About Chris
In May 2007, I got my first “real job” as a web designer at a tiny design company (Chatman Design) in Madison, Wisconsin. They were losing their “web guy”, so despite having no professional web experience at all, I got the job. It’s just three guys, fearless leader and art director Tim Chatman and graphic design wizard Andrew Frigo. I am the new “web guy”, literally:
I had to go in head-first, as the were already hosting and maintaining two important eCommerce sites and working on a third even more ambitious project. It was a trial-by-fire. In the first year we were able to fully redesign both the eCommerce sites, launch the third, redesign our own site (a few times) and do a couple of other web projects as well. It was a crazy year and it looks like this next year will be even crazier.
In July 2007, I was learning so much so quickly about web design I got the idea to start writing about what I was learning on a blog. And thus the birth of CSS-Tricks. It was actually a whole family of sites at first, including ones for each of the major Adobe applications. This quickly proved to be too much work and I trimmed down to only the site that really appealed to me, the one focusing on web design.
In August 2007, I wrote up a tutorial on how to “fade out” the bottom of a web page. Despite it having some major shortcomings (like, uhm, it didn’t work in IE 6 and it would make links unclickable in the fading region) it was picked up a ton of other sites and I got my first taste of popularity. It got me excited and I quickly redesigned the site and kept up at writing tutorials.
It’s now over a year later and CSS-Tricks has had close to 7000 subscribers at one point and over 2000 subscribers to the newer video screencasts. Between CSS-Tricks and the job, I feel like I’ve come tremendously far as a web designer and I can’t wait to see what the future holds!
