styling

I'm pretty new to drupal, omega and 960. I could really use a few tips on styling the regions, block etc, without breaking the grid.

When not using drupal, i realize i can nest a div inside of a grid and then add padding, etc and the grid stays intact. But how do i accomplish this using omega?

Basically any first best practices on which templates to modify (those in the Omega or Alpha folder?), and how I can style the content, blocks etc using custom css while keeping the integrity of the grid.

I'm styling a horizontal menu in User Bar First region.
How do I align each list element with the grid in a general way that would still hold good if the containing grid was changed later?

Hey Everyone,
May I introduce you to Peroxide an in-development Drupal theme engine that uses Haml as a templating language and can use Sass stylesheets. Peroxide's goal is to make themes faster and easier to create, and to make them more maintainable over time. Haml and Sass both present nice abstractions and tools to make working with templates and stylesheets respectively much easier. Peroxide is also bundled with the compass styling framework which makes it extremely easy to import existing CSS frameworks including Blueprint, CSS resets, CSS3 compatibility tools, and more into your theme.