Graphic Design Books - Page 12

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Trite and tedious 1 out of 5 stars.
24 of 39 people found this review helpful.

At every chapter in this book I thought, "Well this book's been worthless so far, but I think it gets better in the next chapter." I thought that until the last (26th) chapter, which was actually half-decent. I've never been so disappointed in a book. Any designer with the slightest bit of experience will learn nothing from this book. Nearly every piece of advice is trite ("Design principle: Use noneditable controls for output-only text"). There's very little depth or thinking beyond the completely obvious. You will learn more from any other book (on any topic) than from this book. If you've already bought it, you should skip to the chapters with non-zero value. I recommend chapter 5 (personas), chapter 16 (undo), chapter 17 (save), and chapter 26 (misc). The section on perpetual intermediates is good too.

I finished the book 10 minutes ago after a very tedious three months. I can finally put it on the shelf and never look at it again.

Editorial Review:

This completely updated volume presents the effective and practical tools you need to design great desktop applications, Web 2.0 sites, and mobile devices. You’ll learn the principles of good product behavior and gain an understanding of Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design method, which involves everything from conducting user research to defining your product using personas and scenarios. Ultimately, you’ll acquire the knowledge to design the best possible digital products and services.

The Essential Blender: Guide to 3D Creation with the Open Source Suite Blender

Roland Hess

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that is a real alternative to commercially available 3D design software. A cross-platform software package with millions of downloads annually, Blender is now one of the world's most popular 3D design tools.

Although Blender is free, it's intended for design professionals and others motivated to become 3D artists. The Essential Blender will provide you with the knowledge you need to help integrate Blender into your work and begin to master its powerful creation tools.

If you've never tried 3D design before, an introductory chapter will familiarize you with relevant terminology and concepts. If you're already experienced with commercial 3D software, The Essential Blender will get you up to speed with Blender quickly.

After a tour of Blender's 3D modeling, animation, and rendering capabilities, you'll learn how best to use Blender for these tasks:

Object manipulation and animation

Mesh and sculpt modeling and shape animation

Materials and texturing (including UV unwrapping)

Lighting and rendering

Particle animation

Character rigging and animation

Node-based composition

The book is modular in its approach, with each topic addressed independently and accompanied by hands-on tutorial sections.

The combined expertise of key members of the Blender community, coupled with the experience of editor Roland Hess, bring you The Essential Blender--the definitive guide to Blender. You'll find a wealth of 3D design information inside that will help you to unlock your artistic potential and get the most out of Blender.

Includes a complete version of Blender 2.44 on the CD-ROM. Covers Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (x86 and PowerPC), Solaris, FreeBSD, and IRIX.

Produced by The Blender Foundation. Printed and distributed By No Starch Press.

Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2007 Step by Step (Step By Step (Microsoft))

Joyce Cox, Joan Preppernau

Amazon Price: $16.49 List Price: $24.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Microsoft Press - Model: 9780735623019 Amazon Marketplace: 57 new & used starting at $9.94

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Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Microsoft -> Applications -> PowerPoint

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Outstanding Guidance! 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed the entire Step-By-Step series covering MS Office. I strongly suggest any student, curious George or researcher to pick up a copy and read it. I recently purchased MS 2007 Access, Excel, Power Point and Word set in the Step-By-Step series. The authors are concise in their descriptions without being boring and the information is invaluable.

Editorial Review:

The smart way to learn Office PowerPoint 2007--one step at a time! Work at your own pace through the easy numbered steps, practice files on CD, helpful hints, and troubleshooting help to master the fundamentals of working with the latest version of PowerPoint, including how to navigate the new, easy-to-use user interface. You will discover how to create presentation outlines, work with slide masters and slide designs, add graphics and drawings, and publish your presentations to the Web. You'll even learn how to add narrations and custom animations--and more! With STEP BY STEP, you can take just the lessons you need or work from cover to cover. Either way, you drive the instruction--building and practicing the skills you need, just when you need them! Includes a companion CD with hands-on practice files.

How to Cheat in Flash CS3: The art of design and animation in Adobe Flash CS3

Chris Georgenes

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Frustrated by the overwhelming nature of Flash?

Want to get up to speed with the program fast so you can concentrate on your animation?

Need to solve problems quickly to get work done to time and to budget?

Then 'How to Cheat in Flash' is for you!

This book is different from the rest because it shows you, step by step, how to work from the problem to the solution when creating Flash animations, from the viewpoint of an animator who has been commissioned to create a job and is working to a deadline.

It is task orientated; every example shows real life commercial work. So, it's not so much a case of 'what does this filter/tool/option do?', as 'this is the task I've been set - how do I achieve it?' The solution may involve a variety of tools and techniques; it may take many steps to complete, or only a few. The free CD-Rom includes all the files you need to put your skills into practice as you read, and much more!

It's an accessible (conversational in style), practical book and CD package which also provides artistic inspiration, a goldmine of timesaving practical tips, tricks and step-by-step workthroughs. You will wonder how you survived without it.

* Successful, bestselling How to Cheat coverage now available for Flash
* Learn a myriad of tips and tricks based on real life working methods to help you work faster and more efficiently with Flash
* Work from the problem to the solution, gaining the best possible results from Flash

Dreamweaver CS4 For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

Janine C. Warner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a Web design newbie, Dreamweaver CS4 For Dummies shows you the quickest, easiest way to get up to speed on Dreamweaver. You’ll be able to create professional, great-looking, user-friendly websites in no time at all. Take advantage of the new, more customizable interface, improved integration with Flash and Photoshop, a handy new AJAX coding feature, and Live View, which lets you see your work as you create it.

Understand Dreamweaver basics, set up your site and create new pages, and work with text, graphics, and links. You can manage, test, and publish a site, define and apply styles with CSS, coordinate your design work, add audio, video, and Flash files to your site, build a dynamic Web site, and use Dreamweaver’s database features. Know how to:

• Design, build, and deploy professional-looking Web sites
• Use Dreamweaver’s new, more versatile preset layouts
• Fine-tune styles with enhanced CSS support
• Keep your pages cutting-edge with SmartObjects
• Take advantage of the new, more customizable interface
• Understand browser differences, make the most of CSS, build dynamic sites
• Create and optimize Web graphics
• Learn to maximize Cascading Style Sheets and Dreamweaver’s Layers features for creating fluid layouts

Complete with lists of ten resources, ten timesaving tips, and ten great Web sites designed in Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver CS4 For Dummies is your one-stop guide to setting up, working with, and making the most of Dreamweaver.

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies)

Bill Buxton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Bill Buxton and I share a common belief that design leadership together with technical leadership drives innovation. Sketching, prototyping, and design are essential parts of the process we use to create new products. Bill Buxton brings design leadership and creativity to Microsoft. Through his thought-provoking personal examples he is inspiring others to better understand the role of design in their own companies--Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft

"Informed design is essential." While it might seem that Bill Buxton is exaggerating or kidding with this bold assertion, neither is the case. In an impeccably argued and sumptuously illustrated book, design star Buxton convinces us that design simply must be integrated into the heart of business--Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Design is explained, with the means and manner for successes and failures illuminated by engaging stories, true examples and personal anecdotes. In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton clarifies the processes and skills of design from sketching to experience modeling, in a lively and informative style that is rich with stories and full of his own heart and enthusiasm. At the start we are lost in mountain snows and northern seas, but by the end we are equipped with a deep understanding of the tools of creative design.--Bill Moggridge, Cofounder of IDEO and author of Designing Interactions

"Like any secret society, the design community has its strange rituals and initiation procedures. Bill opens up the mysteries of the magical process of design, taking us through a land in which story-telling, orange squeezers, the Wizard of Oz, I-pods, avalanche avoidance, bicycle suspension sketching, and faking it are all points on the design pilgrim's journey. There are lots of ideas and techniques in this book to feed good design and transform the way we think about creating useful stuff". -Peter Gabriel

I love this book. There are very few resources available that see across and through all of the disciplines involved in developing great experiences. This is complex stuff and Buxton's work is both informed and insightful. He shares the work in an intimate manner that engages the reader and you will find yourself nodding with agreement, and smiling at the poignant relevance of his examples.--Alistair Hamilton, Symbol Technologies, NY

Books that have proposed bringing design into HCI are aplenty, though books that propose bringing software in to Design less common. Nevertheless, Bill manages to skilfully steer a course between the excesses of the two approaches and offers something truly in-between. It could be a real boon to the innovation business by bringing the best of both worlds: design and HCI. --Richard Harper, Microsoft Research, Cambridge

There is almost a fervor in the way that new products, with their rich and dynamic interfaces, are being released to the public-typically promising to make lives easier, solve the most difficult of problems, and maybe even make the world a better place. The reality is that few survive, much less deliver on their promise. The folly? An absence of design, and an over-reliance on technology alone as the solution.

We need design. But design as described here depends on different skillsets-each essential, but on their own, none sufficient. In this rich ecology, designers are faced with new challenges-challenges that build on, rather than replace, existing skills and practice.

Sketching User Experiences approaches design and design thinking as something distinct that needs to be better understood-by both designers and the people with whom they need to work- in order to achieve success with new products and systems. So while the focus is on design, the approach is holistic. Hence, the book speaks to designers, usability specialists, the HCI community, product managers, and business executives. There is an emphasis on balancing the back-end concern with usability and engineering excellence (getting the design right) with an up-front investment in sketching and ideation (getting the right design). Overall, the objective is to build the notion of informed design: molding emerging technology into a form that serves our society and reflects its values.

Grounded in both practice and scientific research, Bill Buxton's engaging work aims to spark the imagination while encouraging the use of new techniques, breathing new life into user experience design.

. Covers sketching and early prototyping design methods suitable for dynamic product capabilities: cell phones that communicate with each other and other embedded systems, "smart" appliances, and things you only imagine in your dreams;
. Thorough coverage of the design sketching method which helps easily build experience prototypes-without the effort of engineering prototypes which are difficult to abandon;
. Reaches out to a range of designers, including user interface designers, industrial designers, software engineers, usability engineers, product managers, and others;
. Full of case studies, examples, exercises, and projects, and access to video clips (www.mkp.com/sketching) that demonstrate the principles and methods.

About the Author

Trained as a musician, Bill Buxton began using computers over thirty years ago in his art. This early experience, both in the studio an on stage, helped develop a deep appreciation of both the positive and negative aspects of technology and its impact. This increasingly drew him into both design and research, with a very strong emphasis on interaction and the human aspects of technology. He first came to prominence for his work at the University of Toronto on digital musical instruments and the novel interfaces that they employed. This work in the late 70s gained the attention of Xerox PARC, where Buxton participated in pioneering work in collaborative work, interaction techniques and ubiquitous computing. He then went on to become Chief Scientist of SGI and Alias|Wavefront, where he had the opportunity to work with some of the top film makers and industrial designers in the world. He is now a principal researcher at Microsoft Corp., where he splits his time between research and helping make design a fundamental pillar of the corporate culture.

* Covers sketching and early prototyping design methods suitable for dynamic product capabilities: cell phones that communicate with each other and other embedded systems, "smart" appliances, and things you only imagine in your dreams;

* Thorough coverage of the design sketching method which helps easily build experience prototypes-without the effort of engineering prototypes which are difficult to abandon;

* Reaches out to a range of designers, including user interface designers, industrial designers, software engineers, usability engineers, product managers, and others;

* Full of case studies, examples, exercises, and projects, and access to video clips that demonstrate the principles and methods.

Photoshop CS4 Digital Classroom

Jennifer Smith, Aquent Creative Team

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Digital Classroom is like having a personal instructor guiding readers through each lesson, while they work at their own pace. This book includes 13 self-paced lessons that let readers discover essential skills and explore new features and capabilities of Adobe Photoshop. Every lesson is presented in full color with step-by-step instructions. Learning is reinforced with video tutorials and lesson files on a companion DVD that were developed by the same team of Adobe Certified Instructors and Flash experts who have created many of the official training titles for Adobe Systems. Each video tutorial is approximately five minutes long and demonstrates and explains the concepts and features covered in the lesson. Coverage includes information on Adobe Bridge, Camera RAW, masks and layers, painting and retouching, and selections and layers. Jam-packed with information, this book and DVD takes users from the basics through intermediate level topics and helps readers find the information they need in a clear, approachable manner.

PowerPoint 2007 For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

Doug Lowe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Speeds the transition from older versions 4 out of 5 stars.
18 of 18 people found this review helpful.

I have used Powerpoint extensively since the first edition and know it better than most -- and I have alwasy been able to easilly adapt to the latest version. This one is DIFFERENT -- and that's an understatement. Most will think, as did I, that MS screwed up a good program. But there is genius to the new "ribbon approach" - once you get used to it. You will need focus, patience and a helper, like the "Dummies" guide. I wish they had better titles, because having it sitting next to your desk makes YOU feel like a Dummy ... bet get over it, get the book and it will speed up your transition to the new version significantly. Could have had a bit more on the "power-features" but definitely worth the money.

Editorial Review:

• New and inexperienced PowerPoint users will discover how to use the latest enhancements to PowerPoint 2007 quickly and efficiently so that they can produce unique and informative presentations
• PowerPoint continues to be the world's most popular presentation software
• This updated For Dummies guide shows users different ways to create powerful and effective slideshow presentations that incorporate data from other applications in the form of charts, clip art, sound, and video
• Shares the key features of PowerPoint 2007 including creating and editing slides, working with hyperlinks and action buttons, and preparing presentations for the Web

Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 2.0, 2nd Edition

Laurence Moroney

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Get a jump on the next release of Silverlight with early insights from a Technical Evangelist on the Microsoft Silverlight team. This guide describes how you can simplify the development and deployment of rich interactive applications (RIAs) by using Silverlight 2 tools with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft .NET Framework. RIAs are Web applications with the features and functionality of full desktop applications. Processing tasks are performed on the client, but data is stored on the server. With Silverlight, RIAs install quickly via a small, on-demand plug-in. This book demonstrates how you can easily use existing skills and tools to deliver next-generation user interfaces and media experiences. You ll discover how to begin building different types of Silverlight-based solutions, generate Silverlight applications dynamically on the server, create an XAML service, and more. The book also features a companion Web site with code samples in Microsoft Visual C# and Visual Basic .

Key Book Benefits:

* Delivers practical, grounded advice from a member of the Silverlight team, including an insider's view of the evolution of this Web presentation technology
* Describes how Silverlight 2 will simplify development and deployment of RIAs with the .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2008
* Provides context about the relationships among Silverlight and the various .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5 technologies
* Places RIAs in context for both Web and Windows-based developers
* Features a companion Web site with code samples in Visual C# and Visual Basic

InDesign CS3 One on One

Deke McClelland

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Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Microsoft -> Word Processing

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Click here for the complete DVD content that accompanies this title.

Nothing speeds up learning like personal training from a skilled tutor. With Adobe InDesign CS3 One-on-One, you get the equivalent of private lessons with author Deke McClelland, a world-renowned expert on digital graphics and design. Deke offers you DVD video with more than two hours of professional instruction and advice to accompany the book's easy-to-follow text. The book itself includes 600 full-color images, diagrams, and screenshots to illustrate every key step.

This highly popularly learning approach is quite simple: "read the book, watch the video, do the exercise". Each chapter has corresponding video lesson that demonstrates the techniques covered. The combination of text and video instruction is uniquely effective. You proceed at your own pace and work on relevant, real-world projects as you master fundamental and advanced concepts, theories, techniques, and best practices for making the most of InDesign.

This comprehensive multimedia training solution teaches you how to:

• Create professional-looking documents with InDesign's powerful text and graphic tools
• Import text from a word processor, move and scale existing text frames, and check spelling
• Use the line, pen, and geometric shape tools to draw complex graphic objects
• Apply fill and stroke, specify process and spot colors, and design custom rules
• Use Adobe Bridge to organize and manage your digital assets
• Import and modify layered artwork from Photoshop and Illustrator
• Create inline graphics and anchored objects that move automatically with your text from one page to the next
• Create, edit, and link paragraph styles, complete with nested character styles
• Apply a sequence of style sheets to format an entire document in one operation
• Build object styles with embedded paragraph styles in order to format entire frames at a time
• Use master pages to automate repeating page features
• Automatically generate a table of contents
• Compose a fully interactive document -- with bookmarks, hyperlinks, buttons, sounds, and movies -- and export your creation to a PDF file that can be played on most computers

Adobe InDesign CS3 One-on-One puts you on the fast track to becoming a real InDesign expert. Once you're finished, you'll use InDesign smarter, faster, more creatively, and more efficiently than you thought possible.