This assignment, which is based on the very cool CSS Zen Garden web site, has two parts. First, create two different Cascading Style Sheets with different sorts of design elements and apply them to the simple html file you are reading right now. One of these sites should be intentionally ugly, and one should be a representation of a good style where the layout is designed for a particupar audience. Other than CSS commands that control the layout ("div" for example), you can't mess with the code of the page.
Second, write a brief (about 1000 words, or about four double-spaced typed pages) essay about both the process you went through making these different style sheets and the "writerly" effects you believe you achieved with different style sheets. Be sure to note what you see as the rhetorical impact of the different "looks" of your different style sheets.
First, I'm calling this a "CSS Zen Flowerpot" and not a "CSS Zen Garden" because I want to emphasize the modest scale of this assignment. A full-fledged garden is something not everyone can do because it requires space and resources, and to make a large and impressive garden takes experience and expertise. On the other hand, a flowerpot is the sort of thing that almost anyone can keep almost anyplace-- a dorm room, an apartment porch, a shelf, even a windowless school office.
Second, to extend my metaphor further, different CSS gardners will come up with different CSS flowerpots. Some of you will have cascading style sheets that are like exotic and delicate plants from far away places; some of you will have casscading style sheets that are like common and hard-to-kill plants. That's okay; both kinds of plants/style sheets have a place.
Third, the goal is to use CSS to effect the design of information (in this case, just this particular piece of information) to reach different audiences for different purposes. As Molly Holzschlag writes in her book Spring Into HTML and CSS:
Keeping presentation separate from the document means you can style that document for numerous media, including the screen, print, projection, and even handheld devices.