View the winning entry

Nicolas Le Gall is a 24 year old web development student and television station R&D trainee living and working in France. Nicolas chose to donate his $125 winnings to Abbé Pierre, which helps the homeless people of France. As Nicolas reminds us, though, “the purpose of entering the contest wasn’t winning, but challenge and good feedback which is most important in our work.”

The Internet is a wonderful platform; professionals: please keep that in mind. We have the opportunity to make it beautiful. But making it beautiful doesn’t mean making a lot. The more complex your website and your code, the more ugly and difficult to maintain it will be. Simplicity is beautiful.

or, in Nicolas’ words:

Internet est une plateforme magnifique, n’oubliez jamais ça. Nous avons l’opportunité de rendre le web encore plus beau. Mais faire du beau ne veut pas dire faire beaucoup. La simplicité c’est la beauté; plus votre code et votre site sera complexe, plus ils seront moches et difficiles à maintenir. Plus c’est simple, mieux c’est.

Read More »

Sorry for the delay, folks.

While we’re still getting all the notes compiled and narrowing down a winner, we thought we’d at least give you a list of all the entries.

Thanks again for your patience!

Update: Jusging is complete. You can also view the complete list of entries with notes.

We’ve got a total of 37 entries for the fourth CSS Off contest.

We’re looking forward to giving feedback on all of the entries, as well as determining a winner. We want to be thorough, but we know the importance of getting feedback in a timely manner. We ask for your patience as we undertake this exciting effort.

We hope you enjoyed the challenge. Stay tuned!

Download the psd file now.

This contest lasts for 24 hours, starting from 1 minute past midnight of April 5 and lasting until April 6 same time, Central Time (as in Memphis, TN USA).

This time, the prize is $30 for the winner’s wallet or $100 for the winner’s choice of charity.

Details below.

Read More »

Without further adieu: at one minute past midnight (12:01 am), CST, April 5, a .psd will be available for download in .zip format on this page. You’ll have 24 hours to send your zipped entry to cssoff@gmail.com.

We’re tickled to announce that this month’s contest is being designed by guest designer and illustrator, Brad Colbow.

As always, the winner of this contest gets to pick between cash or a donation to a charity of their choosing (we’re trying to scrounge up exactly how much cash, and possibly some goodies — more to come), and we’ll feature you and your site when we discuss your winning entry.

View the winning entry

Brad Dielman is a husband, father, network administrator, and freelance web designer living and working in Cleveland, Ohio. He is actively involved in the Cleveland Web Standards Association and helps promote best practices in web design and development in the Northeast Ohio area. Brad chose to donate his $50 winnings to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

Read More »

We’ve got a total of 8 entries for the third CSS Off contest. Considering our judge-to-entrant ratio, our entries should get some pretty decent customized feedback.

We heard mixed reactions on the higher focus of design for this contest. We’ll take your comments to heart and re-evaluate our implementation of bullet number two of our mission, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we will do less of that sort of thing.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that we will break a record of how soon results will be posted.

Download the psd file now. We’re not offering a png any more, but you can feel free to convert it and post a link to it in the comments for your fellow CSS Off contestants.

This contest lasts for 24 hours, starting from 1 minute past midnight of September 15 and lasting until September 16 same time, Central Time (as in Memphis, TN USA). There are a few differences you may notice.

Details below.

Read More »

Tony and I are pleased (and a little relieved) to announce that the CSS Off now has its first official crew. We hope you’ll get to know them better. As we slugged our way through the first two contests, we slowly realized that to do this thing right, we had to give it more time than we had alone.

Rather than abandon the whole concept, or hand it off to a group who didn’t envision it the way we did, we decided to find a little help. We didn’t offer any compensation, just the fuzzy feeling that comes with helping something good grow. Read More »

At one minute past midnight (12:01 am), CST, September 15, a .psd (and .png) will be available for download in .zip format on this page. You’ll have 24 hours to send your zipped entry to cssoff@gmail.com.

As always, the winner of this contest gets to pick between $30 in cash or a $50 donation to a charity of their choosing, and we’ll feature you and your site when we discuss your winning entry.

This time around, we’ll have help from a fantastic group of judges, who we’ll introduce when we make the files available.

We’re looking for a few judges to help us provide well-thought, useful examinations of CSS Off entries and to help us select winning entries. Benefits include:

• Helping fellow web designers learn, improve and discuss
• Recognition on the CSS Off site
• Help raise money for charities
• Help keep the CSS Off going

As a judge, you will be asked to help form a framework for judging entries, to evaluate web sites, to discuss the top entries with fellow judges, and to help compose well-thought remarks on the entries.

If you’re interested, email us before 29 August at cssoff@gmail.com with “CSS Off Judge” in the subject line.

UPDATE: We’ll be in touch with you shortly if you expressed an interest in being a judge.

View the winning entry

Dan Ott is an independent contractor out of Cleveland, OH, who has worked for the past 5 years in the web development field. He blogs on his personal website, dtott.com. Dan chose to donate his winnings of $50 to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Dan’s EarlyBird entry had a great balance of good markup, organized CSS, and consistent browser rendering true to the original comp.

Dan says:

I have a lot of experience in back-end work like php and mysql (and front-end javascript/AJAX), but my true passion is (x)html and css. I don’t have the strongest design skills in the world, but put a psd in my hands, and I’m a very happy camper. I live for the green bar on the w3 validator.

Well said, Dan. Read More »

We’re finished judging, and we’re now in the process of composing the results. Tony and I are leaving on vacation tonight (not together, it’s just a coincidence), so we won’t have the final results ready until the middle of next week.

In the meantime, be thinking about spacing issues. An issue that kept coming up in this contest, to our surprise, was less of a markup issue and more of a design issue.

Read More »

We’ve got a total of 24 entries for the second CSS Off contest. That’s less than half of the participants than the first time around, but that’s ok – that allows us to spend a little more time for each entry.

We thought that doing a page that has repeated markup as its main content (like a search results page) would be easier for you (and us!) than the previous competition. We were surprised to see comments and emails that indicated otherwise. We can’t wait to compare all of your submissions!

Please allow us the same patience you did last time for the results. We want to make sure we grade these effectively.

Download the zip file in the format of your choice:

• psd
• png

This contest lasts for 24 hours, starting from 1 minute past midnight of July 14 and lasting until July 15 same time, Central Time (as in Memphis, TN USA). Read More »

At one minute past midnight (12:01 am), CST, July 14, a .psd (and .png) will be available for download in .zip format on this page. You’ll have 24 hours to send your zipped entry to cssoff@gmail.com.

As with last time, the winner of this contest gets to pick between $30 in cash or a $50 donation to a charity of their choosing. Again, we’ll feature you and your site when we discuss your winning entry.

View the winning entry

Dawid Lizak is from Łęczna – a small town in east Poland. He has been working in XHTML and CSS as a hobby since 2005. Dawid is currently expanding his knowledge of JavaScript, usability, accessibility, and new semantic web trends, which he hopes is evident in his CSS Off Jabroni entry. He has started a new personal web site just within the last few days, http://www.lizak.pl.

Dawid has chosen the $50 charitable donation as the reward for his winning entry. The funds will go to the Polsat Foundation, one of the largest charities in Poland, which helps ill children whose parents don’t have money for treatment.

Why Dawid Won

Dawid’s Jabroni entry had a great balance of good markup, organized CSS, and consistent browser rendering true to the original comp. Read More »

For those wondering, we’ve got a total of 53 entries for our first CSS Off from participants all around the globe.

I’m very much surprised at how many people said with your entries, “thank you for doing this” and “this was fun”, even though all of you are the ones doing the work! The response of this contest has confirmed one of our initial thoughts when creating the CSS Off — that there is a clear desire for many designers to compare their work.

We hope to have results for all the participants (and you quiet observers out there) soon enough.

Download the zip file in the format of your choice:

• psd
• png (for Fireworks users. Yeah, we caved in.)

This contest lasts from June 1, noon until June 2, noon Central Time (as in Memphis, TN USA). Details below. Read More »

First off, we don’t have everything figured out. But here’s what we’d like to do, with your help. We’re definitely open to suggestions.

Every month, we’ll design a web page in Photoshop and host a competition to see who can turn it into the best web page. The designs we release will present specific markup challenges, along with design and coding considerations for everyone from web newbies to experienced developers.

The point of CSS Off is to make you think critically about web design, and then execute it on a dime. You’ve got 24 hours to take our design and slice it up. Be thoughtful, be creative. Above all, use flexible markup, lean CSS, good design and your best judgment.

Within 24 hours, email us back a zip of your final html, css, supporting images and anything else you care to throw in the mix. Read More »

At noon, CST, June 1, a .psd will be available for download in .zip format on this page. You’ll have 24 hours to send your zipped entry to cssoff@gmail.com.

The winner of this contest gets to pick between $30 in cash or a $50 donation to a charity of their choosing. Plus, we’ll feature you and your site when we discuss your winning entry.

Hope to see you soon.