A categorised CSS gallery?

Sites like CSSMania are great for keeping an eye on the new designs coming out. The other day I was starting to plan a layout for a new project, and wanted to get some ideas before I started. I knew I wanted a fixed-width layout, centered, to fit 800px wide browsers, with at least 3 columns, the logo to be top left, a farily large masthead photo with a tag line near the top of the page. So I started sifting through a load of sites to see what options other people had used

Today I started thinking that it would be useful to have a CSS gallery where some of these design options were categorised – where you could search for all gallery entries with ‘fixed width 800px wide, 3 columns’, for example. Maybe there is such a thing already? CSSBeauty categorises sites into ‘business’, ‘entertainment’, ‘personal’, etc which is really useful. So why not take it further.

As an initial solution I’ve started using del.icio.us to keep track of designs that I like. I’ve added tags like 800boxed (the standard 750px wide, horizontally centered, with a border layout), 800free (designed for 800px wide browsers but without a definite border), liquid, semiliquid, and so on. It kind of works but it’s a bit clunky and you can’t ‘search’ on more than one category (tag). Maybe oneday I can make a web app to do this better.

2 Comments

  1. Well, since I posted this, CSSBeauty has done exactly what I was writing about. How’s that for Zeitgeist.

    And of course there is the amazing site Design Melt Down which does a really thorough job of categorising sites by various design features.

  2. Ben Hayes,

    We are working hard to enable those search parameters into our css gallery. The trouble we are finding is how to quickly identify these qualities in those designs submitted. Until we finish our auto detection process we are forced to rely on good old fashion tagging. If anyone knows of great scripts to identify the standard web design qualities, we would be VERY interested in hearing from you. Great thought provoking article!!

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