81 Yet another tool at the designer's disposal, use i

I guess I fall into the “Time and place for every design” camp.

The evolution of design for digital media is increasingly providing opportunities for new and different types of communication. The grid-dependent design clearly has it’s place in the majority. If not for it’s usability, then merely because that is what is expected from the end-user. It is important not to forget that an individual’s expectation of how something should work, their conceptual model, is based as much on past experience as the design of a thing.

So, if you’re going to design a website for a bank, a grid-based design is the obvious choice.

But there are increasingly new and different uses for the web, and not all websites are created for the same purpose. It is natural that as the type and purpose of media available grows and diverges, the methods of presenting it should diversify as well. Personally, I love the freedom of design afforded by CSS (which, by the way, doesn’t necessitate that one shy compeletely from the grid). Great article, Molly!

posted at 10:57 pm on January 7, 2006 by Dan Corcoran

82 I just flamed this article

concerning mostly the comparison between London and Tucson, Arizona. Whoever’s concerned, read more on my page [url=“http://www.eugenescherba.com/entry/51”]Of Phenomenology etc.[/url]

posted at 07:43 pm on January 8, 2006 by Eugene Scherba

83 boxes all around

Thank you for the article Molly,

I agree with your ideas. As cssZengarden shows it is completely unnecessary to think a site from a content point of view. I think css is a very powerful tool if you do the effort to think in terms of semantic elements and not tables or cells.

But, as Paul Novitski say, I like to see curves too… and that obliges you sometimes to think a way to hack with html and css, just like happened when you wanted to layout with tables.

So, I think the real power of css is its organisational and structural capacity of grouping the site elements look, because in general we always want to do things out of the capacities of the current technology and that makes you hack and think one step forward. That’s why we need standards, isn’t it?

posted at 08:41 am on January 12, 2006 by Juanjo Espí

84 Hmm

Maybe we just need to refrain from the square-designs. But you must admit, playing with wild organic layouts when content length is not always the same is much harder than sticking to the columns. Remember newspapers? :-)

posted at 12:46 am on January 14, 2006 by Srđan Prodanović

85 actually, maybe I should just make a zine

I’ve been thinking for a long time about the central design metaphor that I would like my new personal site to have. I had been thinking about a city metaphor, but I had let go of it because the town-square idea had been done to death (eWorld, anyone?). And as a city metaphor concept, a grid-based city just doesn’t seem that fun to look at, as far as maps go, anyway.

Then I spent two weeks in Spain, in the older parts of cities such as Sevilla and Toledo. Like Molly’s example of London, these are areas of the cities that have no grid — and the beauty of that was that no matter how good my map was, I always got lost on the way to my destination. Given that I was on honeymoon and not on business, however, getting lost was utterly charming.

I decided that I want my new site to have some flavor of the ability to get lost. I’m still trying to figure out how to do that and not make a site that’s impossibly convoluted to either navigate (for the reader’s sake) or maintain (for mine). I’m conceptually committed to using CSS throughout, and I’m going to require readers (I hate the term users) to employ Firefox or Safari, because I’m going to use PNGs (which I’m surprised no one else has mentioned for grid-breaking visual possibilities).

But that’s because it will be a personal site. I can’t have that same attitude toward people when I’m developing a business site, because you still have to design for some level of lowest-common-denominator, and that means IE.

And business or personal, I’m going to use a grid. I hope to achieve interesting design with it, but like other commenters here, I don’t see where the examples showed truly breaking the grid (Kutztown’s internal pages give the lie) or, if they did break something of a grid, such as the CSS Zen Garden example, it was just a visual jumble (I’d hope that kind of design would include an RSS feed).

Finally — I just don’t think the web lends itself well to interesting editorial design, at least not yet. After five years of developing websites for adult-literacy programs and curriculum, where I had to restrain myself to very-low-common-denominator technical requirements, I’m so happy to be back doing 99% of my work for print: I get to use the fonts I want, I can wrap text around irregularly shaped objects, I can make things with interesting folds, and I can mess with my grids however I like and not worry how some browser is going to render my work (not to mention that I can refine my grid from piece to piece without destroying older pieces). That’s why on my new site, readers will also have the chance to download some pieces as PDFs, so they can see my real design creativity at work.

posted at 08:19 pm on January 14, 2006 by Cheshire Dave

86 The right tool for the right job

Tables, suddenly we all hate them, they’re that despicable markup used for layouts. But hey tables were never meant to be be used for layouts anyway. Originaly table markup was added to HTML ni order to display tabular data. Until one day someone decided to go beyond that asn use it for layout. Now its not like non-grid layouts are the norm but table-less design definitely is. BUT that doesn’t mean you write lots of CSS code and force a table for the data that could be placed in some table markup.
Pick your tool wisely and for heaven’s sake, experts, quit that “table-less layouts are the coolest” rant.

posted at 07:42 am on January 16, 2006 by Harshit Sekhon

87 Not every city had a plan

When you design a site you think about layout, but when city is forming from ages to ages, there was no plan in the beginning.
Try to create a website by adding new elements not looking back. You’ll create a masterpiece

posted at 07:59 pm on January 16, 2006 by Max Kiselev

88 Whats the real benifit?

Gridless CSS layouts often end up being like college art films. Sure, they’re innovative at times, but no one ever really looks at them except other people making college art films.

The concept of “breaking out of the box” is great but lets look at it in practice. Most, if not all, of the gridless designs cited at examples were, quite honestly, horrible. How well do you think books would sell if we suddenly decided that straight lines were too “confining”? What if the Mac or windows interface just suddenly decided to get rid of grid layouts and throw widgets all over the place? We’d all go mad!

I dont need another nifty design. I’ve honestly seen enough of them. What I need are designers who care about getting my content to me in a quick, efficient, and intuitive way, not designers who want to make my content look “cool”.

Now as with anything there are exceptions to any rule. Band, movie, visual arts, & promotional websites for example are often based more on style than large ammounts of content anyway and can tollerate less traditional designs, but for the most part I just spend a lot of time wishing I could find plain text versions of websites to free me from all the “designer fluff”.

posted at 03:44 am on February 16, 2006 by Cliff Pruitt

89 Extreme to prove a point

I think Molly probably chose the extreme examples she did in order to prove her point, not to hold them up as the kind of grid-free design we should all aspire to. In my opinion, the break-out-of-the-grid techniques that CSS affords us are sometimes most effectively used in small, subtle ways — for instance, allowing page elements to overlap, as with the ALA issue bug.

posted at 04:45 am on February 16, 2006 by Lindsey Kuper

90 Strictly Speaking

it used to be that any idiot (like me) could write an html page with a text editor and it would “work”!
so now our world has gotten “serious” …and strict.
i guess the “good old days” of “forgiving” browsers are gone forever.
yikes!
i’m gonna’ have to buckle down and start learning CSS, styles, etc.
thanx… i guess.
:-)
[url=“http://drybonesblog.blogspot.com”]Dry Bones[/url]
[i]Israel’s Political Comic
Strip since 1973[/i]

posted at 07:57 am on March 17, 2006 by yaakov kirschen