Tony Thomas

Just like the README file for Blueprint CSS, I wanted to refer to the TUTORIAL file in a more readable format. Here it is formatted for easy reading.

Blueprint CSS Framework Tutorial

Welcome to this tutorial on Blueprint. It will give you a thorough intro to what you can do with the framework, and a few notes on what you shouldn’t do with it. Let’s get started.

About Blueprint

Blueprint is a CSS framework, designed to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your CSS on top of, including some sensible default typography, a customizable grid, a print stylesheet and much more.

However, BP is not a silver bullet, and it’s best suited for websites where each page may require it’s own design. Take a look at existing BP pages before deciding if the framework is right for you. You may also check out the test files in the tests directory, which demonstrates most of the features in Blueprint.

The word “framework” may be a bit misleading in this context, since BP does not make suggestions on how you should organize or write your CSS. It’s more like a “css toolbox” with helpful bits and pieces, from which you may pick and choose based on your needs.

Structural Overview

From the bottom up, here are the CSS layers in Blueprint:

• CSS reset: Removes any default CSS rules set by each browser.
• Typography: Gives you some nice default typography and colors.
• Grid: Provides a set of CSS classes for making grid layouts.

The second part of Blueprint are the scripts, which lets you customize most aspects of the framework, from column count and widths, to output paths and CSS class namespaces. We have two scripts:

• Compressor: For compressing and customizing the source files.
• Validator: For validating the Blueprint core files.

That’s the quick overview, so now we can finally get into the details. First, we’ll take a look at the CSS in Blueprint. We’ll then move on to the scripts, where I’ll show you how to customize the framework.

Setting Up Blueprint

To use Blueprint, you must include three files in your HTML:

• blueprint/screen.css: All CSS for screen, projection viewing.
• blueprint/print.css: A basic stylesheet for printing.
• blueprint/ie.css: A few needed corrections for Internet Explorer

To include them, use the following HTML (make sure the href paths are correct):
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/screen.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/print.css" type="text/css" media="print">
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/ie.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection">
<![endif]-->
Remember to add trailing slashes if you’re using XHTML (” />”).

Using the CSS in Blueprint

As mentioned before, there’s basically three layers of CSS in Blueprint. The first two layers, the browser CSS reset and the default typography, apply themselves by changing CSS of standard HTML elements.
In other words, you don’t need to change anything in these files. If you for instance want to change the font size, do this in your own stylesheet, so that it’s easy to upgrade Blueprint when new versions arrive.

Classes for Typography

While the typography of Blueprint mainly applies itself, there’s a few classes provided. Here’s a list of their names and what they do:

.small

Makes the text of this element smaller.

.large

Makes the text of this element larger.

.hide

Hides an element.

.quiet

Tones down the font color for this element.

.loud

Makes this elements text black.

.highlight

Adds a yellow background to the text.

.added

Adds green background to the text.

.removed

Adds red background to the text.

.first

Removes any left sided margin/padding from the element.

.last

Removes any right sided margin/padding from the element.

.top

Removes any top margin/padding from the element.

.bottom

Removes any bottom margin/padding from the element.

Styling Forms

To make Blueprint style your input elements, each text input element should have the class .text, or .title, where .text is the normal size, and .title gives you an input field with larger text.

There’s also a few classes you may use for success and error messages:

div.error

Creates an error box (red).

div.notice

Creates a box for notices (yellow).

div.success

Creates a box for success messages (green).

Creating a Grid

The third layer is the grid CSS classes, which is the tool Blueprint gives you to create almost any kind of grid layout for your site. Keep in mind that most of the CSS behind the grid can be customized (explained below). In this section however, I’m using the default settings.

The default grid is made up of 24 columns, each spanning 30px, with a 10px margin between each column. The total width comes to 950px, which is a good width for 1024×768 resolution displays. If you’re interested in a narrower design, see the section on customizing the grid, below.

So how do you set up a grid? By using classes provided by Blueprint. To create a column, make a new <div>, and apply one of the .span-x classes to it. For instance, if you want a 3-column setup, with two narrow and one wide column, a header and a footer here’s how you do it:
<div class="container">
<div class="span-24">
The header
</div>

<div class="span-4">
The first column
</div>
<div class="span-16">
The center column
</div>
<div class="span-4 last">
The last column
</div>

<div class="span-24">
The footer
</div>
</div>

In addition to the spans, there are two important classes you need to know about. First of all, every Blueprint site needs to be wrapped in a div with the class .container, which is usually placed right after the body tag.

Second, the last column in a row (which by default has 24 columns), needs the class .last to remove its left hand margin. Note, however, that each .span-24 don’t need the .last class, since these always span the entire width of the page.

To create basic grids, this is all you need to know. The grid CSS however, provides many more classes
for more intricate designs. To see some of them in action, check out the files in tests/parts/. These files demonstrate what’s possible with the grid in Blueprint.

Here’s a quick overview of the other classes you can use in to make your grid:

.append-x

Appends x number of empty columns after a column.

.prepend-x

Preppends x number of empty columns before a column.

.push-x

Pushes a column x columns to the left. Can be used to swap columns.

.pull-x

Pulls a column x columns to the right. Can be used to swap columns.

.border

Applies a border to the right side of the column.

.colborder

Appends one empty column, with a border down the middle.

.clear

Makes a column drop below a row, regardless of space.

.showgrid

Add to container or column to see the grid and baseline.

In this list, x is a number from 1 through 23 for append/prepend and 1 through 24 for push/pull. These numbers will of course change if you set a new number of columns in the settings file.

Here’s another example where we have four columns of equal width, with a border between the two first and the two last columns, as well as a four column gap in the middle:
<div class="container">
<div class="span-5 border">
The first column
</div>
<div class="span-5 append-4">
The second column
</div>
<div class="span-5 border">
The third column
</div>
<div class="span-5 last">
The fourth (last) column
</div>
</div>

You may also nest columns to achieve the desired layout. Here’s a setup where we want four rectangles with two on top and two below on the first half of the page, and one single column spanning the second half of the page:

<div class="container">
<div class="span-12">
<div class="span-6">
Top left
</div>
<div class="span-6 last">
Top right
</div>
<div class="span-6">
Bottom left
</div>
<div class="span-6 last">
Bottom right
</div>
</div>
<div class="span-12 last">
Second half of page
</div>
</div>

Try this code in your browser it it’s difficult to understand what it would look like. To see more examples on how to use these classes, check out /tests/parts/grid.html.

The Scripts

Blueprint comes with two scripts: one for compressing and customizing the CSS, and one for validating the core CSS files, which is handy if you’re making changes to these files.

The Validator

The validator has a fairly simple job – validate the CSS in the core BP files. The script uses a bundled version of the W3C CSS validator to accomplish this. To run it, you’ll need to have Ruby installed on your machine. You can then run the script like so: $ ruby validate.rb.

Note that there are a few validation errors shipping with Blueprint. These are known, and comes from a few CSS hacks needed to ensure consistent rendering across the vast browser field.

The Compressor

As the files you’ll include in your HTML are the compressed versions of the core CSS files, you’ll have to recompress the core if you’ve made any changes. This is what the compressor script is for.

In addition this is where you customize the grid. To customize the grid, a special settings file is used, and the new CSS is generated once you run the compressor. The new compressed files will then reflect your settings file.

To recompress, you just have to run the script. This will parse the core CSS files and output new compressed files in the blueprint folder. As with the validator, Ruby has to be installed to use this script. In the lib directory, run: $ruby compress.rb

Calling this file by itself will pull files from blueprint/src and concatenate them into three files; ie.css, print.css, and screen.css. However, argument variables can be set to change how this works. Calling $ruby compress.rb -h will reveal basic arguments you can pass to the script.

Custom Settings

To learn how to use custom settings, read through the documentation within lib/compress.rb

Author’s note: This is word for word post of the Blueprint CSS file only because I’m tired of pulling up the text file and I’d rather read it in a nicely formatted HTML page. I’m sure others would prefer that too.

Blueprint CSS Framework Readme

Welcome to Blueprint! This is a CSS framework designed to cut down on your CSS development time.
It gives you a solid foundation to build your own CSS on. Here are some of the features BP provides out-of-the-box:

• An easily customizable grid
• Sensible default typography
• A typographic baseline
• Perfected browser CSS reset
• A stylesheet for printing
• Powerful scripts for customization
• Absolutely no bloat!

Project Info

• Web
• Bug/Feature Tracking

Setup Instructions

Here’s how you set up Blueprint on your site.

1. Upload the “blueprint” folder in this folder to your server, and place it in whatever folder you’d like. A good choice would be your CSS folder.
2. Add the following three lines to every <head/> of your site. Make sure the three href paths are correct (here, BP is in my CSS folder):
   

   <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/screen.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/print.css" type="text/css" media="print">
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/ie.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection">
<![endif]-->

   Remember to include trailing slashes (” />”) in these lines if you’re using XHTML.

3. For development, add the .showgrid class to any container or column to see the underlying grid.
   Check out the plugins directory for more advanced functionality.

Tutorials

• Tutorial on BlueFlavor
• How to customize BP with the compressor script
• How to use a grid in a layout
• How to use a baseline in your typography

Files in Blueprint

The framework has a few files you should check out. Every file in the src directory contains lots of (hopefully) clarifying comments.

Compressed files (these go in the HTML):

• blueprint/screen.css
• blueprint/print.css
• blueprint/ie.css

Source files:

• blueprint/src/reset.css
  This file resets CSS values that browsers tend to set for you.
• blueprint/src/grid.css
  This file sets up the grid (it’s true). It has a lot of classes you apply to <div/> elements to set up any sort of column-based grid.
• blueprint/src/typography.css
  This file sets some default typography. It also has a few methods for some really fancy stuff to do with your text.
• blueprint/src/forms.css
  Includes some minimal styling of forms.
• blueprint/src/print.css
  This file sets some default print rules, so that printed versions of your site looks better than they usually would. It should be included on every page.
• blueprint/src/ie.css
  Includes every hack for our beloved IE6 and 7.

Scripts:

• lib/compress.rb
  A Ruby script for compressing and customizing your CSS. Set a custom namespace, column count, widths, output paths, multiple projects, and semantic class names. See commenting in compress.rb or run $ruby compress.rb -h for more information.
• lib/validate.rb
  Validates the Blueprint core files with the W3C CSS validator.

Other:

• blueprint/plugins/
  Contains additional functionality in the form of simple plugins for Blueprint. See individual readme files in the directory of each plugin for further instructions.
• tests/
  Contains html files which tests most aspects of Blueprint. Open tests/index.html for further instructions.

Extra Information

• For credits and origins, see AUTHORS.
• For license instructions, see LICENSE.
• For the latest updates, see CHANGELOG.