I’ve been reading *The Zen of CSS Design* by Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag. ISBN 0321303474. I ordered that a few days ago (2005-05-23 Books). The book does in fact contain very little CSS. What it does, basically, is take entries of the CSS Zen Garden and discuss them from a design perspective, and occasionally (!!) show a code example on how to achieve it.
The first design discussed, for example, is Atlantis. It talks about the mood, Atlantis lost, the imagery of the old shell, the stone pillars, how keeping the rusty colors of the shell was important for contrast, how small specks of blue (eg. links!) follow the main theme, how the font-size is much smaller in the menu, the icons in the menu, how horizontal lines are used to offset the titles, and how the shell image itself contains similar circular lines (this I missed when I first looked at it!), and how these lines interplay in a minimal but powerful design.
An interesting *design* discussion – not an interesting CSS discussion!
I like it. 😄
Maybe I can apply some of the lessons learnt for my own Oddmuse sites. Currently I feel that maybe I should start right away, after reading two chapters only, so that I can get a real hands-on benefit. If I start tinkering at the very end of the book, the motivation will be gone and all the ideas will have blurred into a vague sensation of progress. No good.
I think it would make more sense to start editing files right away.
​#Books