I run a similar-in-spirit site about starting from scratch on a project and getting to something functional. I tried both ads and courses, in my case neither were very successful. The most success I had was in offering to do the things the site tells you how to do in exchange for money. That's been my full time job for the last 6 years. I don't know if that's workable in the UI/UX world.
I've done only a small amount of web-design work over the years, but I can imagine that, if I landed on CSS-tricks trying to work out a tricky (to me) CSS or usability problem where LLMs had been failing me, and I had a quick and easy option to pay a few hundred dollars and meet with the guy who wrote the book, I might do that. That's also how I got a lot of my first customers in my current business; I offered paid phone calls where a user could pay a nominal rate and ask some upfront questions about a project they were working on. Many of those calls turned in to longer contracts, and the fee kept out the folks who were just looking to sell me something.
A lot of my customers have been organizations whose focus is not my industry, but, for one reason or another, they needed something done that fits in my wheelhouse. This means they don't (yet) want to hire this expertise and build processes internally, so they're willing to pay my premium rates. Perhaps there is a way to target these types of companies with custom services in the space.
Not sure how it holds up in this day and age but a common setup was to have 3 products: free, cheap, expensive.
The free one gets people in the door. Cheap is could be something like a book or paid tool or course. And the "expensive" would usually be consulting but could also be a more premium tool or retainer service.
So your suggestion seems to fit the model.
I know LLMs will change the developer education landscape but I really hope it doesn't kill it. Interesting times.
While I do believe that selling to DigitalOcean was a mistake ultimately, I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development.
Don't get me wrong, I think CSS-Tricks is a great resource and it has helped me over the years, but if I was in Geoff's shoes right now I'd be pretty scared.
Look at TailwindCSS for example, they had to reduce the size of their team and ended up joining Shopify to continue surviving. It is hard out here these days.
I don't want to sound too doom and gloom, so I wish Geoff the best of luck and I hope he succeeds.
Scared of what, exactly? It looks to me like the site is primarily static content, so operational costs should be reasonable. He could scale down to just static content, and even if traffic decrease, it is not an existential crisis. Or am I missing something?
No, but is it a reasonable assumption to think it is Zero? Or that the upkeep is Zero too? No.
The blogpost literally says he's making this his full time job. What's reasonable is to ask how that will pan out. And to, after answering oneself, tell the relevant party to be weary of it.
I can only assume DO took a bath on this. Buying CSS Tricks from Coyier to largely sit on it silently before rolling it back off the books seems like a terrible investment strategy.
Attract an audience of people who make purchasing decisions, then attract sponsors who want to be put in front of those people. Quality of readers is more important than quantity.
You're saying that like it's straightforward hard work. But that strategy has been on the decline for years, with no sign of reversing. High-value technical audiences aren't Googling for educational articles, videos, and courses. They're just asking LLMs, and getting answers. Sometimes the LLMs are searching the web, but LLMs approximately never click on the ads.
I didn't say "easy" either, I said "straightforward hard work."
What you're doing is hard work, but it's way more straightforward than building out CSS Tricks.
You're a successful marathon runner. CSS Tricks will have to run a marathon with both legs tied together.
What makes your subject matter (LLMs) work is that it's a very fast moving topic, much faster moving than CSS, so people come to you for news.
Plus, it's difficult to test new models effectively, so people are looking for trusted names to do meta analysis, fast. Is the new OpenAI model better than Claude? Better how? Quality of output? Evaluated how? Even comparing prices can be difficult, as different models (at different settings) can generate different numbers of tokens (and different numbers of cached tokens) for the same tasks.
None of that applies to CSS Tricks.
CSS fundamentally can't move that fast, as long as changes in CSS require Apple, Google, and Mozilla to all agree on standards. Hardly anybody needs to know about the latest CSS news. Mostly you only need to know about Baseline Widely Available CSS features, which are at least 30 months old by definition. And when you do learn about new CSS features, it's usually pretty obvious (either to you or to an LLM) whether those new CSS features apply to something you're working on.
It's going to be very, very hard to keep CSS Tricks alive, even with a lot of hard work.
Something can be both simple to execute and extremely difficult to execute well. Simple and easy are not synonymous.
> High-value technical audiences aren't Googling for educational articles, videos, and courses. They're just asking LLMs, and getting answers.
You're right, but the high-value audiences are also looking at the sources the LLMs cite, guiding the LLMs to use specific source and exclude others (even if it's just "eschew blogspam and listicles" in the prompt). So being one of those sources is still valuable. Perhaps less so, but it's not without value.
I published a magazine for a few years. Off the top of my head:
- publishing is fucking hard. Early on, you need a constant stream of dependable writers who do not value their time. Later on, you have a constant stream of writers but have to figure out who will make you hate your life the least.
- good writers are flaky and they always have options. A little less than half of good pitches get published. 100% of good pitches take work.
- there is a difference between good and dependable writers. Early on, you need dependable even though each one eats a lot of time. Layer on, you need good. You won’t know when to switch until your readers tell you that you suck. Then it’s too late to save your publication.
- I published before generative AI was possible but at each stage of popularity, I dealt with more PR shit bags. Add in generative AI and I’m not sure my naïveté would have survived as long as it did.
- at its best, publishing is a very expensive way to harm yourself. Back in the day, Jim Rose would have paid me to fuck myself up in equivalent ways. Naïveté convinces you that you’re changing the world through self flagellation, but when that’s gone you’re just beating the shit out of yourself.
- my co-founder handled editorial and I handled publishing. The gap between them is so massive that we really needed double the headcount. Alas, publishing is totally fucked so our budget was so low that we needed slave labour yet couldn’t even afford the slave in the first place. Without the editorial/publication divide, I would have had a heart attack five years before I did.
- there’s this thing in publishing called the trough of zero ideas. You won’t believe it’s possible in the beginning but it will hit you hard. It’s not so much there aren’t ideas; it’s that you’re tired and ideas stop feeling good… they feel like work because they are.
- in publishing it’s really easy to come up with business models. Unfortunately, every single business model requires consistently exceptional content, a reality distortion field and a lot of hand holding.
- all those membership plans etc will be invaded by sales or PR fucks as soon as you launch them. $25 a month makes a lot of people feel entitled to explain your dreams to you.
Edit - This sounds very negative and it is… but I want to publish again.
Agree the market is weird right now, but on that specific example - TailwindCSS was built around the notion of reducing keystrokes per style (basically). That's not as useful in the age of AI, of course. CSS-Tricks is about learning what modern CSS can do, which is arguably still useful. An uphill battle, for sure, but I think there's still a place for hand written human content on the web, so I plan to support it even if it's just with my clicks.
> TailwindCSS was built around the notion of reducing keystrokes per style (basically).
That "basically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I don't even use Tailwind and I know the point is to localize basic style information and reduce the amount of weird CSS you have to write via functions and utilities.
Especially because Tailwind came well before CSS started natively having these features (let alone them becoming baseline widely available).
Both of those goals definitely help the current era of agents by making it easier to find the rules that affect an element without needing to reliably search all of the project CSS, and reducing required context use and the need to keep track of selector lists.
> That "basically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Yea. To me Tailwind was to make CSS act predictably for someone who was not an expert and just wanted to make some tweaks in a good expertly-crafted CSS theme design without seeing the strangest unexpected things happening layout-wise.
By localizing basic style information and reducing the amount of weird CSS you have to write, you have thus reduced your keystrokes per style. We're talking about the same thing.
No, the semantics are different. The goal has never been "type less", which changes how it interacts with your premise. The goal has been reduce cognitive load and increase semantic density and discoverability. And, counter to what you said ("that's not as useful in the age of AI"), those are very useful in the current age of AI.
Increasing locality increases semantic density. As a utility class library, I'd say it's main goals have healthy overlap with other utility class libraries..
A very large percentage of the Tailwind classes also seem to be more or less 1:1 with CSS, or like 1:2.. So it's the locality and brevity IMHO that contributes most to reducing cognitive load.. Or at least in making it faster..
LLMs get along well with high locality..
I'm not sure if I'm disagreeing or agreeing with you now LOL.
The tailwind ones slightly misleading. They laid off their staff, posted on twitter about it, opened a sponsorship program, made approximately $2 million, and THEN joined shopify.
I agree with this. In my day to day I've started AI as a glorified "look this up for me" thing and hardly look at reference sites anymore. It's a shame because I really did admire CSS-Tricks when I was starting out and referenced their stuff often. I'll be rooting for them though!
>While I do believe that selling to DigitalOcean was a mistake ultimately
using the word "ultimately" makes this "Monday night quarterbacking"
It's not a mistake to plan a picnic for a day that turns out to be rainy, even if you got paid to plan the picnic.
It would be a mistake to sell if the seller should have known at the time of the sale that the seller's goals would not be met, but something turning out badly doesn't retroactively make it having been a mistake, it just means it came out badly.
This was my initial thought but I think that if he will focus on new problems arising.
For example how to build websites with AI to not look like a slop, how to approach this problem, why is it happening and what to look at.
It certainly is brave decision but it could also be an opportunity.
>"I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development."
I owe Coyier and CSS Tricks a huge debt to getting my career started in the 2000s. It's loss will be tragic. But web development (as we knew it) has gone the way of elevator operators. Dead and gone. Good on the guys for getting their bag while it still had some value.
Llms are not good at web design or writing css, this art form will live on for a long time to come. It is art, I dont care what people say, and as we all know machines mostly suck at creating art. Anthropic claims to have started training in "taste", but im sure they've realized that cannot be distilled into vector embeddings. Taste is somewhat empheral and is dictated by society and culture that machines can't experience.
In fact, I think it will have more staying power than most, if not all of web dev domains of expertise.
Theres simply no "soul" behind llm crafted websites. There are companies out there, like lovable et al who sell the idea that web design is solved but are still hiring six figure retainer design firms to do their frontend.
I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten.
I see your point and I agree that ultimately web design will be incredibly hard to automate, probably harder than almost any other programming domain, where people will likely stay for accountability reasons.
But the thing is that for the vast majority of web pages/applications, it barely matters what does the design look like, especially for B2B/internal apps. All the dashboards, CRMs, tracking tools, etc -- these exist mostly for functional requirements, so the design just needs to be inoffensive.
B2C market might hold longer, but ultimately there might emerge some sort of higher-level design specification language which would sidestep the original problem or being too recognizable.
This is like saying the design of your mobile operating system barely matters as all you use it for is to open Youtube and a browser. Design is everything when building a product people interact with.
The thing is, there's no end to the appetite to lower quality in order to reduce personal cost. Whether there's a website or not is very "seen". Whether it's any good at evoking intended understandings or organizing information is not (directly) seen. Unfortunately, only a very small portion of humanity directly cares about design.
I shared your sentiment maybe a year+ ago when it comes to css, and I do think it's one of the areas AI in general struggles with (where art and code meet), but it's a lot better today with the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models as someone that works on design systems for a living (for now). It follows stylistic patterns, it can inspect the issue in the browser and have a better understanding of CSS upstream effects than it used to (it used to suck at this and paint itself into a corner over and over like some game of whack-a-mole), and can even tackle things using latest interop features.
It does make really silly mistakes now and then, like using fallback css variables in the wrong order, but they are fewer and farther in between.
"I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten."
AI model taste is not good, but taste is easy and many cheap human have soul, only hard part is memorize CSS trivia, I predict cost of UI/UX go down and CSS education business also go down
>Llms are not good at web design or writing css, this art form will live on for a long time to come.
I don't want to ruin your day, but LLMs excel at CSS, thanks to the abundance of explainer articles like those on css–tricks.com. Had a bug fixed in about 10s the other week after having stared at it myself for like 10min.
The guys made some money, it's not bad idea, specially knowing nobody cares now tutorials on internet with the era of agentic development. See StackOverflow, it's dead. They did the right thing when selling this.
One of my favorite sites to visit, was CSSPlay, run by Stu Nicholls[0]. The demos have always been awesome. Personally, I never found opportunity to implement any of his demos, but I really enjoyed looking at them.
I wish Mr. Graham luck. I feel as if LLMs are turning this type of business on its head. It's a new world.
As an eng who spent over a decade on frontend and hasn’t touched CSS since last November, I’m ecstatic for this news.
Nothing a frontier LLM has built me in the last year has been satisfactory to me. Every detail was shipped after millions of tokens stripping back and optimizing what Fable/Opus started doing.
The process is leaner and faster, but frontend isn’t “solved” just because LLMs exist.
Did DigitalOcean forget they owned CSS-Tricks? Because that's what seemed to have happened based on the limited notes on the subject I've read in the past few weeks.
I was at DO at the time, so I can at least validate exactly what you implied about it frustratingly not being a priority. There's a whole story behind that I probably can't get into, but wish I could tell.
I'm glad it's back with someone who loves the craft, cares, can dedicate the time to it, and not just own it to slap a "Powered by" logo on the front page. At least there's that.
Man, that's such a bummer. Thanks for the additional context.
Sounds like DigitalOcean really convinced Coyier that they'd invest and focus on CSS tricks as a key funnel, and I'm so curious why that ball was entirely dropped.
In my personal experience, so many decisions like this come down to one person with a suit and tie at the top making a decision, then either leaving or completely forgetting about it. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened here. For me and so many others, it's just hard to see something that had so much momentum and promise completely neglected for no clear reason.
Hoping the best for this new iteration of CSS Tricks, especially in this time where so many are struggling to find that interest in learning the basics of technologies when AI can do it for you.
They also ruin things they don't acquire, such as their own control panel. It used to be simple and clean, now it's a horrible mess, so horrible it looks like they don't even sell virtual machines anymore.
Nice! Digital Ocean was definitely not a great owner for the site, and it clearly wasn't treated as much of a priority under their ownership. Hopefully Geoff will give it the attention it deserves, especially given he's already the most active contributor there.
Awesome! Really happy for Geoff to be afforded the opportunity to bring CSS Tricks back to life.
Just goes to show that you can always make the world a better place with a little bit of luck and a lot of well placed effort. Kudos also to the pressure people put on Digital Ocean to do right by CSS Tricks and kudos to DO for allowing Geoff to take the site independent after their priorities changed.
I wish I didn't have such a bleak outlook for community-focused tech publishing. Sites like LWN and 404 Media seem to be hanging on, but they're more likely the exceptions that prove the rule.
My paycheck for the better part of a decade came from publications run by a large tech company in an arrangement not too dissimilar from DO's relationship with CSS-Tricks. It was great while it lasted, but shortly after I left it was the first thing on the chopping block when the layoffs started. That was 3-4 years ago and the landscape for quality tech publishing hasn't gotten any easier.
Chris acknowledged credit in the comments but never updated the "I saw it maybe a year ago but I can’t for the life of me remember where." after I pointed out that he had seen and commented on my Codepen* of this trick.
It's a bold move. Educational material -- particularly frontend -- is an ever-shrinking pie, so Geoff is betting on claiming a very large share of that. I hope it pays off.
I'm sure it will be a great resource for LLMs to read.
But seriously, good luck to them. I used to make Photoshop tutorials before YouTube, and it was a lot of fun. When YouTube came around, all the eyeballs went there, rightfully so -- videos made more sense for Photoshop. But I didn't have it in me to pivot.
And these days you don't even have to know how to do things like mask objects. There's one-click solutions, there's generative fill, light matching, face filters, etc. Hell, you can rotate a 2d layer in 3d now. Soon, live prompting in Photoshop will be the norm.
Nice! CSS-Tricks served me well over the years with whatever limited web-dev I did. I'm glad it's not actually shutting down. And if the author is reading this, I hope you can ignore all the nay-sayers. There are people who still want to actually know their tools instead of leasing their brain from Anthropic, and there's been a shortage of great teachers.
I remember learning the very basics of webdev from CSS Tricks. Years and years ago. They've been with me for my entire career and I am happy to see them independent again.
Have more than 10px touch targets for voting. Don't make the ability to see downvoted comments dependent on user's eyesight and monitor. Order elements reasonably for screen readers (e.g. thread title first, actions after it). Add an ability to collapse subthread without having to return to the root comment (for its [-]).
I think HN is peak design. Everything is condensed, there's no wasted space, it's like a good old website from a bygone era. It's just a bit annoying on mobile, but that's it.
This is great news! I love CSS-Tricks and have bookmarked a lot of their articles over the years. We need reliable sources of learning material that isn’t just LLM-generated to make a quick buck. LLMs by their very nature cannot be trusted, even if they can be a great additional tool for learning.
Quality information is hard to come by these days and I admire everyone who take on the responsibility and cares enough to keep those sources available and healthy, even through uncertain times.
As most others I’m also very doubtful of making this a worthwhile venture. I hope OP didn’t pay too much and makes this a chill project.
I see 2 additional paths:
1) I have no knowledge, but how does the let the crawlers pay work? Could a site like css-tricks with a lot of backlinks make money on that ? Or do LLMs have enough free content available
CSS tricks is a shining testament to consistency and not falling for trend-chasing. I love how laser focused they are on covering purely CSS and making it fun to keep up with CSS news. Sounds like they're on a good path right now, and he's convinced in his choice to take full control.
quite brave move, when it looks like it's not worth to learn anything anymore, wont get a job anyways
and stores are flooded with apps..
and ww3 is going on..
Good luck, I guess, but in 2026 "CSS Tricks" seems about as relevant as "PostScript Tricks" or "Office Open XML Tricks". Human manipulation of CSS is going to be, at best, a hobby for a few dedicated tinkerers. And I say that as someone who invested a significant amount of the last 20 years getting good at CSS.
I don't really have a definitive answer, so this is more thinking out loud, but why do the Economist, Spectator, WSJ, NYT, or the like continue to do reasonably well?
News is everywhere now, and AI can do a reasonable job guiding me on any economic or political topic I might care about. Yet.. named authors with track records or strong personalities/opinions still seem to draw readers and have value, and maybe CSS Tricks is mildly like that in some niches.
In the old days? Reading the www-style W3C mailing list was the best way to learn about proposed features and people like Dave Hyatt, David Baron, Anne van Kesteren, Eric Mayer, Paul Irish and many more I've forgotten about used to blog about upcoming things. Sites like A List Apart and Smashing Magazine were also good resources for articles about established features and interesting techniques.
I am pessimistic. I hope I am wrong. In the age of AI, content websites are trying to find a new identity for themselves. CSS-Tricks are great resources for the tinkerer and imagineer. What kind of products and services can be offered to this niche? courses? ads? donation buttons? Nope. Innovation, maybe. Paywalled css tools like color palette, or smartArt type demos. The problem is that these tools require a dedicated staff just for billing, user support, and maintenance. Say 10% of the revenue goes towards the existing CSS tricks team. That is $20 million dollars worth of annual revenue needed. $10 per user. 2 million users. If they are lucky I expect them to get 300k users. That makes it $60 per user.
There is either going to be a layoff, a price increase, or I don't know.
learning css is going to go the way of learning jquery. at this stage with AI, having a fundamental grasp on css is about all you need. with the stuff that claude and company can produce, do anyone really code css by hand anymore?
Vibe coders / Slopgineers that don't know the foundations of how these systems work are going to fall behind people who actually know how to program. Just because the machine can spit out text quickly doesn't mean it's good. And no, what all of these LLMs output isn't good css.
I run a similar-in-spirit site about starting from scratch on a project and getting to something functional. I tried both ads and courses, in my case neither were very successful. The most success I had was in offering to do the things the site tells you how to do in exchange for money. That's been my full time job for the last 6 years. I don't know if that's workable in the UI/UX world.
I've done only a small amount of web-design work over the years, but I can imagine that, if I landed on CSS-tricks trying to work out a tricky (to me) CSS or usability problem where LLMs had been failing me, and I had a quick and easy option to pay a few hundred dollars and meet with the guy who wrote the book, I might do that. That's also how I got a lot of my first customers in my current business; I offered paid phone calls where a user could pay a nominal rate and ask some upfront questions about a project they were working on. Many of those calls turned in to longer contracts, and the fee kept out the folks who were just looking to sell me something.
A lot of my customers have been organizations whose focus is not my industry, but, for one reason or another, they needed something done that fits in my wheelhouse. This means they don't (yet) want to hire this expertise and build processes internally, so they're willing to pay my premium rates. Perhaps there is a way to target these types of companies with custom services in the space.
Not sure how it holds up in this day and age but a common setup was to have 3 products: free, cheap, expensive.
The free one gets people in the door. Cheap is could be something like a book or paid tool or course. And the "expensive" would usually be consulting but could also be a more premium tool or retainer service.
So your suggestion seems to fit the model.
I know LLMs will change the developer education landscape but I really hope it doesn't kill it. Interesting times.
I think you mean free, expensive, and slightly even more expensive.
Depends on the audience and the niche
just because you can optimize your pricing for maximum value extraction from your customer doesnt mean you have to
That's a different model. Both are valid.
Aside: Nice site and concept/business. I have service from a local WISP and am quite happy with it.
It might be interesting to have a list/map of WISPs on your site!
I didn't expect this.
While I do believe that selling to DigitalOcean was a mistake ultimately, I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development.
Don't get me wrong, I think CSS-Tricks is a great resource and it has helped me over the years, but if I was in Geoff's shoes right now I'd be pretty scared.
Look at TailwindCSS for example, they had to reduce the size of their team and ended up joining Shopify to continue surviving. It is hard out here these days.
I don't want to sound too doom and gloom, so I wish Geoff the best of luck and I hope he succeeds.
> I'd be pretty scared.
Scared of what, exactly? It looks to me like the site is primarily static content, so operational costs should be reasonable. He could scale down to just static content, and even if traffic decrease, it is not an existential crisis. Or am I missing something?
The cost of purchasing the property from digital ocean and the cost of his team.
Have we seen a price tag?
No, but is it a reasonable assumption to think it is Zero? Or that the upkeep is Zero too? No.
The blogpost literally says he's making this his full time job. What's reasonable is to ask how that will pan out. And to, after answering oneself, tell the relevant party to be weary of it.
I can only assume DO took a bath on this. Buying CSS Tricks from Coyier to largely sit on it silently before rolling it back off the books seems like a terrible investment strategy.
How does one pull a 6 figure salary from a blog site in 2026?
How does one pull a six figure salary from anywhere in 2026!? Might as well make a go of it
Attract an audience of people who make purchasing decisions, then attract sponsors who want to be put in front of those people. Quality of readers is more important than quantity.
You're saying that like it's straightforward hard work. But that strategy has been on the decline for years, with no sign of reversing. High-value technical audiences aren't Googling for educational articles, videos, and courses. They're just asking LLMs, and getting answers. Sometimes the LLMs are searching the web, but LLMs approximately never click on the ads.
I didn't say it was easy. I'm doing this myself at the moment, so I have a sample size of one showing it's possible.
I didn't say "easy" either, I said "straightforward hard work."
What you're doing is hard work, but it's way more straightforward than building out CSS Tricks.
You're a successful marathon runner. CSS Tricks will have to run a marathon with both legs tied together.
What makes your subject matter (LLMs) work is that it's a very fast moving topic, much faster moving than CSS, so people come to you for news.
Plus, it's difficult to test new models effectively, so people are looking for trusted names to do meta analysis, fast. Is the new OpenAI model better than Claude? Better how? Quality of output? Evaluated how? Even comparing prices can be difficult, as different models (at different settings) can generate different numbers of tokens (and different numbers of cached tokens) for the same tasks.
None of that applies to CSS Tricks.
CSS fundamentally can't move that fast, as long as changes in CSS require Apple, Google, and Mozilla to all agree on standards. Hardly anybody needs to know about the latest CSS news. Mostly you only need to know about Baseline Widely Available CSS features, which are at least 30 months old by definition. And when you do learn about new CSS features, it's usually pretty obvious (either to you or to an LLM) whether those new CSS features apply to something you're working on.
It's going to be very, very hard to keep CSS Tricks alive, even with a lot of hard work.
I don't disagree with any of that.
Something can be both simple to execute and extremely difficult to execute well. Simple and easy are not synonymous.
> High-value technical audiences aren't Googling for educational articles, videos, and courses. They're just asking LLMs, and getting answers.
You're right, but the high-value audiences are also looking at the sources the LLMs cite, guiding the LLMs to use specific source and exclude others (even if it's just "eschew blogspam and listicles" in the prompt). So being one of those sources is still valuable. Perhaps less so, but it's not without value.
> LLMs approximately never click on the ads
In future LLMs will make buying decisions and this strategy can become viable again.
Run a relatively small political Substack and just bide your time till you get picked to run CBS News.
I published a magazine for a few years. Off the top of my head:
- publishing is fucking hard. Early on, you need a constant stream of dependable writers who do not value their time. Later on, you have a constant stream of writers but have to figure out who will make you hate your life the least.
- good writers are flaky and they always have options. A little less than half of good pitches get published. 100% of good pitches take work.
- there is a difference between good and dependable writers. Early on, you need dependable even though each one eats a lot of time. Layer on, you need good. You won’t know when to switch until your readers tell you that you suck. Then it’s too late to save your publication.
- I published before generative AI was possible but at each stage of popularity, I dealt with more PR shit bags. Add in generative AI and I’m not sure my naïveté would have survived as long as it did.
- at its best, publishing is a very expensive way to harm yourself. Back in the day, Jim Rose would have paid me to fuck myself up in equivalent ways. Naïveté convinces you that you’re changing the world through self flagellation, but when that’s gone you’re just beating the shit out of yourself.
- my co-founder handled editorial and I handled publishing. The gap between them is so massive that we really needed double the headcount. Alas, publishing is totally fucked so our budget was so low that we needed slave labour yet couldn’t even afford the slave in the first place. Without the editorial/publication divide, I would have had a heart attack five years before I did.
- there’s this thing in publishing called the trough of zero ideas. You won’t believe it’s possible in the beginning but it will hit you hard. It’s not so much there aren’t ideas; it’s that you’re tired and ideas stop feeling good… they feel like work because they are.
- in publishing it’s really easy to come up with business models. Unfortunately, every single business model requires consistently exceptional content, a reality distortion field and a lot of hand holding.
- all those membership plans etc will be invaded by sales or PR fucks as soon as you launch them. $25 a month makes a lot of people feel entitled to explain your dreams to you.
Edit - This sounds very negative and it is… but I want to publish again.
Scared of wasting one's limited time on an ambition that can't pan out.
And Tailwind joining Shopify made quite a few people really look at Tailwind and say ... do we really need this after all?
Agree the market is weird right now, but on that specific example - TailwindCSS was built around the notion of reducing keystrokes per style (basically). That's not as useful in the age of AI, of course. CSS-Tricks is about learning what modern CSS can do, which is arguably still useful. An uphill battle, for sure, but I think there's still a place for hand written human content on the web, so I plan to support it even if it's just with my clicks.
> TailwindCSS was built around the notion of reducing keystrokes per style (basically).
That "basically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I don't even use Tailwind and I know the point is to localize basic style information and reduce the amount of weird CSS you have to write via functions and utilities.
Especially because Tailwind came well before CSS started natively having these features (let alone them becoming baseline widely available).
Both of those goals definitely help the current era of agents by making it easier to find the rules that affect an element without needing to reliably search all of the project CSS, and reducing required context use and the need to keep track of selector lists.
> That "basically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Yea. To me Tailwind was to make CSS act predictably for someone who was not an expert and just wanted to make some tweaks in a good expertly-crafted CSS theme design without seeing the strangest unexpected things happening layout-wise.
By localizing basic style information and reducing the amount of weird CSS you have to write, you have thus reduced your keystrokes per style. We're talking about the same thing.
No, the semantics are different. The goal has never been "type less", which changes how it interacts with your premise. The goal has been reduce cognitive load and increase semantic density and discoverability. And, counter to what you said ("that's not as useful in the age of AI"), those are very useful in the current age of AI.
Increasing locality increases semantic density. As a utility class library, I'd say it's main goals have healthy overlap with other utility class libraries..
A very large percentage of the Tailwind classes also seem to be more or less 1:1 with CSS, or like 1:2.. So it's the locality and brevity IMHO that contributes most to reducing cognitive load.. Or at least in making it faster..
LLMs get along well with high locality..
I'm not sure if I'm disagreeing or agreeing with you now LOL.
The tailwind ones slightly misleading. They laid off their staff, posted on twitter about it, opened a sponsorship program, made approximately $2 million, and THEN joined shopify.
I agree with this. In my day to day I've started AI as a glorified "look this up for me" thing and hardly look at reference sites anymore. It's a shame because I really did admire CSS-Tricks when I was starting out and referenced their stuff often. I'll be rooting for them though!
>While I do believe that selling to DigitalOcean was a mistake ultimately
using the word "ultimately" makes this "Monday night quarterbacking"
It's not a mistake to plan a picnic for a day that turns out to be rainy, even if you got paid to plan the picnic.
It would be a mistake to sell if the seller should have known at the time of the sale that the seller's goals would not be met, but something turning out badly doesn't retroactively make it having been a mistake, it just means it came out badly.
This was my initial thought but I think that if he will focus on new problems arising. For example how to build websites with AI to not look like a slop, how to approach this problem, why is it happening and what to look at. It certainly is brave decision but it could also be an opportunity.
>"I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development."
I owe Coyier and CSS Tricks a huge debt to getting my career started in the 2000s. It's loss will be tragic. But web development (as we knew it) has gone the way of elevator operators. Dead and gone. Good on the guys for getting their bag while it still had some value.
Llms are not good at web design or writing css, this art form will live on for a long time to come. It is art, I dont care what people say, and as we all know machines mostly suck at creating art. Anthropic claims to have started training in "taste", but im sure they've realized that cannot be distilled into vector embeddings. Taste is somewhat empheral and is dictated by society and culture that machines can't experience.
In fact, I think it will have more staying power than most, if not all of web dev domains of expertise.
Theres simply no "soul" behind llm crafted websites. There are companies out there, like lovable et al who sell the idea that web design is solved but are still hiring six figure retainer design firms to do their frontend.
I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten.
I see your point and I agree that ultimately web design will be incredibly hard to automate, probably harder than almost any other programming domain, where people will likely stay for accountability reasons.
But the thing is that for the vast majority of web pages/applications, it barely matters what does the design look like, especially for B2B/internal apps. All the dashboards, CRMs, tracking tools, etc -- these exist mostly for functional requirements, so the design just needs to be inoffensive.
B2C market might hold longer, but ultimately there might emerge some sort of higher-level design specification language which would sidestep the original problem or being too recognizable.
This is like saying the design of your mobile operating system barely matters as all you use it for is to open Youtube and a browser. Design is everything when building a product people interact with.
The thing is, there's no end to the appetite to lower quality in order to reduce personal cost. Whether there's a website or not is very "seen". Whether it's any good at evoking intended understandings or organizing information is not (directly) seen. Unfortunately, only a very small portion of humanity directly cares about design.
I shared your sentiment maybe a year+ ago when it comes to css, and I do think it's one of the areas AI in general struggles with (where art and code meet), but it's a lot better today with the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models as someone that works on design systems for a living (for now). It follows stylistic patterns, it can inspect the issue in the browser and have a better understanding of CSS upstream effects than it used to (it used to suck at this and paint itself into a corner over and over like some game of whack-a-mole), and can even tackle things using latest interop features.
It does make really silly mistakes now and then, like using fallback css variables in the wrong order, but they are fewer and farther in between.
"I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten."
Agreed!
AI model taste is not good, but taste is easy and many cheap human have soul, only hard part is memorize CSS trivia, I predict cost of UI/UX go down and CSS education business also go down
>Llms are not good at web design or writing css, this art form will live on for a long time to come.
I don't want to ruin your day, but LLMs excel at CSS, thanks to the abundance of explainer articles like those on css–tricks.com. Had a bug fixed in about 10s the other week after having stared at it myself for like 10min.
You can just make a mockup in whatever tool you want, and pour your 'art' and 'soul' into that.
Then hand it to the LLM and it'll make CSS to match.
Spoken like someone who's never actually put their art and soul into a mockup and asked an LLM to make CSS to match.
The guys made some money, it's not bad idea, specially knowing nobody cares now tutorials on internet with the era of agentic development. See StackOverflow, it's dead. They did the right thing when selling this.
CSS-Tricks was sold to Digital Ocean a while back. Now it's been purchased by an individual again. Someone who used to work on it back in the day
I bet they bought it for a tenth of the price they've sold it.
It's the opposite... Digital Ocean bought it for $4M; I bet they sold it for $0 (rather than shut it down).
(EDIT: oh maybe you're saying the same thing and I misunderstood?)
We are ;)
One of my favorite sites to visit, was CSSPlay, run by Stu Nicholls[0]. The demos have always been awesome. Personally, I never found opportunity to implement any of his demos, but I really enjoyed looking at them.
I wish Mr. Graham luck. I feel as if LLMs are turning this type of business on its head. It's a new world.
[0] https://cssplay.co.uk/
As an eng who spent over a decade on frontend and hasn’t touched CSS since last November, I’m ecstatic for this news.
Nothing a frontier LLM has built me in the last year has been satisfactory to me. Every detail was shipped after millions of tokens stripping back and optimizing what Fable/Opus started doing.
The process is leaner and faster, but frontend isn’t “solved” just because LLMs exist.
Why have you stopped touching CSS then?
Did DigitalOcean forget they owned CSS-Tricks? Because that's what seemed to have happened based on the limited notes on the subject I've read in the past few weeks.
I was at DO at the time, so I can at least validate exactly what you implied about it frustratingly not being a priority. There's a whole story behind that I probably can't get into, but wish I could tell.
I'm glad it's back with someone who loves the craft, cares, can dedicate the time to it, and not just own it to slap a "Powered by" logo on the front page. At least there's that.
Edit: Worth reading Coyier's take some some time back in 2024 to refresh. https://chriscoyier.net/2024/02/28/where-im-at-on-the-whole-...
Man, that's such a bummer. Thanks for the additional context.
Sounds like DigitalOcean really convinced Coyier that they'd invest and focus on CSS tricks as a key funnel, and I'm so curious why that ball was entirely dropped.
In my personal experience, so many decisions like this come down to one person with a suit and tie at the top making a decision, then either leaving or completely forgetting about it. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened here. For me and so many others, it's just hard to see something that had so much momentum and promise completely neglected for no clear reason.
Hoping the best for this new iteration of CSS Tricks, especially in this time where so many are struggling to find that interest in learning the basics of technologies when AI can do it for you.
DigitalOcean ruins everything they acquire. Just like they did it to CloudWays.
They also ruin things they don't acquire, such as their own control panel. It used to be simple and clean, now it's a horrible mess, so horrible it looks like they don't even sell virtual machines anymore.
Nice! Digital Ocean was definitely not a great owner for the site, and it clearly wasn't treated as much of a priority under their ownership. Hopefully Geoff will give it the attention it deserves, especially given he's already the most active contributor there.
Awesome! Really happy for Geoff to be afforded the opportunity to bring CSS Tricks back to life.
Just goes to show that you can always make the world a better place with a little bit of luck and a lot of well placed effort. Kudos also to the pressure people put on Digital Ocean to do right by CSS Tricks and kudos to DO for allowing Geoff to take the site independent after their priorities changed.
I wish I didn't have such a bleak outlook for community-focused tech publishing. Sites like LWN and 404 Media seem to be hanging on, but they're more likely the exceptions that prove the rule.
My paycheck for the better part of a decade came from publications run by a large tech company in an arrangement not too dissimilar from DO's relationship with CSS-Tricks. It was great while it lasted, but shortly after I left it was the first thing on the chopping block when the layoffs started. That was 3-4 years ago and the landscape for quality tech publishing hasn't gotten any easier.
Can you give me proper credit on https://css-tricks.com/tricky-textarea-pulltab/?
Chris acknowledged credit in the comments but never updated the "I saw it maybe a year ago but I can’t for the life of me remember where." after I pointed out that he had seen and commented on my Codepen* of this trick.
* https://codepen.io/mmoustafa/details/kabEgo
13 year grudge lol
LLMs have put receiving "credit" on life support; gotta get it while it lasts!
It may sound a bit silly, but it's also a reminder that even these "monolithic" sites are built upon knowledge of others.
yes lol
does this mean they'll reopen pages that are out of date and where comments are closed so you can't post "this is out of date, see this MDN article?"
It's a bold move. Educational material -- particularly frontend -- is an ever-shrinking pie, so Geoff is betting on claiming a very large share of that. I hope it pays off.
I feel like you’d have to be out of your mind to pay for a CSS course in 2026, but best of luck to him.
I'm sure it will be a great resource for LLMs to read.
But seriously, good luck to them. I used to make Photoshop tutorials before YouTube, and it was a lot of fun. When YouTube came around, all the eyeballs went there, rightfully so -- videos made more sense for Photoshop. But I didn't have it in me to pivot.
And these days you don't even have to know how to do things like mask objects. There's one-click solutions, there's generative fill, light matching, face filters, etc. Hell, you can rotate a 2d layer in 3d now. Soon, live prompting in Photoshop will be the norm.
This reminds me of Indie Hackers decoupling from Stripe. The only difference is that IH went back to its original founders.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/whats-new-indie-hackers-is...
This has recently been a fairly wild journey to watch from the outside.
Best of luck to Graham. I've got no idea how they'll make CSS-Tricks work as an indy blog in this era, but I hope they do make it work.
Nice! CSS-Tricks served me well over the years with whatever limited web-dev I did. I'm glad it's not actually shutting down. And if the author is reading this, I hope you can ignore all the nay-sayers. There are people who still want to actually know their tools instead of leasing their brain from Anthropic, and there's been a shortage of great teachers.
I remember learning the very basics of webdev from CSS Tricks. Years and years ago. They've been with me for my entire career and I am happy to see them independent again.
Similar digital publishing news:
https://press.asimov.com/articles/back
https://www.semafor.com/article/10/25/2026/rest-of-world-fac...
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/the-ringer-bets-on-substac...
For a website about CSS it is ironic how awful it looks on mobile.
Yeah even on my S26 ultra single word comments take up 1/3 of the vertical screen space lol
For a website for tech people it is ironic how awful the hacker news UX and accessibility is…
Have you seen tools that tech people build for other tech people if they don't have a designer at hand? It's actually very on brand.
How would you make it better UX-wise? I can't imagine it being much better. It just gets out of your way.
Have more than 10px touch targets for voting. Don't make the ability to see downvoted comments dependent on user's eyesight and monitor. Order elements reasonably for screen readers (e.g. thread title first, actions after it). Add an ability to collapse subthread without having to return to the root comment (for its [-]).
Or you could just push Ctrl + or Cmd +
I think HN is peak design. Everything is condensed, there's no wasted space, it's like a good old website from a bygone era. It's just a bit annoying on mobile, but that's it.
This is great news! I love CSS-Tricks and have bookmarked a lot of their articles over the years. We need reliable sources of learning material that isn’t just LLM-generated to make a quick buck. LLMs by their very nature cannot be trusted, even if they can be a great additional tool for learning.
Quality information is hard to come by these days and I admire everyone who take on the responsibility and cares enough to keep those sources available and healthy, even through uncertain times.
As most others I’m also very doubtful of making this a worthwhile venture. I hope OP didn’t pay too much and makes this a chill project.
I see 2 additional paths:
1) I have no knowledge, but how does the let the crawlers pay work? Could a site like css-tricks with a lot of backlinks make money on that ? Or do LLMs have enough free content available
2) He could make this an anti-llm design website.
Better preserve the current CSS-Tricks in archive.org or some other place before it is changed too much.
This is a refreshingly candid article and was an absolute breath of fresh air. Wishing all the best to the team.
CSS tricks is a shining testament to consistency and not falling for trend-chasing. I love how laser focused they are on covering purely CSS and making it fun to keep up with CSS news. Sounds like they're on a good path right now, and he's convinced in his choice to take full control.
Super happy the site.
There was a time when any CSS related question I'd type into Google would ultimately lead to CSS-Tricks.com.
Previous discussion:
CSS-Tricks in Limbo | 273 points, 146 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708993
quite brave move, when it looks like it's not worth to learn anything anymore, wont get a job anyways and stores are flooded with apps.. and ww3 is going on..
Renaming guest writers "urkels" is pretty cute
"You urkel, yet? I've no idea why I waited so long ..."
"Duuuude just urkel and boost your professional/career visibility"
Having read it, I still don't know if it is a good or bad news
oh I remember this one, learned and use CSS tricks from this website back in the day. I wonder how they plan to make a profit from it?
what ipo did the new owner do?
Independent publishing is very important but really tough, as curl can serve as an example.
Ads, affil, ebooks, membership, voluntary payments (Wikipedia’s fundraising header can be used as template)… Implement everything and don’t be shy.
Don't do ads.
Good luck, I guess, but in 2026 "CSS Tricks" seems about as relevant as "PostScript Tricks" or "Office Open XML Tricks". Human manipulation of CSS is going to be, at best, a hobby for a few dedicated tinkerers. And I say that as someone who invested a significant amount of the last 20 years getting good at CSS.
I don't really have a definitive answer, so this is more thinking out loud, but why do the Economist, Spectator, WSJ, NYT, or the like continue to do reasonably well?
News is everywhere now, and AI can do a reasonable job guiding me on any economic or political topic I might care about. Yet.. named authors with track records or strong personalities/opinions still seem to draw readers and have value, and maybe CSS Tricks is mildly like that in some niches.
???
CSS tricks was never about only css, it also had js, html, design and other tips, too.
Pretty useful to catch up with webdev related new features
I think it's very ominous that their post doesn't even directly mention AI generated CSS.
What was your go to source for deep dive articles into new and proposed CSS features? Where did you get your first flex box and grid deep dives?
In the old days? Reading the www-style W3C mailing list was the best way to learn about proposed features and people like Dave Hyatt, David Baron, Anne van Kesteren, Eric Mayer, Paul Irish and many more I've forgotten about used to blog about upcoming things. Sites like A List Apart and Smashing Magazine were also good resources for articles about established features and interesting techniques.
I am pessimistic. I hope I am wrong. In the age of AI, content websites are trying to find a new identity for themselves. CSS-Tricks are great resources for the tinkerer and imagineer. What kind of products and services can be offered to this niche? courses? ads? donation buttons? Nope. Innovation, maybe. Paywalled css tools like color palette, or smartArt type demos. The problem is that these tools require a dedicated staff just for billing, user support, and maintenance. Say 10% of the revenue goes towards the existing CSS tricks team. That is $20 million dollars worth of annual revenue needed. $10 per user. 2 million users. If they are lucky I expect them to get 300k users. That makes it $60 per user.
There is either going to be a layoff, a price increase, or I don't know.
learning css is going to go the way of learning jquery. at this stage with AI, having a fundamental grasp on css is about all you need. with the stuff that claude and company can produce, do anyone really code css by hand anymore?
Comparing an outdated JavaScript library to a fundamental web technology doesn’t make sense to me at all.
If you work with the web in any serious way as a professional, AI or not, yes you should learn and understand CSS.
Vibe coders / Slopgineers that don't know the foundations of how these systems work are going to fall behind people who actually know how to program. Just because the machine can spit out text quickly doesn't mean it's good. And no, what all of these LLMs output isn't good css.