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Due to an excellent talk at An Event Apart last year, I started following Dan Cederholm. He seemed to epitomize the kind of designer I appreciate most. He is a laid back guy that doesn’t take himself too seriously but does get genuinely excited about design evolution within the three dubs.

As far as Ethan Marcotte goes, he was made for Twitter and Twitter for him. I’m not sure if his life is really that funny or if he just has a knack for 140 character punchlines. Whatever the case, I have been following him (my God that sounds creepy) for the last year or so. I admit to being a skeptic when reading about fluid grids on A List Apart, but I also admit to my reasoning being extremely lazy.

The Good

This dual effort is chalk full of positives. I didn’t read Cederholm’s first book, but I imagine this was a logical build on some CSS beginner concepts established there. He does a wonderful job of not moving too fast (sometimes at the expense of moving too slow) and maintains a voice that is as genuine as apple pie.

There is one concept than Cederholm hammers home and I believe all forward-thinking web designers should do the same. It is the idea of “progressive enhancement”. Progressive enhancement is the practice of rewarding trend-setting, fully compliant browsers (I’m looking at you Firefox) with tasty morsels of design goodness — while accounting for the whirling abyss that is Internet Explorer.

Honestly, how can it be so f-ing hard for a company like Microsoft to create a solid browser?

I prefer to use different terminology than Cederholm, however. “Progressive enhancement” makes me think browsers like IE are the standard and Firefox, Safari, and Opera should be accounted for. While browser statistics may support that theory, I don’t. I believe the term “graceful degradation” is more apt. The best browsers should become the default. Then the term we use applies only to the offender — our beloved black sheep browser.

Cederholm also offers some excellent explanations of how we can use CSS3 today. If you give yourself a healthy diet of web design research, most of the tips won’t be very new to you. But if you have been relying too much on old knowledge, many will be sure to open your eyes.

Marcotte’s chapter on fluid grids is the gem of futuristic design thinking that I was hoping to find a bit more of throughout the entirety of the book. If you haven’t started thinking about using a fluid grid, you should. As much as I love to think my website looks exactly the same to everyone who sees it, it never does. I was showing it to a friend the other day who’s computer was bombarded with a horizontal scroll bar attack (I think it was the terrorists). I won’t spoil Marcotte’s fine explanation here but you should all look into it. A little bit of painful math (it isn’t really that painful) will go a long way towards making your sites flex to each user’s needs.

The Bad

Labeling any of it “bad” wouldn’t be just, but I was a bit disappointed with some elements of the book. There is a fine-line between clarity and redundancy, and I think Cederholm teeters on the edge a number of times. Reading through it entirely took me about 2 and a half hours (~175 pages). As with any CSS book, code snippets are going to shorten the experience, but it isn’t quite like reading The Lord of the Rings (bonus points for those that can speak Elvaan [Did I say "bonus"? I meant "creepy"]).

But I certainly can’t complain. It is well worth the investment for those hovering around the intermediate stages of web design. Cederholm is friendly, well-organized, and an excellent experienced designer. Marcotte’s chapter even pushes things a bit further into the “interestingly complex” category, which is a hard thing to accomplish these days.

Oh Yeah, The Pretty

Handcrafted CSS is designed like a web design book should be. The type is very legible, it has a craftman’s details, and every “what if…” has already been addressed in a succinct footnote in the margins. It looks happy, and this reader came away with the same feeling.