I'm a software developer, not a designer, but I'm being forced to design websites. In the past, I designed "by hand", never using anyone of these before. Now, I have found that there are a lot of CSS framewoks. I want to give a try to some of these, but I don't know where to begin and I don't want to waste my time.
I think the most populars CSS frameworks are:
but I'm sure there are a lot more.
So, which framework would you recomend me? Why?
If you don't want to waste your time, I really wouldn't recommend any of them. If you're familiar enough with CSS, it's easier to write your own rather than using a framework. With a framework, you'll be forced into learning and using their naming conventions and you'll also potentially include a lot of code that you simply don't need every time. If you need to use anything, I'd recommend using a good CSS reset rule over a full CSS framework. Barring that, spend your time learning CSS in more depth; it'll be a better investment with greater rewards in the future as you'll know why things work in addition to being able to do the work.
I'm not sure if you'd classify it as a framework, but I like the jquery-ui framework. There is ThemeRoller, which lets you customize a ui or choose from a gallery, it works visually for most line of business style apps. What's more, its integrate in with most of the jQuery UI Plugins, which I use frequently.
CSS Frameworks can indeed be handy if you don't want to write the same stuff over and over again... It's all about not reinventing the wheels every time, rather change those that exist already. :-)
Top 12 CSS Frameworks and How to Understand Them is a very good article for this, I quote:
As with everything else in the world there are a few critics of CSS Frameworks,
the pros do outnumber the cons, its all about opinion.
You might as well want to check out: Inspiration Overload: 100 CSS Galleries You Need to Check Out
Very simple answer:
NONE
:)
Why? Because you also need to have semantic CSS, not only semantic HTML. So, for example, if you have a div named like size-1 (insdeat of... let's say comment-form) what this will tell you? How this will help you on further changes?
And yes, i've tried to use two or three frameworks in last few months but with no luck at all.
See this comparable question about whether to use CSS frameworks, it has some similar (useful) answers.
I also have a tendency to stay away from the various CSS frameworks. Something that I find useful, however, is to come up with something of a basic template of your own to work off of.
Include a CSS Reset, such as one Eric Meyer's site: Reset Reloaded. An alternative (one I currently use, because I personally don't use most of the xhtml tags included in Eric's reset anyway) would be Tim Wright's Reseting Browser Defaults (reset.css)
And then try to come up with your own set of typographic styles, while thinking about such good things as Vertical Rhythm and whatnot. I find a (generally) good resource to be The Grid System, which has tutorials, articles, templates and the like, including some useful tools for coming up with a good typographic grid.
I would shy away from the CSS frameworks, simply because they are never very semantic, and the multitude of div tags really irks me.
Here are some CSS Framework that are new:
Emastic is only 4kb (fixed and fluid columns and em based), Malo is very very small 8 lines of code and The Golden Grid is 1kb is similar to Blueprint or 960.gs.
Like author of these 3 frameworks it won't be proper to compliment my own work, just open the CSS code of every Framework and try to understand it. The code will speak to you :) .
Also be aware that all CSS Framework are NOT always the right solution.
A neat tool that may help is LessCSS: http://lesscss.org/ -- it is a CSS preprocessor (implemented as a Ruby gem) that enables things like variables, nested rules, mixins etc. Not a framework, but a good way to make your CSS more consistent and maintainable.
Frameworks are great if you're using a more complex language such as PHP or ActionScript. But It's really not needed for simple html & css, which is very easy to learn as you go along. Rather get yourself a basic reset stylesheet and build your styles from there on up.
Collection of reset stylesheets: perishablepress.com