Maker Media

Stylesheets for HTML/CSS Book Layouts

A book on CNC machining written in HTML and styled with CSS.

The Challenge

Maker Media, a book and magazine publisher specalizing in DIY and maker culture, wanted their auto-generated print books produced via O'Reilly Media's Atlas platform to have a more polished look and feel, like books produced in InDesign.

My Role

I redesigned the layout, appearance, and usability of complex books by creating new print, PDF, and ebook CSS stylesheets for use with the AsciiDoc, a lightweight, plain-text, document format.

I used O'Reilly Media's HTMLBook (an open XHTML5-based standard for the authoring and production of print and digital books) toolchain for HTML, PDF, ePub, and Mobi conversion, and Antenna House typesetting software to lay out the PDF and print text and images.

In addition to the generic stylesheets I designed, I also created additional one-off, specialized layout patterns in SASS for my book, Design for CNC.