Pop Art Blog

David Allen, the “personal productivity guru” featured on the cover, brings us his guide to “the art of stress-free productivity.” It’s a quick read, and after thinking it over for a few days, I’ve come to the conclusion that people reading this book will fall into one of two camps. First, there will be the people who find it revolutionary, and then there will be the people who read the book and say “Well, duh.” If you’re the kind of person whose... Read More...

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel wrote this self-professed sequel to The Cluetrain Manifesto , focusing on blogging in the business world. As you might expect if you’ve ever read Scoble’s blog, the book clearly advocates blogging for companies, but they also point out some of the most common pitfalls and reasons not to blog (such as if you have something to hide). If you’re already a blogger, most of this will seem self-evident, but if you’re trying to craft a blogging policy... Read More...

Having already written a book introducing readers to the web standards movement, Dan Cedarholm returns to cover more advanced material. While his first focused on markup and basic scenarios like grocery lists, this book focuses on CSS and accessibility. In particular, he explores how to let a web page flex around things like large font sizes or lengthy headlines without breaking - hence, bulletproof. While this material is all certainly all available online, this is a handy reference to some of the... Read More...

SelecTrucks Center Sites We launched two new Center Sites in November. Kansas City was a challenging design, with lots of absolute positioning, which caused a few problems when IE7 came out. The client was really excited about the puzzle theme. Birmingham is, I think, one of the best looking designs we've done. The diagonal navigation is really sweet. Updates to existing sites We helped out several clients with minor updates to their sites. In one case, we redesigned their homepage to emphasize... Read More...

In the introduction to this book, Andy Budd writes “There are an increasing number of CSS resources around, yet you only have to look at a CSS mailing list to see the same questions popping up time and again.” In that sentence, he’s neatly summarized this book. The material contained here is certainly available elsewhere, and will be nothing new to power users, but if you’re looking for a handy compendium of fairly advanced techniques, you’ll get a lot from this book... Read More...

Dan Cedarholm has written a very nice book introducing the reader to the concept of web standards. Unlike Zeldman’s book, which is nearly all theory, this book is heavily focused on markup techniques, with some basic introduction to CSS. Each chapter presents a variety of scenarios, such as how to mark up a grocery list. Several techniques are discussed, and the advantages or disadvantages of each are explained. If you’ve been in the web standards game for awhile, there’s nothing... Read More...

If you want to be a successful musician, you don’t just pick up an instrument and learn to play, you also study music theory. Similarly, if you want to be a successful web designer, you need to learn theory as well as code. Where most books cover code and technique, this book is the definitive guide to the theory of the web standards movement. Having co-founded the Web Standards Project during the height of the browser wars, Jeffrey Zeldman has been at this longer than most of us, and in this... Read More...

Eric Meyer , known in the web community as the Godfather of CSS, has written several more technical books about CSS for O’Reilly, but this book, as well as its sequel, are intended as a more practical, hands-on set of tutorials. In both books, he presents a series of common scenarios such as adding a calendar to a web page, or styling a press release, and walks you through how to use CSS to apply a design to them. While this is informative, it’s not really very useful. Once you read this... Read More...