Fancy Form Design
| 2009-10-01 00:00:00 | | 0 | Web Design
Forms' - is there any other word that strikes as much fear into the hearts of web designers? Not any more ,,.
Fancy Form Design is a practical hands-on, full color book that follows the process of creating visually stunning yet usable web forms, from start to end. The book covers all design elements from planning the form's purpose and interface through to mastering markup, applying style with CSS, and adding interactivity and visual effects with JavaScript. By the end of the you'll will have the code, and wisdom, they need to build fancy forms of their own.
User review
Does Not Meet Expectations
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Forms make money. People who make effective forms make good money.
The industry needs a lively book to bring together the best practices and lore of making seductive forms. Why do I use the term `seductive?`
If you make form-based Web application interfaces or Web sites for a living then you have encountered this problem: Your task is to collect, say, 10 pieces of information from a user who might rather be doing something else. In order to get these 10 simple bits of data, you may have to get the user to sift through hundreds, possibly thousands, of options. How do you do this without overwhelming the user? How do you flow each user seamlessly through pitfalls they are best left unaware of? How do you do this for complex, multi-screen workflow situations?
Beyond knowledge of markup, styling, graphics editing, programming and usability issues, we in the field also must practice ways to present all this to our co-workers and managers to insure the integrity of the final product.
This book presents the basics in a solid way but it's not going to get you very far with those interesting challenges.
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User review
1/3 of what the book should have been
The book is quite short, with large type, and pretty photos of very simple forms. It is about as realistic as Peter Pan. The forms are very very very very simple, so keeping the forms pretty and clean is a snap -- in the book. But what do you do with real-world forms that have lengthy, multi-line questions? Multi-part questions? Questions where part a changes what happens with part b and c?
I like Sitepoint publishers a lot, but I wasted my money on this book. Be advised.
User review
A lot of words
This book has 170 pages of extensive description on the profound philosophy of forms.
Information is very pristine and lacking in depth and most of it is just long pages on `This is the perfect web form`. Ok well,,. where do I go from here? Instead of providing full proof, wholesome description on how to implement the features examples (which are very nice indeed) the writer goes on and on on what's the perfect form. HTML/CSS code snippets begin to show at the penultimate chapter, where JavaScript validation is barely touched in the last chapter.
Overall, this is a very nice book to cover what a form should look like, so I give another star. But as far as implementation goes, type `form design` in Google and you'll get better results, I promise.