My favourite area of web development is CSS (Cascading Style Sheets - used to format web pages). I’m thoroughly enjoying reading The Zen of CSS Design, by Dave Shea and Molly E Holzschlag, at the moment.

This book is easily the most "coffee table" of my extensive computer book collection. It is based on the groundbreaking CSS Zen Garden website. This site takes the exact same standard HTML coded web page and makes it look completely different on every page of the site just by changing the CSS. Anyone can suggest a design for inclusion and there are now well over 100 completely different versions on the site. It’s a great place to go to see the power and beauty of CSS.

This newly published accompanying book illustrates what CSS has to offer, by taking 36 of these designs as case studies. The approach works well. The designs have been split into 6 chapters, each focusing on a particular aspect of CSS design: design, layout, imagery, typography, special effects and the coding process itself.

It is fascinating to find out where each designer took their inspiration from, the story behind their design and the challenges they faced. It is easy to forget the blood, sweat, tears and testing that are part and parcel of putting templates together when looking at the stunning result on the website alone.

While all this talk of the joy of CSS may be of interest only to those involved in the nitty gritty of web development, the great thing about CSS is that it is easy for non-technical users to reap the benefits. Bloggers, in particular, can take full advantage. If you are using any popular blogging software, it should be possible to transform the look of your site by replacing one file. Just choose the look you want from one of the blog template sites around. BlogSkins is a good resource whatever your blog type, while MovableStyle caters specifically for Movable Type users like me.

Wordpress users are also in luck. Alex King organises Wordpress theme competitions, and the winners of the version 1.5 competition were announced just a few days ago. You can even zip through the impressive entries using a theme browser. Even the ever stylish AnthonyFinucane.com is currently trying one of them out for size.

CSS can bring inner peace to all our lives

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 at 9:02 pm and is filed under blogging, books, css. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.