It’s been almost a year I have been using Sass and Compass in my various web projects, and as I look back over this now-established design process, I can only think of the advantages those tools have brought to my daily routine.
This blog post is not here so I can dwell on the technical features of Sass and Compass, nor list the best mixins you could include if you were to use pre-processors, but more to motivate the designers keen to learn the technology, yet still waiting for their time to get cracking.
Yes, using Sass and Compass can look daunting for people used to deal with CSS exclusively. There is a learning curve, new tools to test, sometimes even some command lines to type in the terminal, all this can be a bit overwhelming indeed.
But it is SO worth it, you’ll kick yourself for not having done it earlier. I was reluctant too at the time. As I was before starting to use Version control systems like Git, or writing my CSS in a modular way.
Don’t Wait up!
My piece of advice to you would be: Do not wait up for the next big project to start using Sass and Compass! I often speak to fellow designers, who tell me they haven’t found the right project to start using pre-processors.
You are fooling yourselves if you think that you will start learning Sass and Compass on a big scale project, as part of a dev team (even small). Do it on your own on a poxy little project of yours, even a one-pager. This is the best time to get acquainted with pre-processors, read documentation and books on the subject. There is no way you will be able to do that when pushed by time, with deadlines approaching.
I promised I wasn’t going to talk code, but i’m going to talk resources. This is far from an exhaustive list, but I advise you to take a long look at them and get cracking with Sass and Compass, if you haven’t started using both.
So long folks.
Resources
Websites
Sass – Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets
The Sass Way
Compass Home Documentation
Blog Posts
#chris-eppstein {position: unique;} – Blog
Chris Coyier’s Sass style guide
Using Compass and Sass for CSS in your Next Project
Ben Frain’s Sass-related blog posts
Books
Sass and Compass for designers by Ben Frain ( my review of the book here)
Screencasts
Assembling Sass – a free course by Codeschool
CSS-tricks’ Video Tutorials on How to Build Modern Websites (*)
Tim likes to teach (*)
* a special mention to Tim and Chris’ video series, which are membership only, but a bargain considering they will make you gain valuable time by reducing your Sass and Compass learning curve.
Tools
Codekit for mac users only
Prepros for windows users only
Scout for both mac and windows users (only compiles Sass and Compass as opposed to Codekit and Prepros)
My name is Flo Preynat and I am the freelance webdesigner and developer behind shoogle designs. I live in France and specialize in responsive web design. Give me a shoogle or get in touch with me on twitter.
Follow @shoogledesigns
