May 18, 2008

May 17 Meeting Report:
Grid-Based Design

Our May meeting was about effective ways to lay out webpages.

We started by briefly looking at Dreamweaver templates. We touched on this subject in April when we were talking about Contribute. Templates can be convenient for an individual developer, and in an enterprise setting, templates can enforce controls over changes that can be made on a page by other people editing the site.

We then went on to talk about page layouts and the concept of grid-based design. Many current websites employ a layout that is divided strongly into horizontal sections that can get rather complicated to organize. Using a grid can help to keep a clean design while using complex arrangements. During the discussion, we reviewed the Divine Proportion and noted how grid design can help to use that proportion to arrange material on webpages. We also briefly looked at some tools for setting up grids.

The sites we looked at are listed below.

Design and the Divine Proportion

Grid systems in Web Design

Five Simple Steps to designing grid systems

Column Techniques How-To Smashing Magazine

Blueprint Grid CSS Generator


Blueprint: A CSS Framework

Seven Smooth Steps to Superb Grids

Eric Meyer's CSS SCULPTOR

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