By now CSS, or more correctly, CSS2 is the gold standard behind all new websites. Web and interactive designers find themselves constantly trying to keep up with the rules and constraints placed upon them. As code standardizes, web designers have coalesced into group that prefer one method over the other. At Digital Canvas, we have begun designing web sites that utilize the 960.gs method of developing some sites based on 12 and 16 column frameworks.

This has allowed us to rapidly deploy sites based on proven site structure code. The evolution of CSS standards allowed content to be separated from structure and design. The grid takes it one more step and makes design independent of structural code.

Though designing within a structural grid can be extremely limiting, it lets us focus on the aesthetic and conveyance of content in a usable and accessible manner. Grid based web design is both a blessing and a curse, it allows code to standardized, but may also lead to standardized designs and a "thinking inside the div" mentality. But like with any tool, knowing how and when to use it, is more important that applying a blanket approach.

Learn more about CSS from the following helpful sites:

• A List Apart
• Veerle's Blog
• Smashing Magazine

There are tons more, but these are the ones we refer to. BTW, CSS3 is coming soon. Stay tuned and happy CSSing!

Labels: css, grid based design, interactive, structural code, tricks of the trade, web design

Keeping up with "cool" in interactive trends can be a tough job, especially when one has to attend a barrage of parties, drinking, geeks dancing, sandwiched between technical seminars. Over the four days of the "Nerd Spring Break," thousands of dot com pioneers, their entourages, web designers, developers and investors invaded Austin in the search of "geekasm" as it is put so eloquently in the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) How-To Seminar.

Every where you looked, the glow of Mac books, iPhones and Blackberries bathed over a sea of people texting, Twittering, Gawking, Meeboing, facebooking and blogging (Wordpress, Blogger.com, etc.). In the evenings, start up ideas flowed as freely as the liquor, and new friends exchanged business cards, Moo cards , linked-in, and facebook id's. Miss something? Check it out later on youtube, qik.com or browse through thousands of pictures (read evidence) on flickr or natuba.

Seminars ranged from designing beautiful web sites, javascript development, user-experience design, gaming, finding respect as a designer, finding creativity, happiness and team building. The inaugural Screenburn seminar video gaming trade-show found Master Chief playing Guitar Hero...speaking of Microsoft, they were there pushing Silverlight, their answer to Adobe Flash - who were there promoting CS3. The most obviously absent was Apple. And of course, Linux was there represented proudly by the folks of Linux Journal. ;)

Below are just a few more pictures captured via Blackberry to add to the web collective.







Jeffrey Zeldman's panel on Respect (If you don't know him, you have no business working on the web.)




Elisa Adams from MMI and Richard Yoo of Natuba, sorry about the pic dude. ;)





Fire-dancing at the Frog Design party




Keynote speaker Matt Zuckerberg of Facebook




With Brian Tong of CNET.com covering the trade-show




Serverbeach party at the Iron Cactus








Finally, a shout out to Vancouver! See you all there next year!

Labels: 2008, interactive, sxsw, sxswi