I’ve toyed with a few CSS frameworks in the past such as Yahoo!’s YUI framework, but 960 is the best I’ve come across so far. Here is what they provide:
- A flexible framework for creating your designs in a grid based layout
- Templates for doing your design work and have it fit nicely into a grid
- Simple, understandable markup where if you revisit your code in a month you won’t be stuck saying “Huh?”.
- Light weight, the CSS (minified) is only about 4Kb.
There are others out there, but I’ve found that 960 is the easiest to work with. So why 960? Its based on a 960 pixel width because “960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480.” This is what makes it so flexible.
What if you don’t want a 960 width layout or perhaps you want less columns in your layout, Spry-Soft.com has a customizeable grid creator for you.
They provide you with everything you might need, even the ever popular reset.css and a text.css to get you off and running. They even give you a printable “sketch sheet” you you can pencil in your design/layout ideas on paper before you hit photoshop or fireworks or visio or omnigiraffe.
Here is what the photoshop .psd template looks like:
I’ve added this to my default group of files whenever I start a new project. I highly recommend it, give it a try, it will make slicing up your designs soooo much easier.
Tags: CSS, development, framework, web design
