Hi;
Which is the best book for hands on web 2.0 User interface development?. I would like a book that can help me learn the CSS needed to make good looking highly userble web 2.0 interfaces with rounded corners , buttons with gradient, elegant and simplistic not overcrowded , good color matching and themes e.t.c. I know what i want. i just want to have a starting point.
I will appreciate any recommendations.
regards. Josh
Look for some inspiration @
for example.
Hi Josh, its a good question, but one that I suspect that will be even more rapidly outdated than normal!
HTML 5 is right around the corner and will totally redefine the answer to this question as there will be so much more functionality built into specifications that does what you want out of the box as opposed to the hackery required at the moment.
I recommend it is better to spend time looking into the functionality available today from the HTML5 and CSS3 specs in most browsers and seeing if you can achieve your goals with the compatibility already built into IE/FF/Chrome before spending time learning how to do it with HTML4 and CSS2 with a lot more difficulty! I can't think of a good book I have see yet on HTML5/CSS3 because it is so new, but there is lots of info online at places like smashing magazine.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/08/04/designing-a-html-5-layout-from-scratch/
For usability there are these basic rules of thumb. (old site) http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html
Site Points 'The Principles of Beautiful Web Design' is a good book for learning 'design', color theory, layout, typography etc. http://www.sitepoint.com/books/design1/
If you want to learn how to hack html elements into things they were never meant to be then there are plenty of blogs articles on that. A-list apart has many articles on css techniques, I suggest you read some of these.
As someone else has mentioned, HTML5 will soon make tasks like styling buttons, rounding corners, shadows, reflections, animation etc a lot easier.