You may be familiar with the css Zen Garden...or you may not. It's a very cool experiment in the use of CSS in web design. Many designers have contributed many good, bad and ugly designs to it.

The other day, I had a mental arc--why not create a similar site with a slightly different focus. While the Zen Garden allows designers to incorporate their own graphics into their designs (which is a good thing--there are a lot of beautiful and skillfully used graphics there), my site provides 12 very minimalist graphics and does not allow the use of any others. The goal is to explore just how much can be done with stylesheets alone as a step toward understanding the optimal uses of stylesheets versus graphics in today's and tomorrow's web.

Behold, the CSS Trappist Monastery.