When I started learning CSS, I did some research to find out who were the best people at the time sharing their knowledge online. I found that this was the best way of learning CSS by myself. Of course, I wasn’t learning CSS by myself, I recruited the best teachers available.
Still to this day I follow the top CSS’ers in the business to keep up with what’s hot and now with the rise of Twitter, you can easily keep up to date with the best people in the world of CSS.
Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier lives and breathes CSS over at his site, CSS-Tricks where you can find so many great tips and tricks that will help you with almost any CSS problems you’ll come across. He also throws in jQuery from time to time as it goes hand in hand with CSS.
Also make sure to check out his tutorial screencasts for some detailed insights into CSS and jQuery as well as any related topics.
Top Articles
- What is Vertical Align?
- CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They’re Cool, and How To Use Them
- AnythingSlider jQuery Plugin
Inayaili de Leon
Yaili regularly writes for Smashing Magazine and her own blog, Web Designer Notebook mainly on the subject of CSS3. If you have any interest whatsoever in CSS3, make sure you follow her work.
Top Articles
Andy Clarke
When I began looking at CSS, the first thing I did was to watch Andy Clarke’s (and Molly Holzschlag’s) CSS for Designers video tutorial series on Lynda.com. Quite simply, I wouldn’t be so confident with CSS as I am now without watching these videos first.
Top Articles/Work
Jonathan Snook
Jonathan Snook is a web designer from Canada currently working for Squarespace. You should follow him and his work for his ability to come up with interesting solutions in CSS to solve difficult problems.
Top Articles
Eric Meyer
What would this list be if it didn’t include Eric Meyer? Incomplete, thats what. Eric is best known for his work promoting CSS as the way to syle HTML rather than using tables.
Top Articles/Work
Who do you follow to keep up to date with CSS? Leave a note in the comments below.
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Awesome list. These guys and girl are definitely my CSS heroes. I follow all of them. Great round-up here.
Good list.
For me it was first and foremost Dan Cederholm with a bit of Roger Johansson who got me more involved.
I still recommend Dan Cederholm’s books, particularly the great Web Standards Solutions.
Excellent list of people to follow.
I’ve already got all of them on RSS and Twitter, always covering great subjects.
Great little list for anyone that is starting off coding.
Thanks for taking the time to put this list together. Some truly great web development talent represented here.
Good list. I’ll argue that you left out Andy Budd.
Great list, thanks!
Thanks for the mention, Tom, you’ve made my day!
Hopefully my daily ramblings aren’t too much of a pain for those who choose to follow me — on some days I find chocolate a lot more interesting than CSS to talk about
Yaili, keep up the great work, especially your articles about CSS3 as I still think the average designer/developer isn’t too aware that you can start using it effectively right now.
Also, I don’t think you need to warn people of your love for chocolate on Twitter. Surely that’s a selling point?
You forgot an awesome CSS developer. Cough cough *wink wink* I’m j/k
Eric Meyer would be my #1 though. Death to tables!
It’s not hard to figure out why you should be following the best CSS work on the web… these guys are innovators of the web! Using their code suggestions and tutorials, you can build one hell of a site that will really draw attention.
Dude(s),
Tell me how does this look to you: (a) more like some sweet, well-formed 2010 HTML 5 or (b) more like nasty 2000 HTML tag-soup?
http://screencast.com/t/ZDc2YThiMj
Are you sure this is the kind of coder you’d want to learn from?
In case you haven’t recognized it, the code is from Yaili’s “Have a Field Day with HTML5 Forms” Top article…
P.S.: I hope that, unlike the “24 ways” policy to reject all comments against or highlighting flaws within their articles, the “InspectElement” admin(s)/authors will allow people, with different opinions than their own, to freely speak their mind… Thank you!
I see nothing wrong with that code. What do you think is wrong with it exactly?
Yaili has implemented HTML5 into the form as documented here. It introduces some useful techniques such as the placeholder attribute. Go back and look at the code in more detail if you’re having trouble understanding it.
No, I understand it perfectly. Just to be clear, I’ve been coding HTML/CSS for 7+ years, so I shouldn’t have any problem understanding that.
My problem is not with the used tags, nor the standards compliancy. I’m well aware what those are.
My problem is with the good (actually bad) practice in writting code. Just because HTML 5 specs allows unquoted attributes, it doesn’t mean we should use them. Same goes for the empty attributes.
In my opinion, a experienced coder would think twice before jumping ten years into the past and start using some of the most “evil” HTML features, denying the benefits of the strict coding technique enforced by the XHTML standards. This is what bothers me most, along with the lack of consistency that comes with this kind of coding and the obvious attempt to “show off”.
Why “show off”? Well, if you’d look through Yaili’s portfolio, you’ll see some nice XHTML 1.0 Strict coded websites. Why the jump from the strict and consistent syntax of XHTML to the loose syntax of old-school HTML? If she’d love so much the HTML syntax she could have easily use it before, with a HTML 4.01 Doctype. So, I only see 2 reasons for this: she either had no clue of HTML before HTML 5, or she just wants to show off her “knowledge” regarding “the latest techniques” available on the web.
Now, I don’t have a personal problem with Yaili. It just happens that she’s the last one I came across lately. There are many others just like her around the web, doing this kind of things just to impress novices in order to gain some more (undeserved) notoriety and I hate seeing people promoting these poor values.
@Ionute: bine spus!
I totally agree with Ionut here. Not playing by XHTML (XML) rules and leaving unquoted attribute values and empty attributes is proof of, well, lack of experience not to call it newbie-ness.
To me this is as lame as the following PHP line:
if(true){ return 1; } else { return 0; }
Why the else? It’s not gonna reach that if it exists on first return so, experienced people will write:
if(true){ return 1; } return 0;
or best:
return true ? 1 : 0;
I hate this Web2.0 world where everyone is a coding / Web-Developer / money making guru … just lacks the skills and lower level understanding how it all fits together. Nevertheless they have huge following, misleading them too.
PS: Message to the TABLE haters: there are layouts you will in no way achieve without TABLEs or the display=”table-…” styles (PERIOD).
Hmm… I wasn’t aware of this discussion.
@Ionut: I’m a bit relieved that the part you’re making a point about is the HTM. It doesn’t mean, of course, that HTML and CSS don’t live hand in hand with each other, but I must confess I’m more fascinated about exploring the possibilities that lay on CSS applied to some simple semantic markup.
In regards to the article on 24 Ways, as Tom pointed out, its purpose is to introduce the readers to what’s been done. Be it a solid, final spec or something more experimental. For example, there are hundreds of articles on the Web explaining how to use the box-shadow property (even recently published CSS books), but it wouldn’t be nice to point out how that property has been removed from the spec now.
Also, the 24 Ways article’s title may be a bit misleading: most of the article is about explaining how a form can be styled in an interesting way using just CSS.
But thanks for commenting on that, it’s your informed opinion, and I’ll be more than happy to investigate it further.
About your last remark, that’s just mean. I love what I do, and I love writing about it. I realise that a lot of people are coming fresh to CSS everyday, and are sometimes working in an environment that doesn’t invite experimentation. I’m glad and, I don’t mind saying, proud, every time someone tells me that some post I wrote on my blog introduced them to something new in CSS. I make an effort to come up with new content, and lose many sleeping hours to write those articles, and that’s because I really think someone can benefit from that. If I “impress novices” or gain “undeserved notoriety”, well… what can I do?
Sorry for the long comment, I realise now it’s far longer than what I had in mind
I think you should include Stu Nicholls at CSSplay. One of the best
Really nice article, thank you for that but I think Dieter is right, you have to put Stu into this list
Awesome list…
I am bascially a new coder and I would surely benefit from learning from these wonderful people..
Thanks again
very good thanks