These days, whether you’re working on a static website, dynamic application or content management system, the final appearance of your pages comes down to cascading style sheets (CSS). Artisteer is designed to reinvent the way that CSS is handled, and itdoes so with considerable success.

To understand what’s so radical about Artisteer, it’s necessaryto understand the advantage that CSS brings -and the problems. The great strength of CSS is its centralised control, flexibility and efficiency update a single rule and the look and feel of your entire site updates accordingly. It’s simple in theory, but not in practice. The inherent complexity of trying to manage all the possible elements of a design through CSS, with its hundreds of parameters, cascade of rules, and infuriatingly different browser implementations, means most users never stray beyond the default templates provided by Dreamweaver or their CMS.

To get around this, you can visit one of dozens of online directories to download preset themes created by real CSS experts. But even this approach isn’t ideal, as the design you choose is neither unique nor tailored to your content. And ifyou try to adapt the desfgn to ensure that it is, you’re thrown back into the complexities of directly editing CSS.

This is where Artisteer comes in. At first sight the program seems very much like one of the online theme directories. It looks as if it simply provides a number of preset templates to apply to your layout, but this isn’t how it works at all.

Instead, when you hit the large Suggest Design icon on the ribbon bars ldeas tab, Artisteer randomly generates something for you. Ifs a clever idea that takes full advantage of the flexibility and power of CSS, but it also sounds like a recipe for disaster. It’s hard enough to find an attractive hand-cralted template, so what are the chances that a computer generated theme will fit the bill?

The good news is that the Artisteer approach work brilliantly. It’s clear that, rather than changing parameters at random, it intelligently varies groups of elements together to produce consistent, coherent and attractive designs. And the advanced dropdown menus and use of generated bitmap textures show Artisteer is going well beyond straight CSS.

Once you’ve found a theme that appeals, you can we other commands on the ldeas tab to suggest new colour schemes, typography, menus and so on. With a few clicks you can hone in on a custom design that could easily haw taken weeks to produce from scratch.

Output options are just as impresive. Themes can be exported as a collection of HTML, CSS, JS and PNG files ready for use in a program such as Dreamweaver. You can also export designs as ready to go themes for use in WordPress or, if you upgrade to the Standard Edition, in Joomla 1.5 and Drupal5/6.

The nature of design means that you will almost certainly want to tweak thing further. With a downloaded template this is a real nightmare but it’s far simpler here. Alongside the main ldeas tab, Artisteer provides no fewer than ten other tabs offering comprehensive control over colour, fonts, layout background, sheet, header, menus, articles, blocks, buttons and even footers. The pricing on the cake is that in each case Artisteer lets you explore your changes live on the layout before you commit yourself. Standard Edition users can call up dialogs to take absolute control.

Without the ability to add styles or edit code directly, Artisteer certainly isn’t a complete CSS solution. And it has limitations: liquid CSS layouts aren’t supported; them are some problems with how themes interact with CMS modules (most obviously Drupal’s Panels); and the way blocks are created rules out multiline headings.

But the program is developing quickly, and these issues are likely to be addressed. Plus, it’s so cheap that criticising it for these small weaknesses seems churlish, By making it child’s play to automatically create tailor-made and easilycustomize themes that look good and workwell, Artisteer really could revolutionise the way we all go about
designing for the web.