March 8th, 2010 
Admin 
- ISBN13: 9780321553843
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Best Price at Amazon
Product Description
Liquid or fluid layouts change width based on the user’s unique device viewing size. These types of layouts have always been possible with tables but offer new design challenges as well as opportunities when built with CSS. This book, for experienced Web designers with some CSS experience, outlines how to do this successfully.
Designers will learn the benefits of flexible layouts and when to choose a liquid, elastic, or hybrid design. They will learn not only how to build a liquid layout from scratch using standards-compliant and cross-browser compatible (X)HTML and CSS, but will also learn how to design and slice their graphic comps in a way that makes flexible design achievable. This book will show designers that flexible layouts do not have to be visually boring or difficult to build when planned and built correctly. Even those who do not intend to build liquid layouts can use the concepts and techniques taught in this book to improve their fixed-width CSS designs, because they will learn how to design for the inherent flexibility of the web medium, instead of the rigid qualities of print media or table grid-based layouts.
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Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS
Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS
Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS teaches you exactly what the title would suggest. Zoe Mickley Gillenwater walks you through the theory and logic behind designing with CSS to create fluid design choices.
The book is very heavy in theory, so much so that the 9 chapter book has 3 chapters of pure theory before ever getting to the meat of how CSS can help you create the designs and layouts that Zoe suggests are best for each situation. Finally in chapter 4 you will get a brief exposure to the life of CSS in the design process, but it is short lived.
Don’t get me wrong, theory is a very important part to design work, and development in general. You must first know where you are going and why you are going there, or you will certainly end up in a place that you never intended. However, I felt that this book was a little heavy on the theory. More examples would have been nice as well.
A little about Zoe. Zoe is the design services manager at the University of North Caronlina Highway Safety Research Center, and leads the design and development of dozens of information-rich web sites. She focuses on aesthetics, usability, and best practices.
Overall the book is a short read, and in the end you will surely understand why you will pick between fixed, fluid and elastic designs, and if you are careful you will even know how to program those styles with CSS.
You can pick up Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS at Amazon.com or at the publisher’s website newriders.com
Rating: 3 / 5
After having read multiple articles from Smashing Magazine, A List Apart, and other blogs that have articles on both liquid and elastic layouts, I was really blown away with how much information was in this book. It definitely pays tribute to how much time Gillenwater must have invested in writing ‘Flexible Web Design.’ It’s a truly excellent CSS book, and I’d recommend it to anyone who tries to use CSS Frameworks for laying out web pages instead of hand-coding. Out of all the CSS books I’ve read, this one was by far the most informative.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought this book while I was reading Teach Yourself HTML, so you can tell I have nearly no experience with web design. No matter, I followed the instructions and changed my sites from fixed sizes to scalable in a day.
This book is AWESOME!
I know that my site isn’t going to win the WEB-E awards, but it has graphics, audio files, tables, photoshopped pictures and is something I was completely incapable of doing before I picked up this book. I had been thinking of taking college courses because I wanted to get into the web world and it seemed inaccessible. I majored in Cultural Anthropology, so I’m a bit behind the technology wave.
The sites I created were creationsbycrouch and huknowsphotography so far.
It isn’t accessible any more. My sites are up and I’ve offered to make more sites for friends. I grow and learn daily and I’m having fun!
I also bought Teach Yourself PHP and MySQL. I haven’t started down the PHP path yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
Books like this one are amazing, because they let completely unschooled people like me into the web. The drawback, as mentioned in one of the reviews, you need to know HTML code to apply the information from this book. It assumes you already know how to put width into your HTML and that all you need to know is how to make it fluid.
Rating: 5 / 5
Great book. Hard to put it down. The explanations are very concise and enlightening for a sometimes confusing area of web design. Good pointers. Quick to get to the nitty gritty of elastic and liquid design. Just what I was looking for.
Thanks for the help.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a fantastic book (very well written too) for those wanting to know how to properly create layouts that really work and accommodate for your target users. If you are serious about your interface layout, then this book is very well suited and is a must read. The author clearly discusses the proper usage/application of the various layout techniques like fixed, liquid and elastic. It’s great to also know that accessibility is not forgot and taken into consideration wherever relevant. A great author who knows how to teach, guide and develop clean and clear layouts.
Rating: 5 / 5