Product Description

We’re been trawling the web looking for the most interesting and well-designed portfolios—of designers, photographers, artists, illustrators, and motion graphic pros—to profile the creators working behind the scenes. The focus is not so much the work presented, but the way the portfolios are designed. Presentation, elegance, and style are key, and the individuals and studios featured in this guide represent the best the web has to offer. Entries include screenshots, designers’ contacts, tools and content used (HTML, Flash, XML, music, video, etc.), awards received, and cost in hours per website for creation and maintenance. With designers hailing from 33 countries, from the United States to Croatia to Japan, this selection of portfolios demonstrates how today’s best designers are pushing the limits and experimenting with innovative ways of navigation outside of corporate contexts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #662127 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-01
• Original language: German, French, English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Turtleback
• 191 pages

About the Author
The editor: Julius Wiedemann was born and raised in Brazil. After studying graphic design and marketing, he moved to Japan, where he worked in Tokyo as art editor for digital and design magazines. Since joining TASCHEN in Cologne, he has been building up TASCHEN’s digital collection with titles such as Digital Beauties, 1000 Game Heroes, Animation Now!, and TASCHEN’s 1000 Favorite Websites.

Customer Reviews

it is not the topic, but how it is presented, which is described here
If you are searching for ideas on how to layout your website, one method is to look through this book for inspiration. Wiedemann has combed through many websites and summarised those that he considers to be elegant and well designed.

Perhaps you might not agree with all the choices in this book. But there is enough variety to increase the chances that you can adapt an idea that someone else was skilful enough to implement well.

Nice for inspiration
As an amateur photographer, some years back I'd built up a simple site to show my images. It is pretty stale so I wandered the net looking what other photographers were doing. While it is easy to just wander around, it is time consuming for this research aspect.

Looking at the latest web design books at the local bookstore, this one was titled exactly what I had in mind. Fortunately Wiedemann has wandered far and wide to gather this collection. Sitting on the couch, it is easy to thumb through and mark those you may want to see. Clicking on these is like a best-of and the sites are fantastic as far as content and creativity. While not every one will match your preference, there are more than enough that will.

Many of the examples play heavily on Flash programming so it may be a bit much for casual site builders. To me, this book is a nice reference for those who want a site but may not have an idea which direction to pursue. Seeing the layout, this may be beneficial when farming this aspect out. You can say..."I like this feature on this site...can we integrate something like it in ours?" So by picking-chosing various features, one can develop a pretty nice atmosphere for viewers.

You'll easily spend countless hours in fruitless wandering to maybe turn up 2-3 sites in an hour that really grab you. Then try and dig through your history tab frantically hoping to recall one particular site with a feature you liked. This book for the price is a no-brainer...BUY-IT! For me, the overall value in design layout, content, Flash ideas exceeds the price paid in multiples.

The book's production values are first rate too. Well worth $10.

Good, sort of...
I reviewed another one of these books I bought at the same time as this one and it basically is the same review. The very most of the sites featured were done in Flash, which looks real good and inspires design ideas, but is very uninteresting for a web designer like me. These books should be called "Best Flash Portfolios" it would be more realistic.