I’ve been a fan of Jonathan Snook’s work for a long time so I was super excited to talk to him about his new job with Shopify and to dig into what he’s doing with his SMACSS project. Jonathan is a speaker at this year’s ConvergeSE too!
Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS
Jonathan has been working on an approach, a sort of best practices, for structuring your CSS for large website projects. He’s worked on a few of ’em. He’s documenting it all in his SMACSS book and online companion pieces. We think this is pretty smart stuff and hope you check it out too.
Jonathan puts it this way on the SMACSS website:
SMACSS (pronounced “smacks”) is more style guide than rigid framework. There is no library within here for you to download or install. SMACSS is a way to examine your design process and as a way to fit those rigid frameworks into a flexible thought process. It is an attempt to document a consistent approach to site development when using CSS.
Giveaway!
Jonathan is giving away a membership to his SMACSS: Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS e-book/website. Just leave a quick comment to tell us about your last CSS/HTML project and how it went for you. You’ll be entered for a random draw to win the SMACSS e-book/membership!
About: Jonathan Snook
Jonathan Snook (@snookca) writes about tips, tricks, and bookmarks on his blog at Snook.ca. He has also written for A List Apart, 24ways, and .net magazine, and has co-authored two books, The Art and Science of CSS and Accelerated DOM Scripting. He has also recently written the e-book, SMACSS, sharing his experience and best practices on CSS architecture. When not writing books and speaking at conferences, Snook works on the design team at Shopify.
I’ve been intrigued by Jonathan Snook’s SMACSS since hearing about it a little while ago; for my last project I thought I’d try Zurb’s Foundation framework and while I like the speed with which you can prototype, it left me unsatisfied with the way I had to work – namely, feeling “locked” into someone else’s code and decisions.
Cheers.
Hit me with snooks eBook…. Pleeeeaaaaasse!
Designing websites is a passion for me, and when it comes to CSS/HTML projects, I never miss an opportunity. My last project was for a non-profit organization, and it went awesome. They love the website and I also got wonderful feedback from the community!
Can’t wait to read it!
My last HTML/CSS project was http://whymeltmediashouldhire.me
It went well enough for me to get an interview = )
Drop me off a copy
I could learn a lot from SMACCS.
Been really interested to learn more about smacss since it came out and have been trying to be more modular with my CSS since reading the free online book!
Isn’t SMACSS basically only describing something any sane HTML/CSS coder will evolve into after a period of time and few pages done? (By insane, I obviously mean people whose code is based on 400+ IDs)
Isn’t it every coder’s way of doing things: Reusing as much as possible and writing as few of code as possible, thus being closer to this so called modularity with every new project?
I discovered SMACSS about month ago and I have been applying some of the techniques to some of the recent project. Thanks 🙂
Entry.
My last HTML/CSS project went fine, the boss was pleased, but I think there’s always room for improvement, I try to keep up to date with best practices, and I’m familiar with the concept behind SMACSS, but I really want to apply more ideas to code faster and specially to produce easy-to-maintain code.
I’ve enjoyed stalking @snookca for only a short few months, but as a .NET web developer, I’m literally thrilled at the site design techniques in this work!
I loved Snook’s SMACCS website!
At the moment I’m redesigning my personal website to finally make it responsive, here’s to hoping it works as well as my head thinks it will!
My last proyect was for a ONG, fairly easy but the code after reading the online version of SMACSS realized it was far from reusable and efficient, so this would really help me grasp the concepts for my future proyects. Thanks.
My last project went really well as I used the HTML5 Boilerplate for the first time and it helped me to break out from the routine. I learned lots of new things, but I think I could still improve the organization and modularity of my code, specially to make collaboration easier.
I also updated a responsive mini-site and I had to sacrifice my original design idea for a table for compatibility reasons. There are still a lot of inconsistencies for table styles and responsiveness just makes it more complicated.
I’ve been interested lately in ways of making my markup more efficient and easier to maintain and I believe SMACSS’s approach could be very helpful.
I would like to learn more about SMACSS
SMACSS me down with an ebook!!
Really excited about what Jonathan started with SMACSS. From what I’ve read about it, it has already introduced to me a different paradigm of how I think about the modularity of CSS and it’s structure.
Kudos, Mr. Snook! 🙂
watching your chat! 🙂
count me in
What I like about Jonathan’s method is that it is more of a conceptual framework that can be adopted for my own purposes rather than a precomposed framework that locks you into someone else’s way of coding. I’ve used several CSS frameworks in the past and always found there was a lot of code I never used and some that I ended up writing differently anyways.
I am just starting to work on “recoding” of a large site and am looking into oocss, BEM and smacss. They all have good stuff, but smacss seems to be the least rigid and better adapted to my needs.
Wanna!
My last web project went very well especially since I was trying out sass for the first time. But web design still feels a bit non DRY and would be interested to see how SMACSS can help improve that.
Announcing the winner of the SMACSS site membership: Natalia Ventre – thanks for reading and commenting on this post.
Jonathan Snook is the man BTW!