Book of resolution

Web design books come ten a penny at the best of times, but just before Christmas comes a flurry so strong that if it were snow we’d be knee deep in it.

At first glance it’s often impossible to tell the pearls from the swine, but the publisher is often a good indicator, and if German publisher Die Gestalten Verlag’s recent design titles are anything to go by (everything from the work of Swiss designer François Chalet to a book by Sheffield’s finest, DED Associates), then Web design book 72-dpi, released in the UK this week, should definitely be categorised under pearl. So is it?

The first thing that strikes you about 72-dpi is its printing and colour repro, both traditionally rather poor in this area because of the two problems inherent in turning Web visuals into print visuals; namely the lower resolution used for screen-based design (72dpi as opposed to the much denser 300dpi used for print), and the fact that colours are assembled differently for the Internet (RGB) than print (CMYK).

As you can’t simply up the resolution from one to the other, Web design books usually resort to postage stamp-sized comic-strip style visuals or pixelated and distorted larger scale ones. The book 72-dpi makes up for this problem with impressive colour repro, achieved through its being printed in hexachrome, a six-colour process that ensures an accurate reproduction of the original RGB monitor colour system. Coupled with a good stock and landscape layout, the immediate sense is of a Webdesign book that’s a cut above the rest.

The book is unusual in its approach to content, too. It has the usual editor-chooses-bunch-of-sites format, but those editors, Vicky Tiegelkamp and Jan Rikus Hillman (both ex-MetaDesign, Web designers and editors at Germany’s highly respected culture magazine De:Bug), chose a wide range of inspired and inspirational Web work, then invited a number of the Web’s most idiosyncratic and inventive designers to submit accompanying “chapters” on pretty much anything they wanted.

Entries on everything from the designer’s personality to site usability, visual codes and language, operation versus use, and structure and strategy came in from, among others, Matt Owens at New York’s Volume One, David Lindermann and Jeremy Abbett at Fork Unstable Media, Stinkymeat creator Ansgar Hiller, Eddie Pak at New York’s The Office For Fun And Profit, and Kingston-based Other media man Jonathan Briggs.

In their intro, both Tiegelkamp and Hillman strive to make clear their direction for the book; a move beyond what they call “Flash-masturbation”, and the superficiality of commercial Web design to explore the work of the few who are taking risks to “realise their potential as ‘designers’, not as traditional graphic artists in the context of the Web”. Given all that, you might be tempted to judge elements of the book’s layout and design, by Birga Meyer, as gimmick masturbation.

A case in point is Meyer’s employment of a loose-leaf card that you are supposed to line up along lines protruding from the spine of the book to get more information on the sites and people involved in their design and development.

It’s a quirky idea that could have worked were it not for the fact that most of the lines in the book don’t make it beyond the spine.

The information in the sites and contributors indexes are equally less than clear, with Meyer’s use of arrows coming across like the kind of onanistic pursuit Tiegelkamp and Hillmann so despise in Web design. Still, it’s a minor quibble. A gratifying number of UK sites in 176 pages of great Web design, coupled with a valid departure from the process and appreciation approach, make 72-dpi a bit of a gem – if not quite a pearl.

72-dpi is published by Die Gestalten Verlag on 27 November, priced £27.99