Voices that matter to me.. on CSS

I recently bought a couple of books from Amazon.com on this hobby of mine - Web Design. Dan Cederholm’s “Bulletproof Web Design” and “Transcending CSS” by Andy Clarke, Molly E. Holzschlag, Aaron Gustafson, and Mark Boulton. And great books that they are I was caught by the by tag line of the publisher - “Voices That Matter™”. Now - I’m not quite sure how they trademark three words but it got me thinking - Who are the voices that matter to me? Who do I listen to? Who’s doing amazing and extraordinary things? Who’s talking about what we should all be paying attention to? First off I’ll start with a particular love of mine which is web development and CSS in particular.

Eric Meyer

I’m pretty certain it would be impossible to exclude Eric Meyer from any list on CSS. Any list at all, because he is probably the best, most world renowned CSS expert there is. Having practically eaten two of his many books on CSS (”Eric Meyer on CSS” and “More Eric Meyer on CSS“) I can’t recommend them enough. Presumably does not suffer from stage fright as he speaks regularly (indeed founded) a travelling web design conference called “An Event Apart“ and most recently at this event in San Francisco and Chicago, along side a number of other names on this list. You can find Eric blogging at http://meyerweb.com/ and otherwise dolling out his genius in the form or amazing tips and helpful hints there too.

Andy Budd

I first found Andy Budd when I bought CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions. It quickly became one of my favourite books on CSS and has become a excellent and well used reference. His website has also become an excellent resource - especially his extensive bookmarks at http://www.andybudd.com/links/. He can also be found blogging at http://www.andybudd.com/ too, a popular weblog where he writes about his personal hobbies and also about web design and web standards. Another branch in Andy’s CSS work is also his efforts at http://clearleft.com/ (btw they also have a ridiculous trademarked tag line - “We make Websites Better™”). Clearleft have a good few web applications and web sites under their belt and one very interesting project that they have is http://www.silverbackapp.com/.

Dan Cederholm

from http://www.simplebits.com/ - One of the books I’m reading right now, “Bulletproof Web Design” was written by Dan Cederholm, and from what I’ve read - he uses techniques and has a style of code that I really admire and now aim for myself with my projects. He is a big proponent of lean markup and CSS, and apparently in every project looks to “minimize markup and embrace the flexibility of CSS”. This is something that I’d like to be able to do and his book seemed like the obvious place to start. Having said that, “Transcending CSS” is also pointing me in this direction as its mantra of content being king is helping me see the benefits of avoiding unnessary divs, and other markup that adds nothing to the semantic value of the page.

Jonathan Snook

at http://snook.ca/jonathan/ - Having heard of Jonathan over the years and having read a couple of his articles and things, when I first found out that he’d written a book, I pretty much had to buy it. The book was “The Art and Science of CSS“, and what a book it was. It was a book that really made me turn a corner, that made me realise how much I could do with CSS and good markup. I enjoyed this book immensely and learnt a great many things from it. He does the big web and development conferences too and has graced SXSW, Webmaster Jam Sessions, and Future of WebDesign. His personal website http://snook.ca/jonathan/ is where he shares his “tips, tricks and bookmarks on web development” and I often venture there for inspiration ideas and excellent ideas. One of the handiest tools on his website is also one of my favorites - The Colour Contrast Checker at http://snook.ca/archives/accessibility_and_usability/colour_color_co/. His list of accomplishments is long and they are many, check at the about section on his website to find out more.

Andy Clarke

from http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/ - Another recent addition to my list of really really good people is Andy Clarke. In fact I hadn’t really heard of him properly until I read Transcending CSS - A book that has literally changed how I look at new projects, and really got me thinking about the way I design websites. And although I only found him recently, it would appear that the man is a bit of a legend! He also speaks at the big conferences (like An event apart this year in Chicago…) and runs his own business from a studio in North Wales. But his book is becoming my most read book on web design(over and over again ). I really enjoyed reading it and appreciate all the work that went into it. Hopefully, I get to put many of the techniques and things learnt from this book to good use in the future.

Dave Shea

at http://mezzoblue.com/ - I first started to read Dave Shea’s website a good while ago after it was brought to my attention as a really good example of a website design, and although its changed quite a bit since then, it still holds true as a really good example of professional website design. Good use of changing themes/colours, great layout and interesting content. Also the creator of CSS Zen Garden, arguable one of the best known places for web designers to show off excellent CSS designs. Not always my cup of tea (I prefer less graphics intensive designs personally), its hard to ignore some of the really excellent things that sometimes appear here. As for Dave himself, I think he says it best himself(from the about section of http://mezzoblue.com/) - “If you’re looking for the professional bio it’s over here. In short, I do a bit of speaking, a bit of writing, but mostly it’s about the design.” He links to a differen site here and its one you should take a look at as its really excellent - http://brightcreative.com/.

Conclusions

In reality while writing this piece I could have listed about 50 more people. In fact I started off with three and it grew after looking at the books on my shelves. However I feel like these are the people that I really look to for CSS stuff and think most people will find it useful. At the very least your should be adding these people’s websites to your RSS feeds, however, then you lose one of the most important aspects of going to these websites and that’s for the great work that they’ve done on their own websites!

The next article should come soon enough on the same topic of voices that matter to me… but with a slightly different subject.

Posted in Technology, Voices that Matter, Web |