Aug
23
2005CSS Design Book Trifecta
23
2005
CSS-based design has always involved a lot of black magic. Sure there are specs and references available, but even with CSS2, which has been around for years, techniques to actually do cool stuff with it are still constantly being discovered. Learning all the different tricks and hacks necessary to piece together a killer standards-based design have involved hopping from site to site, piecing together techniques discovered by a number of talented individuals.
Recently, however, I’ve accumulated three books that go beyond the basics of CSS and really show you how to use it to its maximum potential the way the CSS trailblazers really do stuff.
First up is “CSS Cookbook” (O’Reilly) by Christopher Schmitt.
This is an excellent starting poing for stuff like “How do I make a fluid 3 column layout?” or “How do I get rid of all that stupid space in my bulleted lits?” Unlike most prior CSS books, this one focuses entirely on what you’re trying to accomplish, rather than on what each individual attribute means.
Whether you have no idea where to start, or made an attempt on your own and just sort of hit a wall (which happens frequently with CSS design), just skim through the table of contents, and you’re likely to find exactly what you’re trying to do, with plenty of well-written examples. If you only get one of these books, get this one.
Up next is “The Zen of CSS Design” (New Riders) by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag. This book also delves into the techniques used by real-world CSS designers, but it uses the wonderful CSS Zen Garden as a starting point. CSS Zen Garden is a great inspirational resource which provides designers with a single HTML page to which they can apply any sort of CSS tricks they cook up.
By using some of the Zen Garden’s wildly creative designs as starting points for discussing techniques and aesthetic issues, this glossy, full-color book is an excellent starting point for figuring out what exactly you want to accomplish in the first place, in addition to how to actually do it.
The final book I’d like to recommend is one I just discovered, which tackles my number one issue with CSS - the reason I still chicken out and use tables for design. It’s called “Bulletproof Web Design” and it tackles issues like “How do I keep content from mushing together when the browser is resized?”, “How can I make my graphically-enhanced headings not look like garbage when the text runs over into a second line”, or “How do I stop the whole design from completely going to hell if the user changes the browser’s text size?” This is not a good book to learn from, but it’s a fantastic resource once you’ve cooked up a great design, implemented it, and just want to make it, well, bulletproof.
I strongly recommend all three of these books for anyone interested in serious standards-based web design.