Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal on the cover of Programming .NET Web Services is a boatbill heron. The boatbill heron is native to Central and South America. It is distinguished by its large, wide, flat beak, which is shaped like an upside-down boat. It is a nocturnal creature and does most of its hunting for food in swamplands, but lives in trees. It's diet consists mainly of small fish, snakes, and worms. The boatbill heron is shorter and chunkier than it's heron relatives, and is usually brown or gray, with black markings near the top of its head. Mary Brady was the production editor and proofreader for Programming .NET Web Services. Norma Emory was the copyeditor. Claire Cloutier and Mary Anne Weeks Mayo provided quality control. Johnna Van Hoose Dinse wrote the index. Production support was provided by Derek Di Matteo.

Ellie Volckhausen designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Riverside Natural History, Volume IV, Birds. Emma Colby produced the cover layout with Quark-XPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

David Futato designed the interior layout. This book was converted to FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is Lucas-Font's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6. The tip and warning icons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Mary Brady.