The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web

Proving once and for all that standards-compliant design does not equal dull design, this inspiring tome uses examples from the landmark CSS Zen Garden site as the foundation for discussions on how to create beautiful, progressive CSS-based Web sites. By using the Zen Garden sites as examples of how CSS design techniques and approaches can be applied to specific Web challenges, authors Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag provide an eye-opening look at the range of design methods made possible by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). By the time you've finished perusing the volume, you'll have a new understanding of the graphically rich, fully accessible sites that CSS design facilitates. In sections on design, layout, imagery, typography, effects, show more and themes, Dave and Molly take you through every phase of the design process--from striking a sensible balance between text and graphics to creating eye-popping special effects (no scripting required). show less

I bought this book because I was a fan of the website and I wasn't disappointed. The designs are absolutely beautiful and there is discussion of both the technical side of creating them in CSS and a bit of the artistic side of designing them. Whenever I'm feeling a bit low on inspiration on a project, I pick this book up and flick through it because it always gets the ideas flowing.

I love this book. It's nice to deconstruct a few of the killer designs from the very inspirational CSS Zen Garden. It's one thing to learn the technology, and it's an entirely different thing to learn how to apply it in meaningful and innovative ways. This book is about the latter - how to put the technology to use in an artistic and elegant fasion.

I love this book: it collects together a diverse range of website designs (using CSS) and then dissects the CSS code. It's inspirational and practical.

A simply fascinating book about web design. I've never really read a web or UI design book so this was very new to me. I was initially looking for a more technical introduction to CSS but really enjoyed this one anyways. I don't think you'll get as much out of it if you don't know some CSS already. The different designs presented here are just amazing. I hope to read more books of this sort in the future.

An outstanding exploration of one of the internet's coolest social experiments: good for any level of XHTML / CSS experience. If you know how to code an unordered list, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up.

Simply inspirational, this book challenges you to think about what you can do to improve your code.