Rating: 
Summary: Digital Art Historian
Review: A new group of cutting-edge Web designers are changing the face of the Web, embracing its quirks. Like a new-age digital art historian, Curt Cloninger traces the influences of past masters on the current masters of Web design. Cookie-cutter corporate conformity is out. Morphing the masters is in.Cloninger covers 10 new underground Web design styles, with names like SuperTiny SimCity, Mondrian Poster, and HTMinimaLism. He traces the roots of these styles to the past. He shows current masters of each style, how to perform some of these techniques, and which commerce projects apply for each style. After reading this book, you'll expand your design vocabulary. The idea is to create a compelling experience through great design. Branding matters when selling products. The "usability legalists" say that "an elegant design that is unusable will fail." Cloninger agrees but proposes this corollary: "a perfectly usable site which lacks elegant and appropriate design style will fail." He says that the Jakob Nielsenizing of the Web, avoiding "bad usability" at all costs, has fostered an entire generation of safe, bland, copycat Web sites that "are about as engaging as a book on usability testing methodologies." Cloninger is out to shake things up. He says that to succeed a site must have a "focused narrative voice, an angle, a plan, a consistent point of view to unify its disparate elements and give it a cohesive personality." To Cloninger, creative visual design is an integral part of this site-building process. Inbred conservative copycat design is boring, so Cloninger explores the personal sites of today's leading Web designers. What's wonderful is the way he classifies these styles, relating the present design style to the past with great insight and humor. Roll over Mondrian, tell Kandinsky the news. I really enjoyed this book. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Very thin on visuals, examples, ideas & techniques (content)
Review: A promising idea : find common design themes from the best of the net and provide a portfolio of design ideas for each. Unfortunately, this book entirely fails to deliver on all counts. For each of the ten arbitrarily chosen 'styles' Mr. Cloninger has picked, he provides only *very* few examples of each. This is meant to be a book with a wealth of inspirational ideas? -- what are we meant to be looking at? Of the pages with ANY pictures on at all, most have a SINGLE screengrab PER PAGE! As most chapters only discuss a small handful of sites many of these images are from the same site too.
The choice of examples is suspect too, the design of some of them is just terrible. Others like MTV2, have been in every web publication since well before their launch. The consideration of just how Form is to complement/bow to/mostly ignore Function is an integral part of every web design but, when wanting VISUAL design ideas I just really dont need to see screenshots of Jakob Nielsen's site. Too many of his styles, for example "Pixelated Punk" and "Gothic Organic" have little commercial use. Others, like the "Mondrian Poster" style, are so profuse that it would have been of more creative use to show those who break as well as make the rule.
The design of the book itself is terrible(although the cover itself is great). The text is oversize and pads out the book, the layout is unimaginative and practically the same every page. Original ideas are few and techniques we are tutored with are of the level of tiling background images and pattern-filling in Photoshop. I fail to see where the use of this book may be, perhaps, to a web/design novice wanting to make their first homepage. Eye-candy from the Underground? I really don't think so. Not inspiring...
Rating: 
Summary: Eye candy for creatively-dehydrated web graphic artists
Review: A very good inspiration source. A very good design reference.
Great visuals, great text.
A whole lot of screenshots of cool websites saved my time on surfing. But rather than just looking at hip designs and trying to figure them myself, half of the text in Fresh Styles guided me through each design, with highly readable explanations, so I know how to take advantage of them in the correct manner. The other half of the text are just the author's snipes at web usability theorists. He shouldn't have worried that much about being different to other web theorists, because usability is not a religion, I can buy both Jakob Nielsen's book and Curt Cloninger's book. No problem. Curt Cloninger
The author may not be a world-class web designer (his personal website is a copycat of one of his favorite websites, while his commercial website is not fresh at all) and the sample websites do not represent the whole web (some are just his friends' unpublished mockups), but the courage to dissect and summarize the hippest styles into 10 categories is truly remarkable and useful. Buy the book. Read the book. But apply as necessary.
Rating:
Summary: Super, especially the HTMinimaLism section
Review: As a big fan of simplicity, I was thrilled to see the "HTMinimaLism" style get it's due. Vitually all the web design books out there today skip over this absolutely critical design style -- the style of simplicity, the style of reason, the style of speed, success, and efficiency. Sure, the HTMinimaLism style isn't the sexiest of the styles, but it works and that's the point. Kudos to Curt for speaking the real truth. And, thanks for opening my eyes to 37signals.com -- the primary focus of the HTMinimaLism chapter.
Rating:
Summary: This book gave me a "not so fresh" feeling...
Review: As a web designer I look for visual inspiration for fresh ideas. I don't need a bunch of wordy analytical explanations to know what looks nice, so this book was disappointing to me. If you're interested in that stuff, the book may be useful... but if you're like me and just need something to spark the creativity, I would not suggest this book-- there are minimal visual examples. Instead, I would recommend "www.color" by Roger Pring, and "Web Design Basics" by Glenn Fleishman. Both offer pages and pages of great visual examples to inspire you.
Rating:
Summary: This book gave me a "not so fresh" feeling...
Review: As a web designer I look for visual inspiration for fresh ideas. I don't need a bunch of wordy analytical explanations to know what looks nice, so this book was disappointing to me. If you're interested in that stuff, the book may be useful... but if you're like me and just need something to spark the creativity, I would not suggest this book-- there are minimal visual examples. Instead, I would recommend "www.color" by Roger Pring, and "Web Design Basics" by Glenn Fleishman. Both offer pages and pages of great visual examples to inspire you.
Rating: 
Summary: Fresh Styles? Hardly...
Review: Cloninger does a great job here of touting the over-designed web and bashing the usability factors (he states that the IBM site is flawed, because it attributed to print emulations from an outside marketing firm; wrong - IBM was done inhouse and subjected to usability and focus group testing). I would strongly suggest really understanding the nature of usability before trash-talking it. The web is all about cognitive responses to interactivity - not cool, hip looking "hard to use" nonsense! Your absolutist motivations will be your undoing! But you did well in showcasing some wonderful stuff, and you're approach towards livening up the web with fresh stuff (except for entropy8 - so old man...) is a noble one indeed. I'm gonna give you three stars...
Rating:
Summary: brilliant
Review: Curt captures all the newest styles and puts them all in this one book. Not only does he give you fresh styles to branch off of but he gives you techniques and how to do sections all throughout the book. Most books only show the design but Curt breaks down the design technically the way in which i have never seen in any other book. A must buy for any web designer!
Rating:
Summary: A Sign Of The Times
Review: Curt Cloninger has amassed a great array of graphic designs that typify today's level of creativity on the web.
Taking the form of case studies, with luscious imageery and fantastic hints and tips thrown in - I found this book invaluable. This book is ideal for anyone trying to break into the game of webdesign or even print-based graphic design, and I am quite sure that those of us who have been in 'the game' for quite some time, will find we look at the sites we know so well with 'fresh eyes'.
Rating:
Summary: Great stuff, but a totally uninspiring book
Review: Eye Candy from the Underground was first a site, loosely categorized collection of links. And it was great. But the book disappoints. It's small and flimsy and hurts the graphics and visual effects it's supposed to be about.
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