Blueprint Css and Grids

Grids are nothing new, and by now nothing new to the medium of the internet. Nor are they new to me. I always tried for proportion and alignment. Framing content and making use of White Space. But i spent some time thinking of a new Blog theme and made 4 full designs and then decided i wanted to do a minimal approach. I thought it would be easier to build.

After scouring the internet and really finding nothing if Inspiration. I was on a side project and looking for fonts. That lead to typography, witch came to Page Layout and then back to Grid Design. So i had a look at a few CSS Frame works to handle grids, the two main ones are Blueprint CSS and 960gs. Heads or tales chose Blueprint CSS for me.

I had thought about building my own and then realized there really isn’t any point. Blueprint has it all covered. I read a few articles about the controversial reset.css files. Basically zeroing everything out to be unified in all browsers. Some views say this causes extra work in adjusting elements back to how you want them. I found my CSS to still be minimal.

Part of the beauty of a Grid system is its flexibility and its simplicity. Setting up the layout for the site was very simple and fast. I only had troubles with floated elements like the random photos block. Each grid is 60px wide and has a padding of 10px, there is a special class called last that removes that last padding making things line up perfectly with the right side of the divs. Content looped in a While statement doesn’t really work, so i had to settle for close enough.

In the future i will totally use Blueprint again, and think it should be a valuable tool to any designer. Some good further reading on Grid Systems is
Mark Boulton’s Article.