At the StartWithXML Forum in New York in January, Rebecca Goldthwaite of Cengage gave a great demonstration of how Cengage uses CSS in their XML workflow. Many publishers regard style sheets as an invitation to create cookie-cutter book production, with the fear that all their books will look the same. This is emphatically a myth. Have a look at her seventh slide for examples of how one stylesheet can actually create many different looks.
CSS Zen Garden has been up for a while (Liza Daly used this model to create the EPUB Zen Garden a few months ago). It’s a sort of CSS sandbox where graphic designers can play with style sheets and render the same content in very different forms. Clicking on the four links below will demonstrate what CSS can do:
It’s well worth checking out and maybe having some graphic designers play around with it.