The Zen of CSS Design

You know what zen gardens are, right? Like those little desktop trays containing sand, a few pebbles, and a rake that you can use to arrange the “garden” in any way you like, leaving it for the next person to appreciate but ultimately remake according to their own tastes. The Zen of CSS Design, the companion book to the awesome website is like that, except that hundreds of web designers have the same flat HTML file and then rearranged it to their own purposes with nothing more than a new cascading style sheet and their own graphics. Go browse through the site and tell me it’s not amazing what people have done.

The book takes 36 of the best designs on the sites and uses them as examples in brief and to-the-point chapters designed to illustrate (literally) important lessons in web design and CSS coding. We very rarely use the word “beautiful” and mean it any more. People are “hot” and babies are “cute.” Special effects are “cool” and artwork may garner a “neat” at most. This book, though, is indisputably beautiful. The whole thing is in full, gorgeous color, and the pages are oversized enough so that the authors don’t have to compromise when using screenshots to make their points.

As an inspirational tool, the book is superlative. I’m so full of ideas now! My only complaint is that many of the chapters are too short and shallow, relying as they do on only one example. I’d much rather have seen, for example, a chapter on typography and font selection that made a constellation of related points using examples from half a dozen or more designs instead of just one. I also would have appreciated more “nuts and bolts” chapters that discussed some of the clever uses of CSS that the designs so obviously engage in. But where it fails as a technical manual on CSS how-tos, The Zen of CSS Design more than makes up for in beauty and its ability to energize and inspire its readers.

As for me, I’m ready to tackle those other two websites I’ve been meaning to create, and I’m already sketching out ideas for a total redesign of jmadigan.net.