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The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Beauty for the Web
Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag
Review: The book is inspired by the enormously popular CSS Zen Garden site. It's a beautiful full-color guide which reveals what is possible with CSS design.
Containing loads of full-color spreads of Zen Garden sites, it demonstrates the creative potential afforded by CSS-based Web design.
Authors Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag are leading lights in the world of Web design. She, Molly, with more than 30 books under her belt, and he, Dave, as the creator of the legendary CSS Zen Garden project.
The book includes six major sections, each of which contains six unique Zen Garden designs, all of which can accessed via the Zen Garden Web site.
The Zen Garden pages may be at the cutting edge of graphic design, but they are not at the cutting edge of CSS usage. The site specifically asks submitters to stick with CSS1 and CSS2 properties that are widely used, and with just a few exceptions that's what most of them do.
Looking at the Zen Garden can be a double edged sword. On the one hand, it's outright inspiring to see what can be done, but on the other hand it can be equally disheartening because those who design those pages are both good coders AND talented graphic artists. If you're not a talented graphic artist, with at least a little bit of artistic "touch," chances are you won't be able to create a page as beautiful as those featured in the Garden. Frequently, it is mentioned that the Zen garden is a place to go to see what CSS can do, but this deserves qualifying with that it really shows us what a talented ARTIST can do with CSS.
Perhaps an important sidenote to remember, lest we think that it is knowledge of CSS, alone that creates a stunning page. Not quite so. Artistry creates a stunning page. CSS allows you rebuild a graphic design as a fluid, flexible, accessible, scalable, source ordered, SE friendly, usable web site
Synopsis
Proving once and for all that standards-compliant design does not equal dull design, this inspiring book uses examples from the landmark CSS Zen Garden site as the foundation for discussions on how to create beautiful, progressive CSS-based Web sites.