Some colour wheel example have light and dark terms reversed.
Description
- First Edition: December 2008
- 463 page paperback
- Published by O'Reilly Media
- ISBN: 0-596-52030-1
- A Brain Friendly Guide
- Authors Ethan Watrall and Jeff Siarto
Review
For the most part, this book is an excellent introduction to web design allowing you to learn by doing. The biggest flaw is the author's considering screen resolution to be extremely important when what they in fact should be referring to is browser viewport size since knowing that all visitors are using 1600x1200 pixel screens is no help if most of them put their browser and email program side by side on their screen giving a maximum width in the browser of about 775 pixels.
Apart from the obsession with screen size the remaining flaws that I found in the book are really extremely trivial and probably wouldn't even be noticed by most readers. The screen size issue is the only one that would have any affect the actual design process which this book covers in an extremely thorough and practical manner. I particularly liked the way that the early part of the book highlighted the importance of getting the design worked out properly on paper before starting to enter anything into the computer.
Overall anyone who is not already an experienced web designer will benefit greatly from the practical material this book provides.
