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Jon M. Duff is Professor of Technical Graphics at Purdue University. He is the author of over a dozen books on various graphics topics and serves as a consultant to government and industry clients such as Westinghouse and the United States Navy. He operates the WestHighland Press, where he develops a full range of traditional and electronic publications. Jon can be reached at jmduff@tech.purdue.edu.
James L. Mohler is Assistant Professor of Technical Graphics at Purdue University. He has produced interactive titles for national and international publishers and provides technical training and media services to industry through Sunrise Productions. James can be reached at jlmohler@tech.purdue.edu.
Technical Graphics at Purdue University prepares graphics professionals for electronic publication, illustration, modeling and animation, and engineering documentation specialties. You can visit the department at http://www.tech.purdue.edu/tg/main.html.
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If you're the kind of person I think you are, you've been hanging ten toes off the edge of your Web surfboard for some time now. You've been dazzled by the diversity of information-intellectual and practical, visual and auditory, technical and entertaining-all available in this virtual information space called the World Wide Web.
Or, you may be new to the Web and all its possibilities. After digging deep into funds that could have (and probably should have) been used for more mundane purposes like food, shelter, or retirement, you matched computer, software, and a service provider and now have access to the largest combination of flea market and junk mail consortium ever assembled.
At some point you become a discriminating Web browser. You know what you like, and you vote with your mouse. You start bookmark files of Web site uniform resource locators (URLs) that are so interesting, so informative, and so visually stimulating that you return to them regularly. This is sort of like me rereading my favorite John D. MacDonald novel or my wife popping Pretty Woman in the VCR for the fiftieth time.
But as you spend more time on the Web, you also learn what you don't like, what irritates you, and what causes you to decide in ten seconds whoa, I'm outta here!
As you consider the topics covered in this book, you may find yourself in a position where you know Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), you understand your browser, you mentally have a good picture of the World Wide Web landscape, but the graphics you see both intrigue and confuse you. If so, this book is for you.
The Web without graphics is like pretzels without salt or Madonna without controversy. It's not that you haven't been exposed to graphics over the years; it has been most intense since your telephone bill's Internet charges began to approach your mortgage payment. Unless you are a designer by training or study, you are much like a person who has been exposed to food for most of your life but still know next to nothing about food, biochemistry, or nutrition. Your idea of nutrition may be Spam on Wonderspun with Hawaiian Punch. A power lunch is a Snickers bar and a Diet Coke. Just being exposed to food doesn't give you food knowledge. Just being exposed to graphics doesn't give you graphics knowledge.
This book takes your love of Spam and shows you how to fix lean, healthy, appealing graphical meals that you'll be proud to show your friends. This book is directed to
This book isn't a tutorial. Instead, it is a resource of visual examples you can use for inspiration. It's written so that you can jump into whichever topics are of immediate interest, or spend a little more time in dialogue with the authors.
You'll find many of the topics presented as tasks-instructions you can follow to gain a greater understanding of the role graphics play in effective Web pages.
Software and hardware people would like you to think that you need to constantly upgrade to the latest and greatest. Of course, their survival is based on convincing you that you can't live without upgrading to version 2.1.3 or to that extra 50MHz or 16MB. Who wants to be left behind?
Here's the most important point that will be made in this book:
All the really important and significant activities concerning a Web site occur off the computer. By this I mean that without the planning, analysis, and evaluation; without effective graphics and intelligent use of typography; and without pointed and cogent writing, you're simply playing around.
What equipment do you need to make effective Web graphics? Not much!
I guarantee that exciting, effective, award-winning Web pages can be created on a 386/25 computer with Word 3 and Photoshop 2. You can spend tens of thousands of dollars and still produce ugly pages that don't communicate well and leave your users lost in a link with no idea where they are or how they can get back. There is no substitute for talent. A candidate to become an effective Web designer will probably have most of the following traits:
As authors, we have made every attempt to provide you with the most current examples from the Web. However, the landscape of the Web changes daily and in the several months between original writing, editing, and production there have been, as you might expect, changes in sites and locations. In Chapter 17, "A Portfolio of Graphics from the Web," you'll find a discussion of the reasons why you might not be able to find a particular site that's referenced within these pages. Consider the examples we've included as a starting point for your own graphical adventures on the World Wide Web.
You are about to enter an exciting and challenging field where change is an integral part of everyday life. This book should serve you well in becoming an effective Web artist and designer or as a better user and consumer of Web graphics. But more than that, its instructions, suggestions, and examples should change the very way that you look at Web publication. If we have done our job well, this book will rest, dog-eared and tattered, beside your computer and not on a book shelf. And now, sit back, relax, enjoy, and get graphical!