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Gesso is a CSS primer coat. A bit more than a CSS reset and a lot less than a CSS framework.

Gesso is a collection of CSS files, definitions and parameters that I found myself setting up over and over and decided to put together as a single collection. It is hosted on GitHub so it can be forked and modified to fit anyone's needs or preferences. It aims to be a definition of technique rather than paint-by-numbers.

The stylesheets and definitions that make up Gesso are designed to work best with a standards-based design technique. The project is setup to optimize styling across multiple media types, balancing minimum duplication and maximum customization. Typography, Normalization (sometimes referred to as CSS Reset), and Internet Explorer-specific styles are broken apart into individual modules so they can be imported individually into Screen and Print modes (it is assumed that you will want to do different things with layout and color for screen media than you would for print and we threw Internet Explorer hacks out with IE for Mac).

They typographic style sheet sets up a baseline grid and a couple of basic font stacks including a humanist sans font stack, a serif font stack and a monospaced font stack that are designed to match up well between operating systems. Within the package is a rich text file for previewing the font stacks and an XHTML file for previewing the effects of the stylesheets on various elements in markup.

Updates

To keep track of changes to this <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheet">CSS</abbr> primer coat, you can follow the project on GitHub or grab the RSS Feed of updates.

Installation

View the Readme file for installation instructions.

Gesso is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License