A FRAMEWORKS FOR DESIGNERS

A FRAMEWORKS FOR DESIGNERS | A good and very useful article for designer.

These days, “framework” is quite a buzzword in web development. With JavaScript frameworks like the Yahoo User Interface library, jQuery, and Prototype getting a lot of attention and web application frameworks like Rails and Django getting even more, it seems like everyone is using some kind of framework to build their sites. But what exactly is a framework? And are they only useful to programmers, or can we web designers benefit from the concept, as well?

The bottom line is that we web designers, just like our friends in the programming world, tend to repeat ourselves often. We find ourselves resetting the browser default styles, setting up a baseline grid and writing CSS for navigation tabs over and over again—on almost every project. Taking a bit of time out to abstract some of these idioms into a framework that you can utilize on every site you build will get you off to a faster start, make for easier maintenance, and help the other designers on your team understand the decisions you made. With a bit of care, these benefits can be realized without adding bloat or hurting the performance of a website.
(ALA)