Blueprint is a CSS framework designed to reduce development time and ensure Cross-browser compatibility when working with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It also serves as a foundation for many tools designed to make CSS development easier and more accessible to beginners.

History

Blueprint was first created by Olav Bjørkøy and released on August 3, 2007.^[2] By August 11, Blueprint included work based on ideas from Jeff Croft, Nathan Borror, Christian Metts, and Eric Meyer.^[3] Version 0.8 was released on November 11, and included various bugfixes as well as a new "tabs" plugin.^[4]

Purpose

One of the goals stated by the core team is to facilitate the development of new tools for working with CSS.^[5] A variety of CSS generators, visual editors, themes, and frameworks are based on Blueprint, many of which can be found on the Blueprint Wiki.^[6]

Blueprint is released under a modified version of the MIT License, making it free software. It can be either used as is, or further adapted for use via a compression tool that is written in Ruby.

Features

Blueprint's README file lists the following features as being provided out-of-the-box:

• A typographic baseline
• An easily customizable grid
• Sensible default typography
• Perfected browser CSS reset
• A stylesheet for printing
• Powerful scripts for customization^[7]
• Bloat Minimized as much as possible