The heyday of web design?

I've already written about the CSS Zen Garden (see my March post entitled Web Designers Rejoice), the website devoted to changing the way people view and design web pages. A companion book published this Spring completes the picture in a way never before attempted. To marry CSS, traditionally the realm of the programmer as opposed to the web designer, with the principles and elements of design, is a major breakthrough in contemporary web design. In The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web, Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag take the website Shea launched in 2003 and contributions made to it to discuss design theory, from typography, imagery, shape, texture, colour, balance, and contrast, together with design practices; specifically, how Cascading Style Sheets can be used as a highly effective design tool.

This book is not for the novice, new to either CSS or graphic design programs such as Photoshop or Fireworks. Although it touches on some basic CSS topics, such as typeface, font size and image formats, it also addresses complex CSS, including floats and positioning, fixed vs. liquid layouts, cross-browser issues and solutions, and child and adjacent selectors. The sidebars are numerous and provide not only tips and tricks but also important links, downloads and bug fixes. More than a coffee table book for your clients to leaf through, this book is an inspiration (as is the website that inspired it); it not only shows us what can be accomplished in web design, first visually on the web and now also in print, but it also spurs us to push our CSS-based web designs to the max. This book is revolutionary. Thanks, Molly and Dave!