Posted Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 9:37 p.m. by Chris Amico in Projects
Why, or why, did it take me so long to discover Blueprint CSS?
Because I wasn't looking, clearly.
I am not a designer. Designers are people with style, and my sister, my girlfriend and my housemate have all made it very clear that I'm lacking in that department. More than that, CSS fits into the large category of things I'd much rather outsource to a competent professional. I'll stick to Python and prose.
Clever readers of yesterday's post announcing the beta launch of Tools for News may have noticed the line about building the core of the site in about two days. Two days in late October. And such clever readers may have asked themselves, "What happened over those two months?"
Not much. Mostly, because the site was naked, and I didn't want to send it out into the cold that way.*
For much of its life in development, the site had no style whatsoever. I built it in plain HTML and spent most of my time working on the back end (models and views) and making the template and a few custom tags work.
Then I found Blueprint CSS.
Blueprint is a CSS framework that, like Django does for Python, abstracts common tasks and give designers a head start. For me, it meant more than skipping past the tedium of starting a CSS file from scratch. Blueprint turned out to be all the style I needed to give the site a clean, grid-based layout and clear, readable type.
And skipping past the tedium (for me) of CSS means I can focus on getting stuff built. I'd call that a win.
*There was also much work to be done on another project, a magazine CMS, which I'll blog about soon. You can see what projects I'm working on and follow their progress here.
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dec 31, 2008 at 8:06 p.m. // John Biesnecker said:
I remember when I first found Blueprint. I was amazed, and still am, though I find when I want to do something simple that doesn't quite conform to the "Blueprint Way" it can be simpler to just code it up myself.
I guess that's the way for most frameworks, though...