It’s finally here! My new book, Speaking in Styles: Fundamentals of CSS for Web Designers, is ready for purchase from Peachpit, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Borders. I wrote it for designers who want to learn how to describe their Web work without having to get bogged down in all of the jargon. It’s a simple, straight-forward approach that I’ve used with great success in classes I’ve taught over the past couple of years.

From the introduction:

I wrote this book for designers of all stripes—visual, interactive, user experience, information architecture. However, it is really for anyone who wants to learn how to use CSS.

Speaking in Styles is split into three sections and includes three appendixes:

• Part 1: A Web Primer
  Defines what makes a Web page, introduces some tools you will need to build one, and dispels some popular myths about designers and CSS.
• Part 2: CSS Grammar
  Covers the nuts and bolts of how to create style sheets and apply them to a Web page, including the important vocabulary designers need to know.
• Part 3: Speaking Like a Native
  Follows the creation of a simple Web page design, emphasizing the best practices you should use.
• Appendixes
  Includes all of the code for Part 3; the length, font, and color values you use with CSS; and a list of common fixes for dealing with the bugs in Internet Explorer.

Want to win a copy?

Speaking in Styles

To celebrate the publication, I have 3 copies to give away today. Be either the first, fifth or tenth person to tweet a link to this page with the code #SISContest01, and I will send you a copy of Speaking In Styles. It’s that easy. I’ll check the key word #SISContest01 to find the winners. Only one tweet per person will be counted, my tweets are not counted, and the judge’s decisions (mine) are final.

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Thursday, after a last minute fire drill when it looked like Chapter 4 was going in the book almost unedited due to version control issues, Speaking In Styles is finally off to the printers and out of my hands. I can now relax a bit, and catch up on all of my other projects.

I am proud of what I have done in this book. It’s the first time I did all of the book design—even did the cover, which is extremly rare. This one is all me, but it did not happen with out a lot of help and some pain.

For my next book, which I’ll talk more about in a week or so, I’m thinking I will embrace InDesign more fully. Not only will I use the new Adobe CS4 book capabilities, but I’ve started playing with InCopy for writing and hope I can convince my editors to embrace it. We had a lot of issues working in Acrobat, but I just can not go back to using MS Word.

Any advice my readers can give on InCopy would be most appreciated.

[posted from my iPhone, so please excuse the tyypos.]

Tags: publishing by jason
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