The Web Designer's Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design Paperback – October 6, 2008

This is very nice to have on hand to check out the latest trends, designs, themes and much more. It will help with producing ideas when going to design or build your website for a customer / client or even yourself. It provides a large amount of inspirations for all the sites out there based on the theme, trend etc.As a recent graduate from Art Institute of Pittsburgh with a degree in graphic design. This has helped me visualize a great way of conducting different ideas for building my own portfolio website and also what is out there based on the different companies / businesses etc.Great product and super ideas!

This book is a good overview of site design elements.In spite of it's title, I think it's more related to color usage in design, including many palettes, than web design elements as a whole.This book is helpful to start the ideas rolling if you are needing inspiration or are designing for a color/style you haven't tried before. I always like to see a few examples when I'm thinking of a new design.The issues I have are mainly that the book has become a little outdated in it's usage of color and design elements. Web design moves pretty fast and I think any dead tree book is going to be playing catch up no matter how fast they can get it out the door. Still it's a good reference for ideas, just don't copy them too closely or you'll be a bit out of touch with what's current.Still, I knew all this and still purchased the book as a tool. Nothing more.Pros:Good overview of many designsGreat categorization of styles,colors themes, etc.Useful reference with easy to find examples.Nice images and paper quality.Cons:Published a couple years back and needs to be updated.I would have liked to see palettes for each design just below the example photo rather than at the end of the section where they aren't particularly linked to any of the examples.

I am not a web designer; far from it. I wanted a website to promote my photography and I've been struggling to get the right look for months. My boyfriend gave me this book for Christmas and I love it. It's always within arms reach when I'm working on my website. The book is organized by style, by color, and it has the color codes at the end of most chapters, saving tons of time.I was able to create a simple website that I love, the cost was minimal, and I get lots of compliments on my work.

I got this book about a month ago. It doesn't take long to read through it all. Overall I thought it was just ok. Sometimes the photos were a little small and you couldn't really see all the detail but there are also some cool website examples here. I think it could be sort of useful in terms of creative layouts but I didn't feel that all the examples were very good. Some of them I just thought were kind of ugly. I know it is just an idea book and I do think that it does present some good ideas and a wide range of styles, just not very elaborately. Overall it's an ok book and I think I'll keep it in my library as it could be somewhat useful if you are needing a little inspiration.

This book does not teach design principles. It inspires design ideas. If you want that extra little help to spark ideas rather than going to only Print examples for an online media -- this is what this book is good for. It holds true to its description, "you can find inspiration for layout, color, style and more". The "and more" may be too wide open for some. It is one person's perspective on what constitutes "good" and this doesn't bother me. I need a place to research ideas and then put my own knowledge of design principles into practice. This book provides good research for idea sparks.

I am very pleased with the sheer number and quality of the websites showcased throughout the book. It will not only inspire me to design better websites but it will also serve as a great tool when meeting with clients.I agree with the others that the screenshots are a bit small and the details are hard to see, but other than that I highly recommend this book for anyone going into web development.

I've been updating the company website and wanted to really give the look a 21st century jump start. This book is more geared for somebody who is a professional web designer. I was under the assumption that it would have information on how to achieve the trend and styles as well, but instead is more of a picture book. The web pages showcased are really well done and are probably a great source of inspiration, but this has basically become a coffee table book for me personally.

I'm not a web designer and that may make all the difference in how useful this book was for me.My biggest complaint was the teeny-tiny photographs. I realize there's a balance between showing quantity and detail. I was wanting more detail so I could see how the larger parts of the website were being set up on the page.My personal interest is usability for audiences. And I'm looking for a handful of solid layouts that I can recommend for small business owners who need functional attractive websites. This book seems to be more about provides lots of ideas for designers. Some ideas looked solid others seemed to be purely for aesthetics and effect rather than for anyone to actually get anything done (finding information, buying something, etc.)I guess it comes down to why you're getting this book. For my purposes, it didn't help at all.