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!
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?
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? :-)
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Cheshire Dave
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.
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.
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Max Kiselev
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
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
Cliff Pruitt
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”.
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.
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.
:-) Dry Bones Israel’s Political Comic
Strip since 1973
I enjoyed this article very much and found your examples really good. I know when I first when to the one at Zen Gardens, I thought, what a mess! But then after looking around the site there and going through just about every css style they had, realizing what was going on, I though, WOW, this is SO COOL! If you guys stopped at the first example of theirs, you might want to go back and look through it.
I am looking forward to learning more about css, having a very limited knowledge of it now. Thanks for the insight.
Personally I love to make website that are only made out of css div’s, but because IE designing in CSS (for IE) is hell and though IE7 supports most CSS1 commands, most IE users doesn’t support IE7.
I mostly design in CSS but I’m not afraid to trough away my personal ideas about the internet, when it comes tot designing for someone ells.
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
Daniel Sanders
Grids don’t have to create “boxy” designs, but using borders and backgrounds on every div can, but it would be nice to have a greater set of tools for other geometry (usability withstanding).
For this reason, I was pleased to see Google using SVG to display charts on web usage (I think they were using some activex object for Win). SVG, with more consistent support (Opera has SVG tiny, Firefox has a subset of SVG 1.1), would be a good choice for displaying any geometry (curves!), colour or gradient, is an open XML standard that works with the DOM and scripting. If designers/coders could easily slip in and out of xhtml/html and SVG and rely on reasonable cross-browser support, we’d have all the tools we want without having to simulate curves with unscalable images.
Anyway, I think that grids are good for design, but perhaps the trick is to not make it look like you’ve designed to a grid by not continually highlighting the lines that you’ve worked to.
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Alexander Muir
I grew up in London and often visit Tucson, so I hear what you say about grids and spirals.
However, when walking or driving around a city, the placement of the street signs (names of streets) makes a big difference. In Tucson, like most US cities, they are in very predictable places, and this is very handy. In London, like in much of the UK (and Edinburgh is terrible for this) the street signs are often in different places. Not easily seen, on different styles of plaque, in different locations at different heights etc. Its a real nuisance to strain around looking for the name of a street.
There is a clear parallel to webdesign here: if the navigation links aren’t in a predicatble place, it can easily be a hassle to find where you’re going.
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Sorba Rightley
Great article!!
It is always nice to hear someone who can think outside of the box and articulate an experience. This approach will not work for everything or everyone. Done well, this will define a good designer and a great designer. In the 90’s Carson introduced a non-grid style of communicating in print. We were ready for it then. Most design work up till then was over done with simple grids. Everything started to look alike.
We’ve been strict with grids in both web 1 and 2.0. It’s only a matter of time until the younger generation takes on a new approach. Outside of the box designers will inspire those creative people willing to pull of successful new user experiences. And we can achieve it with Dom!
I think that there is a misunderstanding of what a grid is in this article, I failed to see one example listed that did not follow a strict grid design. Just because all elements don’t line up does not mean that a grid is not being used.
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r a
having a background in both city design and web design, i appreciate the goal of this article, but i don’t think you argued it well. you don’t address the WHY behind a grid vs. a non-grid – both in web design, and in city design. multiple commenters have already pointed out that when it comes to the web, the content (and i would argue audience) are key considerations when making a layout.
but with regards to cities, tucson’s and london’s layouts evolved in very, very different ways. london’s urban form evolved organically, slowly over time, as people needed. since people at the time mostly got around on foot, it (like many old cities) has developed into a distinctly pedestrian-oriented city. buildings are narrow at the street edge, and plots are deep, to minimize distances people have to travel. buildings are in general small and streets are as narrow as possible, because the distance one can get on foot is the most important constraining factor. as a result the city makes the most sense as a pedestrian. and in cities like this, for people who actually grew up there (and not say, in a pre-planned suburb of london), getting around is quite intuitive and easy.
tucson’s grid is NOT a result of city planning, as you said in your article, but rather the result of the 19th-century-era Jeffersonian plat that was laid out across the US, from roughly west of the Mississippi onward, ordering all land, regardless of natural landforms, hills, swamp, rivers, mtns etc according to a 1-mile by 1-mile grid, each square forming 640 acres. (see this article: http://www.core77.com/reactor/undesigningamerica.asp). this grid has shaped the evolution of almost all cities that grew after it was laid out, and not by choice. furthermore, it is a very constraining grid – because it’s square, neither axis has clear hierarchy over the others. it is in this way very different from the complex grid layouts shown in your article. tucson’s grid is more a lesson in what happens when a place does not grow organically.
the 60s and 70s saw a backlash against the grid and gave us suburbs that have endlessly curving streets with nary a straight line in sight. but those layouts, too, are problematic for people, especially when the streets don’t curve for a any particular reason beyond aesthetics. (ie, to go around a hill; to bring a person closer to an important landmark; etc.)
so the question really is – what can we learn, if anything, from all of this? i think the deeper lesson is that in design of any sort, the best structures evolve to meet the particular needs of the system they are supporting, and that blindly imposing any structure – be it gridded or not – without considering the content it will hold or the people who will use it is going to result in problematic design. period.
I agree with Molly – exciting, freeing, inspiring! “¦ and I agree with commenters like r a – non-grid places arise out of time and function, as much as, if not more than grid-based places.
I am excited to put Molly’s thoughts into action, but only after first asking myself, “What does this project need? Where does it come from, and where is it going?”
Most readers/users don’t have the luxury of time to get to know my sites, so they’re going to need other ways to orient themselves quickly and find what they’re looking for.
Freed of grid thinking, but still married to the message, I am now on the exciting path of creating new wayfinding signals to quickly and elegantly carry content to people.
I understand the excitement of CSS-based layouts. When I design websites they are pure CSS unless content would be better served in a table, but the site structure is always CSS and DIV based. I also do HTML emails which rely solely on table-based layouts with CSS being used only for font and the most minor areas of spacing. There is an undeniable increased freedom with CSS especially when you combine XHTML/CSS with Javascript frameworks like JQuery and Prototype.
However, looking again at the European city streets you will notice they rarely form cubes or rectangular block. When you look at the CSS wire-frames they are 100% rectangular. The only irregularity in shape is an illusion created by rectangular images that have been sliced and re-stitched together.
In order to truly break the grid layout that began with tables I think we will need to wait until we can define content areas with coordinates not restricted to top, right, bottom, left. Until then it’s all still a Tuscon city, we may be able to create an earthquake to mix things up, but the underlying structure is still a grid.
Going off topic, thanks Molly for your work with Dave on publishing CSS Zen Garden. It was that book and that site that made me pursue this career path almost 4 years ago.
The exciting things that are here in this field are largely due to the countless hours and dedication the “old timers” have invested in website design and producing.
Being a native Arizonan I appreciated your comparison of Tucson’s city street grid to the concentric circles and spokes of London’s roadways. However, I’m not sure that you can definitely tie a city grid-plan to its quality and quantity of cultural relevance. I’m guessing here but I would predict that London’s 2000+ years of history are the determining factor in its cultural vibrancy as well as the fact that London was the epicenter for the one of the most expansive colonial empires the world has yet seen.
In comparison Tucson has existed in one continuous form or another for roughly 300 years. Not a very long time in the grand scheme of micro-cultures.
I would not disagree that the city-grid may play a part in this cultural development (or lack there-of) but it should probably not be ascertained as the central foundation of the issue.
101 Reader Comments
Back to the ArticleDan Corcoran
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!
Eugene Scherba
concerning mostly the comparison between London and Tucson, Arizona. Whoever’s concerned, read more on my page Of Phenomenology etc.
Juanjo EspÃ
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?
Srđan Prodanović
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? :-)
Cheshire Dave
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.
Harshit Sekhon
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.
Max Kiselev
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
Cliff Pruitt
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”.
Lindsey Kuper
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.
yaakov kirschen
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.
:-)
Dry Bones
Israel’s Political Comic
Strip since 1973
Leslie Ingram
I enjoyed this article very much and found your examples really good. I know when I first when to the one at Zen Gardens, I thought, what a mess! But then after looking around the site there and going through just about every css style they had, realizing what was going on, I though, WOW, this is SO COOL! If you guys stopped at the first example of theirs, you might want to go back and look through it.
I am looking forward to learning more about css, having a very limited knowledge of it now. Thanks for the insight.
Stijn D'haese
Personally I love to make website that are only made out of css div’s, but because IE designing in CSS (for IE) is hell and though IE7 supports most CSS1 commands, most IE users doesn’t support IE7.
I mostly design in CSS but I’m not afraid to trough away my personal ideas about the internet, when it comes tot designing for someone ells.
Daniel Sanders
Grids don’t have to create “boxy” designs, but using borders and backgrounds on every div can, but it would be nice to have a greater set of tools for other geometry (usability withstanding).
For this reason, I was pleased to see Google using SVG to display charts on web usage (I think they were using some activex object for Win). SVG, with more consistent support (Opera has SVG tiny, Firefox has a subset of SVG 1.1), would be a good choice for displaying any geometry (curves!), colour or gradient, is an open XML standard that works with the DOM and scripting. If designers/coders could easily slip in and out of xhtml/html and SVG and rely on reasonable cross-browser support, we’d have all the tools we want without having to simulate curves with unscalable images.
Anyway, I think that grids are good for design, but perhaps the trick is to not make it look like you’ve designed to a grid by not continually highlighting the lines that you’ve worked to.
Alexander Muir
I grew up in London and often visit Tucson, so I hear what you say about grids and spirals.
However, when walking or driving around a city, the placement of the street signs (names of streets) makes a big difference. In Tucson, like most US cities, they are in very predictable places, and this is very handy. In London, like in much of the UK (and Edinburgh is terrible for this) the street signs are often in different places. Not easily seen, on different styles of plaque, in different locations at different heights etc. Its a real nuisance to strain around looking for the name of a street.
There is a clear parallel to webdesign here: if the navigation links aren’t in a predicatble place, it can easily be a hassle to find where you’re going.
Sorba Rightley
Great article!!
It is always nice to hear someone who can think outside of the box and articulate an experience. This approach will not work for everything or everyone. Done well, this will define a good designer and a great designer. In the 90’s Carson introduced a non-grid style of communicating in print. We were ready for it then. Most design work up till then was over done with simple grids. Everything started to look alike.
We’ve been strict with grids in both web 1 and 2.0. It’s only a matter of time until the younger generation takes on a new approach. Outside of the box designers will inspire those creative people willing to pull of successful new user experiences. And we can achieve it with Dom!
Jim McNelis
thanks for this great article. seeing the layout as gray boxes made a big difference in my understanding of these layouts.
michael hewson
I think that there is a misunderstanding of what a grid is in this article, I failed to see one example listed that did not follow a strict grid design. Just because all elements don’t line up does not mean that a grid is not being used.
r a
having a background in both city design and web design, i appreciate the goal of this article, but i don’t think you argued it well. you don’t address the WHY behind a grid vs. a non-grid – both in web design, and in city design. multiple commenters have already pointed out that when it comes to the web, the content (and i would argue audience) are key considerations when making a layout.
but with regards to cities, tucson’s and london’s layouts evolved in very, very different ways. london’s urban form evolved organically, slowly over time, as people needed. since people at the time mostly got around on foot, it (like many old cities) has developed into a distinctly pedestrian-oriented city. buildings are narrow at the street edge, and plots are deep, to minimize distances people have to travel. buildings are in general small and streets are as narrow as possible, because the distance one can get on foot is the most important constraining factor. as a result the city makes the most sense as a pedestrian. and in cities like this, for people who actually grew up there (and not say, in a pre-planned suburb of london), getting around is quite intuitive and easy.
tucson’s grid is NOT a result of city planning, as you said in your article, but rather the result of the 19th-century-era Jeffersonian plat that was laid out across the US, from roughly west of the Mississippi onward, ordering all land, regardless of natural landforms, hills, swamp, rivers, mtns etc according to a 1-mile by 1-mile grid, each square forming 640 acres. (see this article: http://www.core77.com/reactor/undesigningamerica.asp). this grid has shaped the evolution of almost all cities that grew after it was laid out, and not by choice. furthermore, it is a very constraining grid – because it’s square, neither axis has clear hierarchy over the others. it is in this way very different from the complex grid layouts shown in your article. tucson’s grid is more a lesson in what happens when a place does not grow organically.
the 60s and 70s saw a backlash against the grid and gave us suburbs that have endlessly curving streets with nary a straight line in sight. but those layouts, too, are problematic for people, especially when the streets don’t curve for a any particular reason beyond aesthetics. (ie, to go around a hill; to bring a person closer to an important landmark; etc.)
so the question really is – what can we learn, if anything, from all of this? i think the deeper lesson is that in design of any sort, the best structures evolve to meet the particular needs of the system they are supporting, and that blindly imposing any structure – be it gridded or not – without considering the content it will hold or the people who will use it is going to result in problematic design. period.
Penina Finger
I agree with Molly – exciting, freeing, inspiring! “¦ and I agree with commenters like r a – non-grid places arise out of time and function, as much as, if not more than grid-based places.
I am excited to put Molly’s thoughts into action, but only after first asking myself, “What does this project need? Where does it come from, and where is it going?”
Most readers/users don’t have the luxury of time to get to know my sites, so they’re going to need other ways to orient themselves quickly and find what they’re looking for.
Freed of grid thinking, but still married to the message, I am now on the exciting path of creating new wayfinding signals to quickly and elegantly carry content to people.
Matthew Booth
I understand the excitement of CSS-based layouts. When I design websites they are pure CSS unless content would be better served in a table, but the site structure is always CSS and DIV based. I also do HTML emails which rely solely on table-based layouts with CSS being used only for font and the most minor areas of spacing. There is an undeniable increased freedom with CSS especially when you combine XHTML/CSS with Javascript frameworks like JQuery and Prototype.
However, looking again at the European city streets you will notice they rarely form cubes or rectangular block. When you look at the CSS wire-frames they are 100% rectangular. The only irregularity in shape is an illusion created by rectangular images that have been sliced and re-stitched together.
In order to truly break the grid layout that began with tables I think we will need to wait until we can define content areas with coordinates not restricted to top, right, bottom, left. Until then it’s all still a Tuscon city, we may be able to create an earthquake to mix things up, but the underlying structure is still a grid.
Going off topic, thanks Molly for your work with Dave on publishing CSS Zen Garden. It was that book and that site that made me pursue this career path almost 4 years ago.
The exciting things that are here in this field are largely due to the countless hours and dedication the “old timers” have invested in website design and producing.
Mike Jones
Being a native Arizonan I appreciated your comparison of Tucson’s city street grid to the concentric circles and spokes of London’s roadways. However, I’m not sure that you can definitely tie a city grid-plan to its quality and quantity of cultural relevance. I’m guessing here but I would predict that London’s 2000+ years of history are the determining factor in its cultural vibrancy as well as the fact that London was the epicenter for the one of the most expansive colonial empires the world has yet seen.
In comparison Tucson has existed in one continuous form or another for roughly 300 years. Not a very long time in the grand scheme of micro-cultures.
I would not disagree that the city-grid may play a part in this cultural development (or lack there-of) but it should probably not be ascertained as the central foundation of the issue.