[??]

[treehouse friends]

So, who are you and what do you do--

[interview with chris coyier] Chris, web designer. [chuckles]

[Petitt] for people that have no familiarity with you at all,

which is probably only just a few people.

No, most people, I feel like. I hope.

My name is Chris. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, Chris. >>Yeah. I work on the Internet. Yeah.

I build websites and write about websites, and I like to teach web design and just everything.

I'm just fascinated by the Internet, really. >>Cool.

So you're a pretty popular figure in the web industry. >>Thanks.

I'd say you're a thought leader. >>[whispers] Oh.

You recently broke 40,000 followers on Twitter. >>Oh, my God. Did I?

You did. >>Should I check? >>Yeah, you can check.

You just broke it. >>I should have a party.

Well, I mean, it is just a number but it's--you know.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's tremendously useful actually, because I travel a little bit, right?

And at that number you can be like, "What's a good restaurant?" at any time of the day

and somebody is like, "I want to answer your question."

I think that's my favorite part of it, really. >>Twitter is now your Google.

Somebody the other day was like, "You should monetize that."

Two people in the last week told me about how I should monetize my Twitter screen

and I'm like, "I reject this comment, sir. I will never do that."

By tweeting about Ferrari or something like that or doing sponsor tweets? >>Yeah.

There's actually services--yeah, sponsor tweets that are like--

And I don't care if you do, but it's not right for me. It feels gross to me.

Yeah, yeah. No, I agree.

We're going to talk about how to raise your profile in the web industry

or how you raised your profile in the web industry and how other people can do that.

But before we get to that, I want to just kind of ask you some basic background questions.

What is your background?

Actually, first I want to ask you what did you want to be when you grew up,

because not a lot of people-- >>Probably like a dinosaur captain. Is that a thing?

[Pettit laughs] >>I don't know. I don't have a super "I want to be an astronaut" or anything.

I don't know. What did you want to be when you grew up, Nick?

I think astronaut was probably in there at some point or another.

Yeah. >>But I don't think I was thinking, "I want to be a web designer when I grow up."

No, certainly not. Well, that's because there wasn't a Web.

So that would have been really weird if you wanted to be a web designer

before there was an Internet. >>I would have been able to see into the future. Yeah.

I liked art and stuff, like later, especially high school.

I was into ceramics and stuff like that, but I was also a nerd.

In high school there was a Turbo Pascal class that I thought was so rad.

I really liked that language a lot, so I was like both throwing pots and writing Pascal.

I couldn't even decide which 2 I liked more than that.

Then I went to college and I was like, "I better do the Pascal thing, probably,

"because that's where the--" That's certainly what the folks wanted me to do.

I did it for a while and then I got to take 1 class in that

and then it's like, "Now take assembly," or whatever and I'm like, "Oh, worst."

You had to learn a bunch of-- I hated computer science.

I did 4 years of computer science in college and then I was like, "I can't do it anymore."

"I don't like these people."

And then my roommate went for ceramics and he was just always--

The attitude in the art culture in college was so much better

and the people he was hanging out with were funner and I was like, "I want to be that."

"Sorry, parents. I'm going to switch at the end of my computer science degree to art."

And then I ended up getting a degree, a Bachelor of Arts, in ceramics/graphic design.

So right after that, what were some of the first jobs you worked,

or were you just always freelancing? >>No.

Immediately after college I took a job at kind of like a Best Buy kind of thing.

It wasn't Best Buy. It was like a smaller, local chain of that.

So every week in the paper was one of those gross, all color

"Super Warehouse Sale!"

and it was 12 pages of stuff on sale, and every week was a new thing.

I worked on a design team.

It was a whole bunch of designers because it's kind of fast-paced

to put out a book every single week.

So you're like, "Okay, this week you have page 7 and 5."

You'd have to lay out the stuff and put big, stupid bursts

about how on sale it was or whatever.

It was print design right after college.

I wanted to work in web. Web was cool.

But it was one of those things where it's hard to convince somebody to hire you for a web job

when you're so green.

So how did you make that transition into web design? >>I just did it on the side.

I was also playing in bands.

I play the banjo, and I was playing in some bluegrass bands and stuff and I was like,

"I'm going to make our website." I really wanted to because I had some computer science.

I was like, "I'm good at computers. I can do this."

I ended up just downloading WordPress and installing that on a domain that I bought.

I was like, "I'm going to use this awesome music template I got."

I uploaded that and I was like, "I need to change the colors and stuff."

"What's in this fancy little CSS file?"

WordPress and a band website was my intro into it,

and I find that it's the most common story ever for people that got into web design.

So many people I talk to are like, "Oh, I had to make a band website,

"so now I'm a web designer."

50% of web designers, that's their story.

So did you jump into freelance work after that, or did you--

I've never really done freelance. >>Really?

No. >>So you never did any kind of client work or anything like that?

I did client work because after that weird Best Buy-ish place

then I kind of regressed a little bit and went into prepress.

I shouldn't say regressed. I think prepress is fun.

It's like taking digital files that you get from designers

and getting them ready to go to press.

And it was fun because it appealed to all of my nerdier senses

because there's so much.

People don't even realize all the stuff that has to go into preparing a file for press.

But I didn't get any-- There's no real creativity.

You can be creative in weird, abstract ways

like how an accountant can be creative,

but you're not actually being creative like with art.

And then after that I was building websites on the side--

because of course that's the other story that everybody has--

and built enough of those that I was able to get a job at an agency that did client work

just by showing them cool sites I did for myself and stuff, like,

"I have a blog. Check it out. It's cool. I made it by myself."

That was enough. >>So for the last couple of years you've worked at Wufoo.

How does that story begin, and what was that experience like?

The agency that I worked at just out of Madison, Wisconsin--Chatman Design,

still a great place--I worked there for years.

Kind of just as I started that I started CSS-Tricks too.

So it was like I was thrown into the fire. I was the only web guy there.

I was like, "I've got to learn all this really fast."

And so I was kind of blogging it as I was learning it, which was CSS-Tricks,

and then that started to grow. As I worked there, I got better at the Web.

And then I got invited to speak at a Front-End Design Conference,

which was in St. Petersburg, Florida.

It was the first time I was ever invited to speak. I was super excited.

And Kevin Hale was also speaking at it, who is one of the founders of Wufoo,

and we met there, and then just maybe a month or so after that he just called me and was like,

"Hey, you want to work for Wufoo?"

It wasn't just as simple as that because I was kind of a super fan of Wufoo before that

just because it's just a great app.

I'm still kind of passionate about it to this day.

"Oh, my God. That Wufoo is so awesome, you guys." >>Sure.

Yeah. I just said, "Yes, I will accept your job and move to Tampa, Florida."

And so what was that like? What was the culture at Wufoo like?

It was so cool. We actually crafted the culture at Wufoo. It wasn't just this organic thing.

We were like, "We're going to make decisions deliberately to make our culture cooler."

So we worked from home, we worked 4-day weeks, like you did--

or you do currently--which is really nice.

Anybody listening that can influence your workplace,

please do that because it's super good.

But there's some science behind that stuff.

It's like building and recovery periods.

There's this cool chart that Kevin has that shows you work 40 hours a week

and you have this productivity.

So there's baseline productivity and you're working 40 hours a week.

And let's say there's this deadline coming up that you have crunch time for,

so you make everybody work 60 hours a week.

Well, productivity is way above average because they're working more.

And that works fine for about 4 weeks,

and then at that point you're worse,

you do worse work than if you would be working just 40-hour weeks.

I don't know. There's some kind of studies and science behind all this.

But your perceived productivity stays high so you think you're doing all good

but you're really not. It's kind of weird.

So don't do that. You can't just work 60-hour weeks all the time.

So part of this was like, "But we want to utilize crunch time,"

because crunch time can be really useful to get big bursts of work.

So you have to do that and build in recovery time,

like giving people time off and vacations and stuff like that.

I feel like I'm kind of rambling a little bit. But you get it, right?

It's nice having Friday.

And so we didn't bother each other with meetings during the week.

We had 1 meeting a week. It was on Friday.

We had no office, so we would rotate houses.

So it would be Tim's turn to have the meeting there, then it would be Ryan's turn or whatever.

We would all go there, and we'd save anything that was a big debate that week.

If you're arguing with somebody on a Monday about something,

we'd be like, "No, stop. Friday. We'll talk about it then."

That way there was no blocking.

You weren't spending the day having this argument.

You were like, "Okay, tabled. Later."

"I'll move on to the next thing so that I can spend my day productively."

Anyway, I thought that stuff was so awesome when I started at Wufoo.

I'm like, "God, you guys really--"

And I had nothing to do with it other than I worked there and was a part of it.

I didn't craft that culture. That was Kevin and Ryan and Chris's kind of child.

I want to talk about CSS-Tricks.

So css-tricks.com is a super-- >>"Dash" tricks.

CSS dash tricks dot com is a super popular website.

First, what is CSS-Tricks for people that are totally unfamiliar?

It's my land kind of where I write about all things,

mostly front end but I dabble once in a while in other kind of stuff.

So if there's like, "Here's a cool new CSS thing that I learned,"

or, "Here's some philosophical thing about the future of CSS,"

or, "Here's a little trick or a snippet," or just anything,

I'm like, "I want to publish that."

And it's kind of like my external memory, in a way,

so that I can reference my own stuff,

and it's also people have enjoyed reading it over the years,

the subscribership has grown.

I know that's what we're supposed to be talking about during this interview

is our web profile or whatever, and that's part of that. >>We'll get there.

[laughter] That's what it is.

So it's a blog mostly, but there are forums there.

I also do screencasts. There's snippets there.

I'm working on an almanac that is just like each CSS selector and property

and just kind of a human language kind of Chris version of how I would describe it.

There's great docs already like the Mozilla Developer Network docs for stuff like,

"Oh, what's the syntax for nth-child or whatever?"

They have a nice article and it's comprehensive but it's a little dry.

So mine would be like, "Here's a more practical--"

I want to write an almanac of nth-child but like how you would really use it.

You know what I mean, just a human language-- >>I know what you mean.

[makes squealing noise]

So how did CSS-Tricks first start? What made you want to make that website?

[chuckles] It's kind of unglorious in a way.

Aren't they all, though?

I had a friend who worked for tech support for Adobe.

So he would answer the phone and somebody would be like,

"Photoshop won't open,"

and he'd be like, "Did you plug it in?" or just dumb questions.

So he kind of had a bead on what people asked.

So we were like, "You know what? We're going to turn this into a blog."

And we were reading guys like Darren Rowse, who does problogger.net and he's like,

"I have a camera blog and put AdSense on it, and now I'm rich as heck."

And we were like, "I want to be rich as heck. Maybe we can have a blog."

So we made Photoshop Help, Acrobat Help, InDesign Help,

and we had all these things and we were like, "Slap WordPress on it."

He got calls and he'd be like, "Oh, that was a dumb question."

"I'll just blog it and blog the answer to it and build up this archive of content of those things."

And then I was like, "Let's do one for CSS too."

Put that on there, slapped the same template on it.

That was by far the least successful one. Nobody cared about that one.

But all the rest of them just died immediately because it was like,

"I can't wait to go home and write a tech support article about a dumb problem."

I had no passion at all for it.

And he didn't either.

So we just were like, "Okay. That was a fun little run. Maybe in another life or whatever."

The only one that stuck around, even though it was the least successful one,

was CSS-Tricks because I was enjoying it.

Building this kind of pseudo mini network of sites,

I was learning a lot about CSS in the research.

That was the only one I enjoyed writing for, so that's the only one that stuck around.

And then I had little hits of growth once in a while.

I got linked to by Smashing Magazine once way back in like 2007 or something,

and they were even big then. They're way big now.

And I got this big spike of traffic, the hockey stick or whatever they call it, and I'm like,

"Oh, my God. I'm so excited!"

And I spent the whole night that night redesigning the site to capitalize on the--

I made sure there was a big RSS button at the top that people could subscribe to.

And people started reading it.

It's not all just like, "And then I was successful forever."

Then it comes back down and then it's more of a slow growth kind of thing.

It is a super popular site now.

How do you deal with that kind of heavy traffic?

Are you just 1 guy? >>Like as a server?

In any way you'd like.

I mean in terms of the technicals of it or growing the community. >>Yeah.

It's been a long, slow battle. >>How are you just scaling that?

On a totally technical side, it's not that hard.

It's just--I don't know.

You throw WordPress on it, throw it on a decent server,

put some caching on it--I use a CDN that requires no work, the caching plugin.

It's like, "Use this CDN." It's like, "Okay."

I know so little about that stuff, but the site holds up fine.

It would take a lot to get it to stutter, I guess.

But then there's the time, which you might have been more getting at,

how do you manage that side of that because there's the endless flow of emails,

there's the, "What do we do about content?"

"What do we do about planning for the future of it?" [inhales sharply] I don't know.

I just try. I wake up and I manipulate my computer and do the best I can.

I have no master plan.

One of the really great things about the site is the community and the forums. >>Yeah.

What did you do to foster that growth, because that didn't just happen by itself, right?

What did you do to kind of-- >>One is there's some dumb luck there, a little bit.

Where do you think of when you think of CSS forums?

Maybe Stack Overflow or maybe SitePoint has some stuff or something.

Smashing Magazine dabbled in it, but I just looked the other day

and I think they folded on their forums.

It's just I put them up there because I would get an email and it said,

"Chris, how do you make a triangle in CSS?"

And there was a time where I was able to answer those emails. That time has gone.

But I was like, "I'd love to answer you. I want to answer you."

"Every time I answer you, now we have this connection."

"You'll probably be a fan of me," like, "I helped you out, man."

So I wanted to answer every single email that I got.

And I was like, "Instead of answering with email,

"I'm going to answer it on indexable content."

I'm like, "Can we just move this over to the forums?"

I would gently ask them, and they'd be like, "Sure."

I'd post it there and then I'd post the answer there,

so everything that I wrote then became part of building CSS-Tricks

rather than email, which is fine but doesn't grow your content. >>Sure.

CSS-Tricks I think stands really well on its own as a great resource,

a really great community, but has it helped your career in other ways?

I'm sure, right?

I doubt I would even ever have gotten--

Kevin Hale and them would have never known who I was.

I did a screencast on CSS-Tricks that was basically like an homage to Wufoo.

So that I'm sure they noticed, and it got me that job.

And that's just 1 thing. Imagine all the other doors it's opened--speaking opportunities.

It basically in a weird, scary kind of way has defined me

as who I am in the web industry is all the stuff I put there.

It's changed me immeasurably. >>Sure.

In our industry I would describe you as a thought leader.

What are some-- [both chuckle] >>I lead thoughts, basically.

You do. You have a lot of opinion currency. Is that what they call it?

Opinion currency? I like that. >>Yeah.

That's a word I learned today.

What's some advice that you can give to people that are looking to try and raise their profile

in the web industry to get speaking opportunities or to get that next client

or that next job? >>Right, because it's pretty sweet.

It's kind of worth doing because it opens--

Behind all that is money too, which everybody likes.

But yeah, you have a higher web profile.

Another cool thing is #Humblebrag.

I'll probably never have to beg for a job ever again

or craft a cover letter to send in an email, so that's pretty cool, that feels pretty good.

That's part of doing CSS-Tricks and stuff like that.

What should other people do?

I feel like it's not even that hard.

Building CSS-Tricks was a hard, long road.

But just to raise your web profile a little bit or kind of become known a little bit,

I feel like all you have to do is something like really rad

and then have that be identifiable to you.

If you built this website that looks awesome and you say,

"Hey guys, I built this website," and other people link to it and are like,

"Oh, you're the guy behind that awesome thing?" immediately skyrocket.

You could really only have to do it once to really raise your profile a little bit.

Just have some proof that you are good at what you do and people will find you.

I think the web industry is clamoring to find more people to follow that do rad stuff.

So for someone that's maybe a little bit newer to all this web stuff

and they are looking to raise their profile

or they're looking to maybe book a speaking slot at a conference,

how do you go about doing that?

Do you become friends with the conference?

So you're a speaker organizer that's trying to find people

or you want to start speaking? >>You want to start speaking-- >>Okay. Sure.

as maybe 1 way to raise your profile or a way to make money.

That's weird because your profile gets raised and then you get asked to speak,

or you could raise your profile by speaking.

So many conferences have the--

Christopher Schmidt is doing a CSS Dev thing in Hawaii in December

and he's just opened it up, like, "Do you want to do a talk here? Submit it."

There's a lot of them. That's how jQuery Conference does it.

There's a lot of conferences that are just like--isn't that how jQ Conf does it too?--

just submit an idea.

And if it's timely and if it's well presented and you sound like a good, smart human being

who has good writing skills, you'll probably get in.

I don't know, I've never done this, but I bet they get a lot of stuff like,

"I want to talk variables," period.

You're like, "Hmm, I'm going to try the next guy."

So write good sentences.

So submit to these conferences. >>Yeah.

Do you think there's other ways, like getting to know the conference organizers

or maybe-- >>Certainly. Follow them on Twitter and compliment their hair. [Pettit laughs]

I don't know. Yeah, sure. "Have you ever submitted a talk?"

One of the reasons I'm down here in Orlando at the moment--

I don't know if that's in the context of this, but we are in the city of Orlando as we speak--

I'm down here for a BarCamp, which are free conferences that you can go to.

They're in tons of cities, so whatever city you're watching me through

on the other side of your computer screen probably has one

or there is one nearby or it's drivable if you want to.

They're free and they're these unconferences where it's more about talking

and who you meet and hanging out in the hallway kind of thing

and then just presenting on anything you want.

There's no set group of speakers and what they're going to talk about.

All of that is decided in the morning.

I just mention it as like going to those is a good idea.

It may not raise your global web profile, but it will raise your local one,

which is important too. And who knows what can happen from that?

And it gets you more used to what the conferences are like

and what good speakers are and what bad speakers are and all that type of thing.

You collaborate a lot, and I think you collaborate a lot more than people realize,

you work on a lot of different stuff, like podcasts or little side projects or whatever it may be.

Is there a reason behind that other than it's just for fun or--? >>I don't know.

I had to look back on that at one point, though.

I'm like, "I wrote this book and I did it with Jeff Starr so I have that."

Really, all these little projects I do I either seek out or fall into

working on a small team on that project, and very rarely do I just do it all by myself,

other than CSS-Tricks for some reason.

But pretty much everything else I do is on a small team.

I don't know what it is. I was thinking, "Is it just random?"

I was trying to self-analyze this earlier.

I'm like, "Or is it just my personality--that I prefer this thing?"

because there are some obvious niceties, like having someone to bounce ideas off of

and sharing the load and all that stuff, but I think there's more to it than that.

I had this other idea for just a very small project that I work on.

It's kind of a one-off thing.

And I'm doing on it and I'm working on it and I was listening to myself

think about how I want to find somebody else to get in on this thing.

And I'm like, "Why do I even want that? It seems so random."

I think it is somehow embedded in me that when I work on a project

I need to find at least 1 more person to pull in on it.

I had this idea to have Gold Bond alerts--remember that?--

where it's like it will text you if it's a really hot day

and you should probably be wearing Gold Bond.

It never got anywhere because I couldn't find--

I really wanted somebody else to share the glory.

I was trying to bug Jim to do it with me, but he wouldn't do it.

Or he didn't refuse, but he's a busy guy. >>I'll bug him for you.

Okay. [laughs] I can't do that by myself. I need 1 more person.

Last question. We've talked about how to raise your profile in the web industry.

But I think there's probably a lot of people watching

that would rather hear you talk about CSS maybe,

so I'm just going to ask you a super vague question.

What do you think is the future of CSS?

Or will there ever be a replacement for CSS?

Or where do you think it's going? >>Let me grab my magical globe.

All right. >>[makes whooshing sound]

Yeah, I have no idea. What? [laughs] There's obvious stuff.

The syntax of CSS is always changing in a little bit and kind of really needs it.

CSS preprocessors have been kind of popular and on the fringe

and always kind of this ever-present, growing thing.

They're big in my life right now because I've switched everything I do to starting to use them.

These are things like LESS and SASS or whatever.

CSS for sure--there's no doubt about it--is going to start adopting

some of those ideas that can happen in there.

So the ability to do nesting, the ability to do variables and stuff, that's coming.

The future of CSS is slow, though.

As we all know, it goes slowly.

So let's say they finish the spec for nesting,

now it's this new thing you can do in CSS. Done, right?

Well, not really, because when can we use that?

It's so long, like 10 years maybe we'll be able to write that in CSS without any help

because there's no way that gracefully degrades.

If a browser sees that that doesn't understand it, it just will show nothing.

That's not acceptable.

So the future of CSS, it's trucking along now.

There's new cool stuff all the time.

But our ability to actually use them without any help is slow.

But I think the future is bright.

People like to complain about CSS.

They're like, "What, are you dumb? CSS is the worst. It can't do layout."

I'm like, "I don't know. Have you seen the Internet? It's full of CSS. It's awesome."

I think CSS is pretty all right. [chuckles]

Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

I think I definitely learned a lot.

And thanks for hanging out. >>Yeah, man. Thanks for having me, Nick.

Appreciate it. >>Treehouse! Is that a T? T! [laughs]