> CSS is very much like magazine or print layout IMO. If you're not used to that, it won't gel well. If you think of layout from a design perspective and _not_ a programming perspective, it's really not that bad.
Yes! I went looking for this comment before adding it myself. Although I chose not to reply, since that's only part of what I want to discuss.
Once I realized that CSS is exactly what would make sense for laying out a textbook, it clicked for me. Until a few years ago, web design implementation was hacking this model to realize application and widget layouts.
Nowadays, flexbox and grid are basically universal, and we can use them as we please to do proper 2-D layout, and then use classic CSS for textual flow. It's a wonderful time.
But to go beyond that mismatch of expectations, the other historical problem with CSS is how to organize it in a reasonable way. Typically, you need a number of rules to apply to related elements in order to achieve some specific effect, but these get all jumbled with other effects that need to reference overlapping sets of elements. Combine this with the fact that CSS offers a crap-ton of features that you rarely need, especially in the selector spec. Preprocessors and methodologies like SMACSS and especially BEM helped give us ways to tame the madness. The BEM website (https://en.bem.info/) is a great resource for this.
This is all front-end dev skills that most of us learned by thousands of articles and hard knocks. I wish I could point you to a bible for this, but I don't know of one.
When it comes to design, that's its own skillset, which really may have little to do with CSS. Many of the designers I've worked with don't know how to implement their designs in CSS (although that's not always the case). The principles of good design ultimately come from the goals of the product, mixed with usability concerns and, of course, fashion.
