An Interview With Web Designer/Blogger Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks

Chris Coyier is a web designer/blogger most prominently know for his awesome web design blog CSS-Tricks. I invited Chris to discuss some of his experiences as a web designer, how he manages being a web designer, blogger, and web master, and his biggest discovery during his journey through learning how to design websites.

First and foremost, thank you for taking the time to fill out these questions. To get started, can you give me a synopsis of who you are, how you got started in web design, and what inspires you to be a blogging web designer?

Thanks for having me Dhane, always a pleasure!

It was sheer desire that got me into web design. Once I got a little taste of it, in college, how you can design something and throw it up on the web and the whole world can see it and you can completely control it, I was hooked. It’s such a cool medium that way. I get all the satisfaction of “creating something” that an artist of any other medium gets, only the final product is instantly viewable by potentially huge audiences. Plus, that final product isn’t pinned under glass or hardened in a kiln, it exists in the same form as when you built it, so you can manipulate it and refine and refine and make it better over time.

I’ve only professionally been working on the web for a few years now, but I’ve been really loving it. I didn’t have any professional experience whatsoever on the web when I got this first job in web design, so I was lucky that way. It also meant I had to catch up quick. So blogging about web design has helped me in a lot of ways. Archiving stuff I was learning, sharing useful stuff with the community, and learning how to better build websites through building this blog.

Your blog CSS-Tricks by far is one of the most prominent in the web design community. You provide awesome tutorials and resources, free to download. It’s a place where I got my start when I first stepped on the scene a couple of years ago. What do you think keeps people coming back for more?

Hopefully it’s “usefulness”. Not every single thing I ever put on CSS-Tricks is going to piping hot juicy never-seen-before web design technique, but I do hope that most of it is useful in some way. Whether it’s a tutorial, or an explanation of the way something works, or commentary on the industry, or whatever else it happens to be, I hope that its useful. The name “CSS-Tricks” is almost kind of funny at this point. It’s been a long time since I’ve soley focused on CSS and I bet about 5% of the content of the site has anything to do with “tricks”. But oh well, I still like it actually, since of all the web technologies I enjoy CSS the most and having a strong fundamental knowledge of that is key to being a web designer.

People are also voracious consumers of free downloadable content. One of highest trafficked pages on the site is my downloads page where I put up the demos and downloads of tutorials that have them. I am very happy to provide that stuff for free, but I don’t plan to turn into some robot who just churns out stuff that people want to download. I prefer to teach the concepts and make sure that the blog has a voice, not just a download button.

Aside from CSS-Tricks, you’re the web guy for Chatman Design, and you have other web projects that you manage. What are some of the tools or resources you use to keep up with everything and stay productive?

I certainly stay busy, that’s for sure! I consider my main productivity tool GMail, actually. I pretty much use it as my to-do list, in all kinds of different ways. That’s why I freak out when it goes down! I stay current with the industry primarily though all my feeds in Google Reader. And clearly I could barely function without Google search. I guess I’m pretty Google dependent.

You’ve done some freelancing and worked at a web design company. What are some tips and advice that you have for people who are on the fence about making the jump towards a freelance design career?

I’m not 100% freelance, and I’m not sure I ever will be so I can definitely sympathize with the fence sitters. My advice? Marry someone with sweet insurance, a trust fund, and lots of patience.

Obviously you have a lot of experiences both positive and negative that you’ve gone through during your web design career, but what was the best thing you felt you discovered while learning how to design websites?

It was definitely the CSS “ah-ha” moment. For me it was the realization that every element on the page is a rectangular block and you can control the position of those blocks entirely through CSS. That was, and still is, a powerful feeling that makes anything seem possible through CSS web design. I wish I got to do more converting of designs. That’s easily my favorite web task.

There’s a lot to say about getting yourself out there so people can find you. What type of impact has social media had on the success you’ve had in your web design career so far and where do you see the future of social media headed?

I think spending too much time thinking about leveraging social media will rot your brain. If you make cool things and write good stuff, people will find you.