Using the analogy of town planning she states that with CSS we now have the power to create designs which are spontaneous and deconstructed, and ultimately more interesting.
"The beauty and challenge of working with modern layouts is that now we have options. With CSS, we have a means of creating manageable, lightweight, visually rich designs that can be grid designs if we want them to be. But we can also easily deconstruct the grid or dispense with it entirely."
Although she wrote this article in 2005 it remains relevant today, as it is easy to rely on the safety and predictablity of the grid. Grids work and they have their place, but her challenge is to think outside the grid to world of possibilities beyond it.
Holzschlag believes "that it's been the constraints of the table-based layout that have kept us in visual gridlock for so long." This was part of the reason, but CSS has been around for quite a while now and we still see a lot of grid based layouts. Is there also a hangover/crossover form print? Many websites borrow a lot of structural elements from the printed medium, they use grids, pages, and navigation systems similar to contents pages. Unlike print though, the web is not a two dimensional medium, nor is it linear or static. The challenge then is to think beyond the book and the page not just the grid. < back