How Should I Use This Book?

The average Web site has a starting point, otherwise known as the home page; from there you can jump anywhere into the site by selecting a major section and browsing through the content it contains. Or you can use the search function to find the specific content you're after. Or you can just click at random and see what sorts of goodies you can find deeper in.

This is the model we've chosen for the book; there is no right or wrong way to use it. You might choose to start at the beginning and read it cover to cover, or you might jump to a chapter that feels particularly relevant and use it as a starting point. You may read this book as non-linearly as you wish, and approach each design in any order you choose.

The book is broken up into two major portions:

• The first chapter discusses the building of the Zen Garden, as well as meat-and-potatoes topics like proper markup structure and designing for flexibility.

• Within the second part, which makes up the bulk of the book, there are six major chapters. Each examines six great Zen Garden designs and ties them together with a common theme revolving around a major design concept, such as typography. By exploring the challenges and problems solved within these 36 designs, you will learn major Web design principles as well as the CSS layout techniques they employ.

Here is a brief outline of the seven major chapters.

Chapter 1, View Source

An overview of how the CSS Zen Garden came to be and how CSS has evolved over time; discussions of proper markup structure and design.

Chapter 2, Design

Basic design elements and how to apply them on the Web. Color theory, proportions and positioning, relationships between type and photography, and using Adobe Photoshop and CSS harmoniously.

Chapter 3, Layout

The nuts and bolts of building complicated CSS layouts. Columns, floats, and positioning schemes.

Chapter 4, Imagery

Using images to enhance your layouts, and how to generate them. Image replacement, graphic file formats, and how to find imagery source material.

Chapter 5, Typography

All things type; font limitations on the Web and how to work around them. Including font sizing, font-face selection, and image-based type.

Chapter 6, Special Effects

Where to go once you've mastered the basics. Advanced CSS effects to filter style for different browsers, create new and flexible layout techniques, and work around technical limitations with clever code.

Chapter 7, Reconstruction

A peek over the shoulders of six designers to find out how they do it. Selected designs are rebuilt within this chapter, detailing steps along the way. Watch as the principles from the other five chapters of the book come together for the full effect.

As you see, we've packed as much good stuff as we could between these covers to make The Zen of CSS Design the most comprehensive resource about modern standards-based visual Web design available today.

We hope you'll find the book as enjoyable as it was to write.

Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag
August 2004