CrunchBang - Code, Design & GNU/Linux

What is Web Design?

A quote from A List Apart article, "Understanding Web Design":

Web design is not book design, it is not poster design, it is not illustration, and the highest achievements of those disciplines are not what web design aims for. Although websites can be delivery systems for games and videos, and although those delivery systems can be lovely to look at, such sites are exemplars of game design and video storytelling, not of web design. So what is web design?

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

Talking of web design, I'm currently toying with the idea of changing a few things around here. I'm not thinking about anything major, just a few tweaks to the CSS for better spacing and maybe the introduction of some colour!?

Talking of CSS, Jeff Croft created a bit of a hullabaloo over the topic of CSS frameworks last week. The comments generated by the post are probably more interesting than the post itself. Jeff was kind of surprised by the reaction:

Wow. Less than 24 hours after my last post, there have been nearly 100 comments posted, and I've seemingly managed to piss off half the Internet.

Personally, I think the tone of Jeff's post had a lot to do with it. Stating, "I wrote the book on this topic" was probably a bit too much, an ALA article [although important] is hardly a book!

Anyhow, I'm not a huge fan of frameworks, but I did manage to take a look at the BluePrint CSS framework. It's a good collection of CSS techniques by numerous contributors. The typography styles are especially good and well worth checking out — I think I'm going to try and incorporate parts of it into my little redesign.