Great Web Typography

Rating:
Summary: More than I expected
Review: Defintely one of the best web design books I've read in a while. My strengths lie in the coding side of web design, so I purchased this book to learn more about typography- as you would expect from the title. I am happy to say that I learned much, much more. You'll find lots of great typography, graphics, and page layout tips. Also, the author conducts some excellent interviews with other professional designers which lead to even more useful tips. Bottom line- a great value, and a must-buy for the beginning to intermidiate web developer.

Rating:
Summary: More than expected...
Review: I bought this book to learn more about the graphical/visual side of web page layout.

Such as:
- "Which font types and sizes are best?"
- "How do I best divide up whitespace?"
- "How should my headline fonts differ in size and shape from my content text?"
- "What color combinations should I use?"

This book answered those questions and many, many more!

Wendy Peck presents sound methods of typography, page balance, proper use of colors, proper use of graphical text and overall layout in an easy-to-understand way. I was seeing great results on my current project after reading just the first section of this book.

Her design ideas can really help your web sites cross the line from "good" to "professional".

Another surprise in the book is her advocacy of using CSS for content styling. Her in-depth section on CSS styling of links and menus is awesome.

As a "one-person-web-design-freelancer", that needs to know how to do it all, this book is a great addition to my library. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: More than just typography
Review: I found this book to be an extremely worthwhile purchase, even though I didn't find the last third of it very useful.

As someone who was previously familiar with HTML and has worked as a computer programmer for several years, this book very much helped me move beyond the coding aspect of HTML and think more about how to design better looking pages.

Typography is part of the book, but it also covers many other topics like layout, design, how to do rollover menus, and cascading style sheets.

The book does have some inaccurate information. For example, the author said that Comic Sans MS wasn't a safe font to use because it might not be on your user's computer, but according to Microsoft it's on everyone's computer (even Macs) unless they are still using IE 3.0 and Windows 95.

This book is highly recommended if you have experience coding web pages, but your web pages are real ugly and don't have that professional look. This book will help you achieve the professional look.

Rating:
Summary: Better than I could have ever imagined
Review: When I bought this book, I was hoping for a great reference book to teach me a bit about picking good web fonts. I thought maybe it could give me some ideas for the sites that I'm working on. This book has done much more than that. Many times when I'm working on a site, something just doesn't "feel" right. The only way that I've been able to fix that has been by redoing the entire site until it does "feel" right. I didn't understand what was going on. Peck has taught me, by using countless real-life examples and full-color screenshots from other professional sites, what was wrong. My wife tells me every day how much better my pages have started to look. Her words: "Your stuff looked good before, but now it looks professional." Buy this book; read this book; do what this book says.

Rating:
Summary: Better than I could have ever imagined
Review: When I bought this book, I was hoping for a great reference book to teach me a bit about picking good web fonts. I thought maybe it could give me some ideas for the sites that I'm working on. This book has done much more than that. Many times when I'm working on a site, something just doesn't "feel" right. The only way that I've been able to fix that has been by redoing the entire site until it does "feel" right. I didn't understand what was going on. Peck has taught me, by using countless real-life examples and full-color screenshots from other professional sites, what was wrong. My wife tells me every day how much better my pages have started to look. Her words: "Your stuff looked good before, but now it looks professional." Buy this book; read this book; do what this book says.