I've been practising design for the past 2 months and I am looking to jump back into HTML/CSS so I can build a few of the projects I've designed. I've

gone through quite a bit of the basic/intermediate HTML & CSS stuff at Treehouse but I wouldn't say I know them inside out, far from it.

 

I've been reading a few articles lately and learning a bit about Sass and what it is useful for. I think if used the right way it can be utilised to give a more structured approach to CSS and possibly foster the beginning to a decent workflow of how you approach a project in regard to CSS. I understand all that I've just mentioned can be applied to bog standard CSS too but I'm thinking maybe I should just jump straight into Sass right now. I've read in professional settings they like to use things LESS, Sass, Stylus etc so it might be a good idea for me to just start building my projects with a preprocessor if I am able to. What do you guys think?

 

Lastly, I assume many of you work in the industry. Is it standard practice to use things like front-end frameworks like Bootstrap/Foundation/Boilerplates on real projects? I also mean things like Susy and Bourbon or should we be building our own pieces of reusable code rather than using these little helpers?

 

I basically just want to be as efficient as possible and learn the most useful ways of getting things done (subjective I know) without wasting time on the minutiae and I guess that's what some of the 'helpers' I mentioned above are for.

 

Thanks,

Marcus

Edited August 22, 201412 yr by mug2k

I'd learn CSS fully before you jump into SASS it's the same with frameworks and learning jQuery - You should learn the underlying language fully before using them.

At the stage of learning I wouldn't worry too much about speed, in the industry it's pointless being fast if the result is littered with bugs and so on -- But once you do understand the underlying languages then you should certainly learn SASS.

 

As for frameworks most professionals do use them, We did use Bootstrap at some point, but for me it makes way too many design decisions which results in you undoing styles all the time. I have since created my own framework that has taken some of the good stuff from Bootstrap -- the Grid and Carousels and then build a load of objects and abstractions that can be extended in our projects. The result means we can rapidly build unique front-ends. Also we have a start template which always starts as a base for our projects.

 

One thing used in the industry that really speeds things up is an automatic task runner -- We use grunt, there are hundreds of plugins available that do things like file concatenation, minification of css, js and images, autoprefixing etc.

 

Another very good tool is Version control -- Git being the most widely used in the industry.