Fortunately there's not all that much HTML one needs to know to make styles!

You *can* use your dreamhack as a styles testbed, although a paid account is pretty much just as handy and a sight more convenient, but I'll also let people get accounts on my development server to play around with too. A dreamhack is only necessary if somebody is making changes like adding a layout/theme to the codebase, or making changes to core2 or the S2 implemetation, etc, which falls more under the realm of development.