Interview with Chris Coyier, CSS-Tricks

Chris Coyier, the man behind css-tricks.com, are my sites up and script & style, is a well known web developer. He lives in Portland and as he said himself; soon to be Chicago. With his creativity, Chris has given us tons of great tutorials and creates beautiful websites. We were very honored to be able to interview him.

Are you a freelancer?

A little bit.

What is the best part about being a freelancer?

I only take on clients that I’m fairly sure won’t be stress-inducing and that I can “do whatever I want”, so the project is guaranteed to be fun.

What are your best methods for finding/attracting clients?

If I was actively in the game of attracting clients, I’d probably put more time and effort into my portfolio as a first step. Then I’d spread the word as best I could that I’m looking for work. Ask friends, family, colleges, anybody at all if they knew anybody looking for a freelancer. I think I’d be more worried about keeping up and dealing with all the business junk that I would be about finding the work.

How did you get started in your field? Did you study something in particular or are you self-taught?

My BA is in graphic design / ceramic art, so in college I did a little bit of web stuff and a bunch of print design. I always loved the web stuff, but was woefully unprepared to actually work in the field after college. I ended up in the printing industry, but on the side I was always messing with websites. So I’d say my design fundamentals come from school, but all the practical web skills / coding came from learning on my own.

Please tell us more about your programming background and what made you become a developer?

I was way into my computer programming class in High School (TURBO Pascal), which lead to me majoring in Computer Science at first in college. I spent literally four years in Computer Science before I decided at the last minute I didn’t like it and changed my major to art. I definitely don’t consider myself a developer. I tend to have ideas for applications, try to do it myself, and then going uhhhhmmmm yeah I’m going to need to find a real developer to get my out of this. It’s kind of weird position. I’m one of those “I know enough to be dangerous” types, which I enjoy since I have a greater understanding of what is actually going on, but I’m sure is annoying for the developers I work with.

What do you feel are the most important skills for a designer to have/develop?

Fundamentals and work ethic. I think a designer that really understands shape and form and balance and color theory and just generally has a good eye is going to go farther than a designer that knows a bunch of Photoshop tricks. Likewise a developer that really understand and is addicted to efficiency and perfect problem solving is going to go farther than a developer pigeon holed in a single language. And of course you need to work hard.

Where do you go for development inspiration, where do your ideas come from?

All good ideas are shortcuts. They make things easier than they already are.

How do you typically start a new project?

I always say getting to the root of the needs of the projects is the most important thing in the beginning. It’s so tempting to start throwing around design ideas right away, but that can be detrimental. As designers, we’ll start getting attached to those things before we even really consider what the end goals of the project are. If the end goal of this site is to sell as many garden hoses as absolutely possible, the work needs to be focused around that. Nobody cares how hot Gotham Bold is looking today when there is a warehouse of unsold garden hoses.

Do you have any favorite websites for interacting with others in the development community?

Twitter has a pretty kick ass design community going on it. A lot of link sharing going on, which can be both entertaining and educational. Most of my community interaction happens there, as well as the forums on my own site and just through email.

What does your typical day look like?

I actually just wrote up a little article about that, focused on the main applications I use throughout the day. I’m awake and at work by 6 a.m., I find I can knock out big chores if I tackle them right away in the morning. Then by the afternoon my mind is reeling with distractions and all the junk that comes up throughout the day. I’m kind of on autopilot by late afternoon, so I end up taking an extended break usually, and then come back at it in the evening to work on personal projects and write.

What are your 5 favorite sites online?

This is gonna be tough! I read TONS of sites through RSS in Google Reader, and I love all of them so I don’t wanna play favorites. I’ll just pick five kind of at random:

• Daring Fireball – I love John Gruber’s entire approach to blogging.
• Marc Johns – Hilarious drawings.
• Natalie Jost – I think this is one of the best designed blogs on the internet.
• Layer Tennis – It’s over for this year but it was lots of fun to watch.
• Wpazo – A linkblog of only really good WordPress-related stuff.

Who, in the online world, would you say has had the biggest influence on you?

One guy I always look up to is Collis Ta’eed from Envato. He and his team have really taken the idea of creating creativity marketplace to a whole new level and made a very successful business out of it. Someday I’d love to be a part of something like that.

What are the tools you couldn’t live without?

I could do 95% of my job with Photoshop, Coda, Firefox, and GMail.