Visual Communication on the Web

This book is more than the typical web design manual. Visual Communication on the Web integrates practice with theory, providing technical how-to alongside the theoretical, aesthetic, and historical framework you'll need to create thoughtful, functional, and beautifully designed web pages. While interactive exercises in the book explore the technical side of design, concise introductions relate history, design principles, and visual communication theories to the practice of designing for the web. Videos and links embedded in the accompanying Interactive eTextbook will give you additional hands-on web design experience.

By working your way through this text from start to finish, you will learn how to think visually about communicating online and also how to think analytically about assembling code to display your message. Over the course of 14 chapters, a series of exercises helps you create and revise one dynamic web page while learning new coding and tools. Predictable mistakes are purposely included, so you'll learn how to "fix" the project while working on it-a crucial skill for anyone working with code. By the end of this course-in-a-book, you will have created a web page with a centered container div, a Lightbox image gallery, and an external style sheet using HTML, CSS, and copy-pasted and modified code.

The Interactive eTextbook provides concise videos of burrough detailing some of the more complex step-by-step instructions and original chapter introductions by Lester. Users of the eTextbook may also engage in a traditional assessment exercise to test their knowledge of new material. For those who aren't reading electronically, many of these resources are freely available on the blog, viscommontheweb.wordpress.com.

With easy-to-follow instruction and lucid theoretical introductions, Visual Communication on the Web makes an excellent companion to xtine burrough's Digital Foundations and Net Works as well as Paul Martin Lester's Visual Communication: Images with Messages.