Books

Learn Design with Flash
Poor Richard's Creating Ebooks: How Authors, Publishers and Corporations Can Get into Digital Print
Poor Richard's Writing Powerful Web Copy: Improve Your Message and Turn Visitors into Buyers
300 Incredible Things to Learn on the Internet (The Incredible Internet Book Series)
Perl (Fast & Easy Web Development S.)
.NET Security Framework
Photo-graphics (Electronic Workshop S.)
Color for Websites (Digital Media Design)
Max Hits: Building Successful Websites (E-pro S)
Interactive Broadband Media: A Guide for a Successful Take-off (Edition Accenture S.)
Distributed Communities on the Web: 4th International Workshop, Dcw 2002 Sydney, Australia, April 3-5, 2002 Revised Papers (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Web, Web-Services, and Database Systems: Node 2002 Web and Database-Related Workshops, Erfurt, Germany, October 7-10, 2002, Revised Papers (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Networking: ICN 2001 - First International Conference on Networking, Colmar, France July 9-13, 2001 Proceedings: Pt. 1 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Wireless Internet Access Over GSM and UMTS (Signals & Communication Technology S.)
Technologies for E-Services: Second International Workshop, Tes 2001, Rome, Italy, September 14-15, 2001. Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Management of Multimedia on the Internet: 4th IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Management of Multimedia Networks and Services, MMNS 2001, Chicago, IL, USA, October 29-November 1, 2001 Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
From QOS Provisioning to QOS Charging: Third Cost 263 International Workshop on Quality of Future Internet Services, Qofis 2002, and Second International Workshop on Internet Charging and QOS Technologies, Icqt 2002, Zurich, Switzerland, October 16-18, 2002, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science S.)
Hypermedia Systems and Applications: World Wide Web and Beyond
Mobile Object Systems Towards the Programmable Internet: Second International Workshop, Mos'96, Linz, Austria, July 8 - 9, 1996, Selected Presentations and Invited Papers (Lecture Notes in Computer Science S.)
The Internet for Radiologists
Multimedia Applications, Services and Techniques: ECMAST '99 European Conference, Madrid, Spain, May 26-28, 1999 - Proceedings 4th (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems: International Workshop, NGITS '99, Zikhron-Yaakov, Israel, July 5-7, 1999 - Proceedings 4th (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: Third European Conference, ECDL '99, Paris, France, September 22-24, 1999, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems: First International Symposium, FoIKS 2000, Burg, Germany, February 14-17, 2000, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Internet Cool Guide: Sports - A Savvy Guide to the Hottest Web Sites

Average customer rating:

A great book if you want it - turning lemons into lemonade
Insulting
Wretched
Pathetic...
This one taught me alot...

Learn Design with Flash MX
Kris Besley , and Linda Goin
Manufacturer: Wrox Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Graphic Design | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

General | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

General | Software | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

General | Software Books | Custom Stores | Stores | Software
ASIN: 1904344003

Book Description

You are not alone. Learn Design with Flash MX employs a unique class-based approach to learning with the goal of establishing core, generic design skills. Each chapter represents a discrete lesson covering a distinct topic of design, and in each 'class' we smoothly blend theory and practice with plentiful practical examples, and a class project that runs through the book to reinforce the learning in an integrated, real-world context, using Flash MX as the illustrative vehicle. Written from the perspective of the design course's tutor, the context is that of a Design 101 course taught in a classroom environment, where the students act as mouthpieces to ask the common questions that beginner designers are sure to ask. You'll get to know the students in the book and follow the development of these characters as your own skill and expertise evolves too. Learn Design with Flash MX covers the fundamental design principles and skills that every designer needs to master in order to create attractive, aesthetically pleasing work to a professional standard.

This book addresses the shortfall in solid, traditional design knowledge in significant segments of the web design community - specifically, people using Flash. It assumes that the reader is a novice in design terms with no exposure to formal web design principles or training, and little or no Flash experience. If you're coming to Flash completely from scratch, this book will give you a broad and solid introduction enabling you to create aesthetically pleasing, well laid-out sites and content, which will help you learn the trade and get access to the professional web design world. This book should even appeal to those who've read one (or more) entry-level texts on Flash; in fact, it'll complement other tutorials by providing the rich general design context and background that other introductory books lack. This book will teach readers to develop and implement their creative ideas through an understanding of what professional designers in all media see as the prerequisites: composition, color, contrast, light, texture, motion, typography, and many others.

If you're interested in learning design skills following a structured path, or if you've been using some of the tools of the trade, like Macromedia Flash, for some time but have never had the opportunity of a solid tutorial, this introductory level book is for you. Learn Design with Flash MX will answer all the essential design questions that other books ignore - the questions you're too frightened to ask. By addressing the core design skills from a beginner's perspective, in the context of Flash MX, readers will gain a rich, solid, and structured understanding of the what, how, and why's of the fundamental principles of good design.

From experienced self-taught designers who've ever thought, "I wish I knew how to design things more effectively or more coherently ", to anyone who's looked at a cool design and said, "Jeez, I wish I'd taken a design class in school!", this book will show them the money! Anyone in the web design arena who wants overall design skills, and who needs a solid learning vehicle that will help them acquire and embed those skills; anyone who's felt that their lack of knowledge about formal design processes has got in the way of liberating their creative ideas effectively; anyone who's started a creative project in a rush, doodled around, and lost their way… this book will provide the structure that they might lack. Readers will come away from this book with:

A rich, solid understanding of the concepts and basic processes that will enable them to explore further with a degree of confidence that they didn't have before
Insights into universally applicable design processes and techniques
An understanding of how to implement these principles in Flash MX

"Learn Design with Flash MX - the missing link between creativity and technology"

Customer Reviews:

A great book if you want it - turning lemons into lemonade.......2005-10-22

I read all of the previous reviews here and agree with all of them, including the ones that say in effect that the book is very poorly written. I bought the book based on a recommendation for an Amazon "list" written by a graphic designer, so I was ready to like it. I didn't at first. I re-read the reviews here and was then ready to chuck it, when I decided to give it one more chance. That's when I realized how to turn Learn Design with Flash MX into a great learning experience. I imagined myself in a required course with a professor with a terrible sense of humor and six incredibly obnoxious students.

Armed with a pink highlighter, I began reading with the mindset that I was going to get as much as possible out of this course, poor text, unfunny professor, and immature students be darned. This active learning experience made it much easier to read and remember the material. Where the book is fuzzy or incomplete isn't hard to figure out and wherever I needed to I wrote notes in the margins. (With the help of a few other design books as reference.)

A specific example? The author talks about "three" ways to utilize economy in design and then mentions only two. I found the third way buried in a question further down the page.

The graphic example about economy in the book is extremely good though. It's a photo of a group of people assembled to watch some operation being performed on a train. It shows someone with a rope on top of the train and someone below connecting something to the rope. In the example, the extraneous parts of the photo (trees and even the ground) have been removed to bring out depth and to point to the central characters and actions. The characters, the train, and the track remain. It works.

Insulting.......2003-11-06

I have a high opinion of the Friends of Ed series. However, after suffering through 1.5 chapters of this "screen play", I will forevermore scrutinize any FOE book before purchasing. If you enjoy silly little shows like "Saved by the Bell" then this book is perfect for you. Cheesy jokes and dialog are the rule in this 500 page sleeper. I gave up in chapter 2 because, let's face it...I have better ways to spend my time than panning for gold like an old forty-niner, digging through the endless chatter of the "characters" for any golden nuggets of useful information.

If you are beginner, I recommend buying a book on the theory of design alone and then buying a book on Flash

Wretched.......2003-07-29

This is a good idea, utterly ruined. It's a good idea to try to teach design as a sort of narrative with a cast of characters, but the writing here insults everyone's intelligence. And surely a book about visual design could have gotten a better layout and design treatment! Just look at the cover alone...

Sure there's some good points about visual design here, but you'll get as much out of Robin Williams "Non-Designers Design Book" or many other intro-level texts. This garbage drags down the Friends of ED series as a whole.

The best example of this kind of thing--learning design and programming together--is John Maeda's amazing "Design By Numbers" book, which teaches the basics of visual design and the basics of programming at once. Maeda--a respected designer/programmer--puts on every page simple examples, clearly presented and illustrated with restraint and thoughtfulness.

By the way, the "teaching through narrative" style is done really well in the series of "Who's Afraid of C++", "Who's Afraid of Java" programming books.

Pathetic..........2003-04-09

The physical layout of this book is absolutely HORRIBLE. It is a perfect example of everything a technical book designer SHOULD NOT do: Pages and pages of unrelenting gray text; extra-narrow margins on all four sides so that even more text can be squeezed onto each page; no useful headers to distinguish one page from another; no visual anchors to allow readers to go back and locate something later.

And then there's the author's writing style... the book reads like a script from one of those "duck and cover" films produced by the US government during the 1950s.

I can't imagine how this foolish book made it past an acquisitions editor and a production team. My opinion of "Friends of Ed" dropped dramatically when I saw this thing.

This one taught me alot..........2003-03-05

I really enjoyed the way this book is put together. It is easy to follow and understand. As I am mainly a programmer, I was able to follow and learn from this book on how to design layouts and graphics.

You cannot go wrong with this one.

Average customer rating:

Learn Design With Flash MX
Linda Goin
Manufacturer: WROX PRESS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N7C91S

Books:

Books