The Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design

5 Comments on “The Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design”

1. Review by Jason Beaird for The Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design
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   As a web design author, I often get asked what books I recommend. This of course depends on who is asking and what they want to learn, but one book I often pass along is Curt Cloninger’s original* Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground from 2001. The specific design examples are quite outdated now, but to me, that book was a pivotal source of inspiration at a time when everything online seemed to be either boringly corporate or awkwardly amateur. Cloninger helped me to see the web differently; I learned to creatively tag design trends and techniques so that I could mentally catalog them for my own use.

   This process of mentally classifying design inspiration has become a critical part of my growth as a designer as well as my ability to explain web design to the non-designer. In The Web Designer’s Idea Book, Patrick McNeil takes the task of cataloging current trends and styles to a meticulous new level. Within the book’s 256 pages, McNeil has sorted over 700 screenshots of stellar site design by color, design style, type, theme, element and structure. Within these 6 chapters, he has defined a total of 75 individual design categories. Some examples of these categories include: Blogs, E-Commerce, Minimalist, Wood, Pink & Blue, Muted, Rays, Gradients, Tabs and Massive Footers. Then, within each of these seemingly exclusive categories there are a few paragraphs explaining when, how, and why it should be used along with an average of 8 or 9 example screenshots.

   Obviously, reading this book will not teach you to be a great website designer. What it will do is expand your design vocabulary and train you to break down your favorite sources of design inspiration into bite-sized chunks that you can use in your own work. I spent a good portion of the cold, rainy weekend reading through the text in each category and pouring over the pages of screenshots. I saw quite a few familiar examples of good design, but was amazed by quantity of inspirational sites that I had never heard of. If I had one complaint about the book it would be that I wish all of the screenshots were full-size, or perhaps if they couldn’t be, that there was an archive of the full-size screenshots posted somewhere on the web. Regardless, I’m sure the book will be a huge source of inspiration for me for years to come. Then, when it is too old to serve as inspiration, it will most certainly be an excellent resource for web design history.

   * As I was writing this review, I discovered that Curt Cloninger just released a sequel to this book: Fresher Styles for Web Designers: More Eye Candy from the Underground You can be sure that I’ll be reviewing this book as well in the near future.

2. Review by Keith Donegan for The Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design
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   This book does just one thing, it showcases beautifully made websites and the author does this extremely well. The Web Designer’s Idea Book is a must have for any web designer/graphic designer out there to have real world examples of good design on hand.

3. Review by TexasAggie for The Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design
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   This book has a huge selection of design style examples, all organized in a very intelligent way. The print quality is very good. As a reference book, this is a must have for any web designer looking for some inspiration.

4. Review by Brian Martin for The Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design
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   This book is pretty much what you think it is, about 200 pages of site thumbnails. Interspersed throughout are write-ups on the category that is being presented and a little intro by the author.

   The actual sites themselves are pretty good. I wasn’t blown away by them, but was impressed and inspired. I keep a folder of bookmarks of sites that I think look good, categorized by “theme”. This is a nice little handheld thing to quickly scan through to get some quick ideas or some quick inspiration.

   I do wish some of the thumbnails would have been bigger, the pages a little larger, or the book itself a little taller. Some of the pages are stuffed with thumbnails and it can be a little difficult to discern what that header really looks like, or what that button really says.

   Also, some of the themes could have used a couple more sites. Some categories like blogs are literally 2 pages. If you’re gonna have a whole category I’m sure you can find a few more pages of nice sites to fill.

   With all that being said this is a good book for 15 bucks. Especially if you are a web designer of any sort, this is a great resource to just have and flip through right before a new project.

5. Review by K. Le for The Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design
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   This is a great book for ideas and inspiration. For people looking for principles, and how to design web pages, this is not the book for you. I would recommend “Head First Web Design”. It is a very good book, with easy to understand principles.

   As the name states, this is an idea book. I think it’s unfair that people give this book a 1 star because they didn’t bother to read the title or description of the book. This book delivers as promised. It indexes different web page design examples into categories such as type, design style, theme, color, etc. I bought this book as a quick source for design inspiration and it plays that role perfectly. I highly recommend this book to all web designers looking to expand their creativity. There is also a 2nd edition to this book which will be coming out later this year. I already have it on my wish list.