Product Description

Once websites were simple and easy to navigate, but didn’t contain much useful information. Today, they are packed with information and oftentimes are equally packed with complex navigational systems that confuse more than they help.

Many top Web designers have discovered that there’s an art to creating sites that are both vastly informative and simply organized. Their trade secrets are revealed here. This book explores the thinking and methodology behind the creation of 24 simple yet content-rich sites. Here, you’ll find insights into how each designer began creating a structure, progressing to wire-frames that illustrate each site’s internal organization, and on to screen captures that showcase the final product’s simple and accessible design.

With tips from successful professionals, as well as inspiring visual examples, this is a book that no Web designer today can afford to be without.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1208225 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-31
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781592531301
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:

About the Author
Stefan Mumaw was the owner and senior creative director of Big Man Creative, a California-based graphic design and Web development firm. He is currently a senior creative director for The Brainyard, an ad agency in Costa Mesa, California. He lives in Aliso Viejo, California.

Customer Reviews

Concepts behind cool minimalist designs
This book is a collection of case studies, like Jakob Nielsen's Homepage Usability. The explanations from one chapter to another tends to be repetitive, and not all of the 24 websites are really-really cool, BUT unlike Jakob's book that just attempted to make long distance intepretations, this glossy hard cover book takes us into the design processes complete with each designers' thinkings, from the early paper sketches, the sitemaps, and the final screenshots. And those insights are good enough for me buy this book.

Accepting the challenge of wedding style to usability
Whether you are designing professionally or just for your own sites this attractive volume is worth mining for some usefully creative design strategies you may not have considered. Stefan Mumaw not only offers his perspectives on the sites but shares original drafts, schematics, ven diagrams, and other structural strategizing notes of the sites? creators. You may work better in some of these modes than others, but at least you?ll be encouraged to see new possibilities for working through complex designs.

The twenty-four example sites discussed are corporate but certainly not staid - even those required to be quite serious. The clients range from retail mountaineering equipment to winery to interactive education and even to ad agency; the types of issues, the complexity of information, and necessary ?feel? of the site are therefore quite different. But author Mumaw is taking you back to the *process* with which the sites? designers had to match design and structure to content and mission.

Note that this is NOT a book about *how to* make a design function (i.e., no HTML, DHTML, Flash, etc.), but on how to conceptionalize *what* functions / designs one needs: taking a complex business or organizational message or process and putting an attractive and effective face on it. As a designer, you?ll probably admire some of the results more than others, but I think *almost anyone?s* design savy could benefit by seeing how the experienced artists here tackled some interesting design challenges.

It was good for the short period of time it covered
I liked the way the book showed different case studies, starting with the designer's sketches, sitemaps, thoughts, and comments. The biggest problem with the book is that almost all the sites covered are in a style that has not aged well. These sites are mostly the Flash-based mini-sites that barely cover 1/3 of your screen, and are usually not very content heavy. I don't think that's the way sites are being built today, and in the future. So, really, while it's a nice looking book, it has little relevance to today.