Introduction

Print designers use grids to create compelling layouts. Using such a structure makes it easy to place elements into all sorts of layouts, from the front page of a newspaper to a movie poster to the cover of this book. It also makes the designs visually more appealing.

When print designers began gravitating toward the Web, they found the lack of structure frustrating. At most, designers initially could only float images to the left or right until Netscape invented the center tag. In fact, it wasn't until HTML tables were used as grids that the web-design industry took off. Even still, available tools had their limitations and as such designers overused tables to structure entire web pages.

With CSS-enabled designs, web developers learned they could forego the practice of manipulating tables to hold designs. However, they also learned that styling tabular data, such as a calendar, could still be challenging.

This chapter teaches you how to make your tables look better by stylizing table headers, setting borders for a table and for its cells, and reducing gaps with images in table cells. The sample design at the end of the chapter takes you through the steps required to stylize a calendar.