A web design/development question…I’ve always designed in photoshop for my sites using a grid…but, I’ve never really looked into “grid systems” before. From this article here, there’s a bunch out there. Stuff like blueprintcss, or the 960 grid system. Both of which seem interesting, but I’m not really sure how’d I really put them to good use?
My thoughts are…do any of you actually use stuff like this? I quickly looking through some of the source files, and just thought to myself, when would I ever need half of this code? So yeah…maybe the answer is just to modify it to each project itself.
I do follow a grid design pattern, but I don’t use a premade setup file to do so. I prefer to do the custom code, but the style guidelines presented there are excellent. Grids definitely do help page structure, and are especially easy for non-designers like myself to make look decent.
I’ve never used a system but I am very careful to align my sites to a grid which is visually appealing. A lot of that is type line-heights and things of that nature.
I used Blueprint for my portfolio. I don’t think it looks FANTASTIC, or anything like that, but it helped me keep the design really clean. It’s also a great workflow, you can build out designs really fast. There’s no one specific reason you’d go with a grid design over something else, it’s more a philosophy.
Why wait for the CSS aspect to use these techniques, if your photoshop mock up is at least halfway decent, you shouldn’t ever have to worry about this.
