Stefano’s Linotype: Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design (CSS Guide)

> DO NOT use a grid.

Why not?

As a programmer who has troubled himself with designing sites and CSS from scratch for the past 6 years and hating every minute of it... I found this approach highly refreshing.

I've fought my charset battles, stayed up endless nights arguing with the W3C validator whilst comparing the pros and cons of each stylesheet, manually converted paper designs to both CSS and table-based layouts, and done a hell of a lot of toil I could most certainly do without.

At the end of the day? My months of deliberation and constant change of doctypes, my incessant searches for a good -free layout that both scales the way I want and is flexible to new content.... all were really not worth the effort I put into them.

Now, if I want to design a new site from scratch (God forbid!), I will do as the OP suggests and just go with the flow. Let someone else worry about the hacks and incompatibilities, I just want to get my content out there in a way that doesn't look like I plucked it out of my rear end and get back to my server-side programming.

If you look at any site which you consider has a good quality design, there's one big difference that it has to your own site: it uses images.

Lots of images.

That's the key to good design that most engineers don't understand.

Yes, there is elegance in Google, reddit, news.yc, etc, and yes, you can go way overboard with really bad image picks. But if you want to go for something other than 'minimalist', you should find a good personal collection of (non cheesy) stock photos, subtle patterns, gradients, edges, icons, and corners. Get some simple photoshop retouching skills too.

Seriously, learning how to use images effectively will take your design skills up to the next level.