Okay okay, So this isn’t exactly news. But it is news to me. Appar­ently I com­pletely missed the realease (on 8/11) of a new ver­sion of Blue­print. Its got some nice new fea­tures including:

• Font sizing now uses ems
• A com­pressed ver­sion of the CSS is included
• IE bug fixes
• Incre­men­tal leading

You can read the release notes here and down­load the new ver­sion from the Google Code site:

• Blue­print CSS

These are all quite wel­come changes. One of the first things that I noticed about Blue­print was that the CSS files were quite bulky. Much of that bulk­i­ness was because the author was striv­ing to make every­thing easy to under­stand. That said, not having a com­pressed ver­sion was a notice­able absence. The second thing I noticed was that all of the font sizes were in pixels. I didn’t really think on this too hard, because using pixel font sizes sim­pli­fies the grid dra­mat­i­cally. Looks like both of these issues have now been patched up.

I’ve been work­ing with Blue­print since it was released and I have to say that I’ve been quite impressed over­all. My first thought when I read about it was, “Oh great, another frame­work I have to learn.” But after taking a quick look at Blue­print, I real­ized that it is actu­ally very straight­for­ward and easy to use. It took very little effort to adjust my coding to it. Also, it made using a grid a lot easier because all of the grunt work (and math) was already done.

That said, the site that I actu­ally designed using Blue­print bears very little resem­blance to the orig­i­nal Blue­print grid. I ended up mod­i­fy­ing quite a bit of the grid.css file to fit with my design better. I also over­wrote most of the type styles from typography.css. I spent a good amount of time yes­ter­day forc­ing sIFR to render my head­ers with­out mess­ing up the grid. Now I’m won­der­ing if it’s worth it on this site to try and mix in the new release of Blue­print. Per­haps I’m missed the point of using a frame­work? Oh well, at least get­ting started on the site was easy.