Sexy Web Design

After a introduction where the author explains the idea behind the title -- no, it wasn't picked essentially to stand out from a sea of safe and generic "hi-tech" book covers -- the book explains how it will be covering the design process. The four steps: research for your website, thinking about navigation, aesthetics and, finally creating the site itself (deliverables) are covered in order.

Research for your website looks at both the considerations such as the client having a specific "look" in mind, existing branding and other factors as well as the process of finding inspiration.  The research phase involves figuring out what are the requirements for the website, though creating a website brief and finding a proper balance that works for your client. There is also a section on locating inspirations, be they other websites or elements in nature. To help out,  this chapter points out a few pieces of software to help keep track of items like photos yo have found inspirational.

The structure section talks about creating a rough layout where you can figure out what elements are going to go on the page and their approximate placement. They suggest creating a check-list of elements for each page. This chapter is about creating the overall site structure, including a site-map, basic wire-frames and deciding on global elements and basically figuring out how the site is going to work overall.

Getting closer to actually building the site, the navigation chapter looks at how the pages will be laid-out. Here all the aspects of a page are covered from navigation to forms.This is probably one of the most useful chapters in the book as it has plenty of examples from other websites of different approches to navigation elements.

Chapter five is on the aesthetics, and is probably what most people think of as web design. There's several mentions of Beautiful Web Design here. Things like the golden ratio and it's use in layout are covered, as well as basic colour theory and typography. Like the other chapters, several useful websites are mentioned here.

Finally, the Deliverables chapter covers converting an exiting PhotoShop file into a workable web page. This section shows how to set-up mock-ups with functional parts. While it's more of a general overview than a step-by-step (experienced PhotoShop jockeys will be able to follow along) there are some useful points, like setting up a style-sheet that will lead to consistency as other people might be implementing your design.

Only the Deliverables chapter really deals with PhotoShop and HTML. Readers looking for a CSS tutorial or creating and slicing a layout in PhotoShop are not going to find that here, and might want to check out some other SitePoint books for this information. Jason Beaird's Beautiful Web Design is mentioned several times. The book's greatest strength is it explains things in steps and backs it up with plenty of examples from good-looking websites. The layout is, like most Sitepoint books, is very clean and makes an easy read.

Basically Sexy Web Design as about designing a web site that is not only functional, but fun to use, enjoyable to look at- sexy. To this end it breaks the process down into four areas: research, structure, navigation, aesthetics before finally creating the website on the computer. By the end of the book readers will have a series of steps they can follow that will make their work easier.

Published: 21st May, 2009