Adrian Mendoza

Adrian Mendoza has been designing and coding webpages since 1995. He is the author on a book on mobile user experience, a web guru, a mobile UX expert, entrepreneur, and his companies accidental CTO. He is the new author of "CSS for Designer: Organizing, Developing, and Optimizing Your CSS" being published as a video series by O'Reilly Media.

How to build up to good CSS

Avoid problems associated with a quick fix by creating a stable workflow.

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A long time ago (circa 1999) a creative director tried very hard to convince me how great working in print design was compared to web design. One afternoon before a big event for a Fortune 100 company, she showed me an invitation her team had been working on for the past 2 weeks. It had folds, panels, and colors that would wow anyone. It had just come back from the printing press and she was excited to show me how amazing it was. She began reading me the big invitation title first — to her horror she found that there was a spelling mistake on the cover. The entire set of 10,000 invites would have to be thrown in the trash and at the cost of $15,000 — that would be hard mistake to swallow. She was speechless.

My response to what had just happened was this…”That’s why I like designing for the web. I would have been able to change that spelling mistake in 5 minutes…”

At that point in the web’s history anyone with a web connection, an FTP program and a text editor could edit HTML code on the fly. It really was the wild wild west of web development — this was the web’s best and worst attribute. For many young developers and designers it gave us a chance to create, edit, and publish web pages as fast as we could code them.

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