Even now, when a surprising number of clients in the corporate world appear to believe the myth that the dotcom crash equals the end of the internet, I still encounter graphic artists who want to add web design to their skill set.
      They always have two questions—what is the best web design application, and which is the best book? Neither question can be answered in the singular—design requires a suite of products, and the choice of books is a highly personal matter.

Once There Was One
In the early days of the web, the one book you could recommend with impunity was David Siegel’s Creating Killer Web Sites. Siegel is out of the web design business now, and his book is an historical curiousity. The hacks and workarounds designers had to resort to back then should not be applied under any circumstances nowadays.
      There is a new equivalent to Creating Killer Web Sites, and its author is more than the present-day answer to David Siegel. He is Jeffrey Zeldman, and Taking Your Talent to the Web is the one book I would gladly recommend that any transitioning designer buys first off. It tells it like it is, warts and all, without hype and oversimplification.
      Zeldman does not shy away from any of the unpleasant truths and nor does he encourage designers to assume web design will be as easy as transferring their Quark skills to some webbish equivalent.

A Medium In Constant Flux
The printing industry has barely changed since the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. Desktop Publishing (DTP) was its last big advance, and that was in the mid-eighties when Pagemaker first appeared on the Mac.
      Web design, on the other hand, is in a state of constant evolution, and that can be a daunting prospect to traditional designers. Web standards are in continuous reinvention and ongoing application to the web environment. The software tools still leave much to be desired, although they are undergoing continuous improvement.
      Even worse is that the web designer has to resort more to her own knowledge and rely less on the tools than print designers. As good as Dreamweaver is now, I never use it without a copy of BBEdit open beside it. DW’s CSS editor leaves a great deal to be desired, and is next to useless without deep knowledge of CSS anyway. BBEdit 6.5 now has very good CSS editing capabilities, leaps beyond those of DW’s odd little editor.
      Another situation unique to the web, that newcomers often find troublesome, is the increasingly grey boundary between designers and developers. If you are going to seek employ at one of the large web agencies where job specialisation reigns, you might get away with only knowing how to lay out a web page design in Photoshop.

No, Your Product
But in most cases you will need to have at least an overview knowledge of the nitty gritty of traditional web design—CSS, HTML and its replacement XHTML. If you are lucky, you will hand all the coding work over to a webmonkey. Yes, they really are called that.
      Should you be following the newer and more exciting path of designing for Flash, then the division between coder and artist is so blurred as to be virtually nonexistent. In either case, you will be a far better designer if you acquire as much knowledge of programming as possible. Although nobody is asking you to learn to be a Java programmer—beware of any job advertisement that asks for a web designer who does Java.
      Such mention of Java in this context is a sure sign the employer, or their agent, barely has a clue. Java is a very different beast to JavaScript, to which it is no relation, despite sharing the letters J, A and V. Having been through the mill of looking for a new job myself, I can attest to how many job ads, and local recruitment agents, manage to confuse the software engineers who build programs with the designers and developers who make websites.

Qui Etes Vous, Jeffrey Zeldman?
Zeldman is one of the most highly respected designers, and writers, working on the web today. He has regular gigs in the Adobe website and Photo District News, contributes to MacWorld, runs Jeffrey Zeldman Presents, cofounded the influential Web Standards Project, and is Creative Director and Publisher of the best online magazine for web designers, A List Apart.
      Jeffrey Zeldman also presents at numerous web design conferences, and in between all this mostly unpaid web community activity he works as a web designer in Silicon Alley, Manhattan. He is one of those rare birds, a designer who has as much respect for writing as for the design that styles its presentation. His knowledge of both is vast and deep. Any book by him is bound to be an event, and so it is.
      If you are a designer contemplating the move to the web, or adding web skills to your income-earning armoury, you owe it to yourself to buy Taking Your Talent to the Web. Zeldman tells the unvarnished truth. Heed his advice in all things.

The Book:

• Title: Taking Your Talent to the Web: A Guide for the Transitioning Designer
• Author: Jeffrey Zeldman
• Publisher: New Riders
• Publication Year: 2001
• Pages: 426
• Illustrations: Monochrome
• ISBN: 0735710732
• Rating: 5

• Splash Screen
• Designing for the Medium
• Where Am I? Navigation & Interface.
• How This Web Thing Got Started
• The Obligatory Glossary
• What is a Web Designer, Anyway?
• Riding the Project Life Cycle
• HTML, the Building Blocks of Life Itself
• Visual Tools
• Style Sheets for Designers
• The Joy of JavaScript
• Beyond Text/Pictures
• Never Can Say Goodbye