Painting the Web - Catching User's Eyes - and Keeping Them on Your Site

Catching User's Eyes - and Keeping Them on Your Site

Are you convinced that only professionals with expensive tools and years of experience can work with web graphics today? This guide tosses that notion right into the trash bin.

Painting the Web is the first comprehensive book on web graphics to come along in years, and author Shelley Powers demonstrates how readers of any level can take advantage of the graphics and animation capabilities built into today's powerful browsers. She covers GIFs, JPEGs, and PNGs; raster and vector graphics; CSS; Ajax effects; the canvas object; SVG; geographical applications; and more—everything that designers (and non-designers) use to paint the Web.

More importantly, Shelley's own love of web graphics shines through in every example. Not only can you master the many different techniques, but you can also have fun doing it.


Topics in Painting the Web include:

• GIF, JPEG, PNG, lossy versus lossless compression, color management, and optimization
• Photo workflow from camera to web page, including a review of photo editors, workflow tools, and RAW photo utilities
• Tricks for best displaying your photos online
• Non-photographic raster images (icons and logos), with step-by-step tutorials for creating popular Web 2.0 effects such as reflection, shiny buttons, inlays, and shadows
• Vector graphics
• Web design for the non-designer
• An SVG tutorial, with examples of all the major components
• Tips and tricks for using CSS
• Interactive effects with Ajax such as accordions and fades
• The canvas object implemented in most browsers
• Geographical applications such as Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps, with programming and non-programming examples
• Visual effects such as forms and data displays in table or graphics

Graphics are not essential to the web experience, but they do make the difference between a site that's simply functional and one that's lively, compelling, and exciting. Whether you want to spruce up a web site, use photos to annotate your stories, create hot graphics, or provide amazing displays for your data, this is the book for you.


Author:
Shelley Powers has been writing about technical topics—from the first release of Java to the latest graphics tools—for more than 12 years. Her recent O'Reilly books have covered the semantic web, Ajax, JavaScript, Unix, and now the world of web graphics. She's an avid amateur photographer and web graphics aficionado who enjoys applying her latest experiments on her many web sites.

Themen:

• Computeranimation
• Computergrafik
• Web Design