Love them or hate them, there's no denying that CSS frameworks are here to stay. Frameworks make rapidly sketching out a website design much easier by handling lots of boilerplate tasks for you -- positioning elements, setting typography defaults and more.
A relative newcomer that's quickly earned a place our media servers is BlueTrip, which combines the best elements of two other frameworks Blueprint and Tripoli and combines them to create a new one (hence the name).
BlueTrip is the brainchild of a designer/blogger by the name of Mike who runs Capsize Designs. Although you can grab a copy from his site, BlueTrip recently moved to a more permanent home at bluetrip.org, which is alredy up and running in limited form.
While BlueTrip is a nice framework in its own right, one of the things we really like about it is that it exemplifies the best way to use CSS frameworks -- take the elements that prove helpful and ditch the rest.
In this case BlueTrip takes the grid layout tools of BluePrint and the typography tools of Tripoli and ignores the rest.
Of course critics point out that frameworks often add semantically unnecessary class names and encourage otherwise useless wrapper divs and more. Worse, frameworks can be bulky and hurt your page load times.
Still, at least for the prototyping stage, we find frameworks to be an invaluable tool in the web designer's toolbox. And BlueTrip is a great example of how good designers use frameworks.
For a more in depth look at the CSS framework debate and some links to other frameworks be sure to check out our previous coverage.
See Also:
