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Another thing that I've been using to punch out mvp type projects fast is this for the UI:

http://www.designinfluences.com/fluid960gs/

A grid system is awesome to begin with to help with laying stuff out well. But this also includes some basic css boilerplate for typography, forms, tables, etc.

It's purposefully in black and white (see the grey box method http://v3.jasonsantamaria.com/archive//2004/05/24/grey_box_m...) which doesn't look half bad until you decide the mvp is worthy enough of some better style.

3 comments

I would add CSS compilers like CleverCSS, SASS et al and CSS3 in the same timesaver category as grids. They make prototyping and iterating much faster with small and large projects.

Btw. Here's a nice CSS reset & typography to go with 960.gs and other grid systems http://borderleft.com/labs/

Yeah, using a grid-based css framework is a huge time saver. I find things tend to get a bit less readable when you've got "grid_5 alpha push_2 foo bar" classes everywhere, but hey, it does wonders for getting an MVP done.

Also, that JSM post never gets old.

Compass ( http://compass-style.org/ ) lets you use CSS frameworks while bypassing the problem of non-semantic class names by using SASS mixins. It's yet another layer of abstraction to learn, but worth a look if you don't know about it already.

And while we are on the topic :) these are some sweet buttons you can create if you are using compass:

https://github.com/imathis/fancy-buttons

Oh God, thank you for this. I'm just starting a new project and I think this will save a lot of time.