As it gets easier and easier for regular folk to publish on the web, I find less and less publishers are actually bothering to get their hands dirty with design. Using Blogger? Simply choose a theme from the list. Using Facebook or MySpace? The default settings will do. Using Wordpress or Movable Type? Again, we've got numerous themes to choose from, one is just right for you!
I think it was early in the year 2000 when I stopped marking up my design in the HTML. CSS design made so much sense so I dove in. Every colour, every font size, every border, everything could be moved to an external CSS file.
Here we are, eight years later, and I'm still crazy about CSS when it comes to design. I'm also still creating web sites from scratch, hand coding the CSS files from a blank slate. This entry was inspired by a great article I just read on CSS design, entitled Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design. The author's hope is to show people that feel CSS challenged that you don't need to be an artist, know how to draw or even just pick colours, and certainly you don't need to know how to use Photoshop to be able to come up with a nice, clean, readable and original layout. I concur.
It's an article I wish I had written. If you design for the web, or if you think you might like to learn how, read the article. At the very least it will get your creative juices flowing.
