Hotwired Style

Having just completed a course in Web Design, and after mulling over a few dozen books in this field, I find that this book has the best advice on what works. It provides "hip" yet practical advice for laying out images and text for visual appeal and usability. One thing that has not been mentioned in the reviews here is that the book itself is well designed and laid out: electric, cool, yet tasteful. I enjoy it also as a history of the Web user interface.

I have about 30 books on the internet, of which perhaps 25% are on web design; this book, despite it's size, it the one book I will never cast aside as out-dated. Veen is not a graphics guru, nor (as far as I know) a table-meister, but his philosophy of web architecture ought to be required reading for anyone who styles themself a "internet content developer".

Great job Jeff. This book brings a clarity to web design like no other. It makes it very clear that the web isn't just pretty pictures or complex programming or plain blah interfaces. Each solution is unique, a combination of all of the above in varying degrees. A great book that adds legitimacy to the profession of web design!

Jeffrey's book is exceptional for its clear and practical explanations of how one can optimize web design to aim lower (accomodate lower-end systems) and higher. He contextualizes all the remarks by giving real-life examples drawn from his experience at Hot Wired. He gives examples of what has worked and what has not and why. The writing is superb - without extraneous details that often fill how-to books. This is a high-level how-to, that will help designers conceptualize their sites with clearer vision. If he wants to give you info on how to do something, he just says here is the code to do X. He also displays a sense of humor that is great. I read the book in one sitting and marked certain pages with stickies. I plan to refer to it from here on when I begin my site development. As a final note, I was worried that the book might be "too cool" which is sometimes how I feel about Wired. Instead it seemed only normally cool.