Friday, August 30, 2013

The 960 Grid

I have encountered the 960 grid system before, when modifying pre-designed web templates for clients in the past. Mostly I have only been exposed to it via a CSS file called grid.css or 960.css. In the past I did not know what to make of it. Looking at those CSS files I noticed a series of classes called grid, prefix, suffix, push and pull; and all of them had derivatives (grid_1, grid_2, etc.). As it turns out, the 960 grid system is not an actual component or element of CSS, but a stylesheet created for ease of work.

What the stylsheet essentially does is offer a designer a pre-built group of classes that effectively divides a 960 pixel wide block into either 12 or 16 columns. So I am relieved to now learn it has a presence within the Photoshop Web Design community. I found a Web Design tutorial that uses this grid and dove in. Going forward I will be applying this gird to all my designs.

The template I created, using the 960 grid, is a beast! It is a Layered Photoshop file, weighing in at 56MB and it has given me some great ideas on how I can modify my other templates I’ve made. It took me pretty much an entire day and that was only the layout/template. The content is mostly filler with the exception of the graphic slider image I made.

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