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.