Yet another week of non-Agenceum work. However, all that templating work from months ago has been coming in handy as I build new website shells elsewhere. I have a small handful of tips that I am reusing over and over again:

1. Faux Columns.
2. Centered Fixed Layout.
3. Using a Reset script to start everything from scratch.
4. Using position: relative on a parent div to allow children to use absolute positioning, which makes layout a lot easier.
5. Using float: left to force a parent div to fully-contain its child divs instead of letting them overflow. This is actually part of a set of techniques that seek to control div behavior.
6. Standardizing on a 72-pixel or 60-pixel grid size for layout (I need to print out a reference chart for this to make things easy to add/subtract).

This seems to solve the vast bulk of my layout needs, which are very simple. Then I have a typography.css file that builds up the type in a way that I find pleasing, again based on a 72-point grid broken down into 12pt or 18pt linespacing.

So although I’m not doing a whole lot with Agenceum at the moment, it’s helped me get over a hurdle with doing faster, simpler CSS layouts that are relatively bulletproof.