Understanding Web Designby Jeffrey Zeldman
"The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging."
Here's where I say things like "hear, hear". A brilliant summation of, well, "it all" from a pioneer of web standards.
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Five simple steps to designing grid systemsby Mark Boulton
I have tried using these techniques with some success. Placing a grid as a background image on your content is also useful in production to remove some of the alignment guess work. As usual we bid out jobs based on two photoshop templates, its a budgetary thing for the client. Using a grid the design can hand off the CSS to a HTML developer and ask them very nicely "Would you mind awfully making sure any element that aren't accounted for in the templates at least line up with this grid?"
Not a bad idea to add to the work flow if you dont have the budget to design each and every page.
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