Interview with Dan Cederholm
Dan Cederholm discovered web standards and never looked back. He talks to Oliver Lindberg about what’s got him excited again about CSS, how to implement CSS3 and what’s next for his designers’ playground, Dribbble
This article originally appeared in issue 206 of .net magazine in 2010.
11 October 2002 — the day that Douglas Bowman’s redesign of Wired News went live — changed everything. At the time, Dan Cederholm was working as a web developer for business mag Fast Company and still using tables. He’d already read Jeffrey Zeldman’s influential ‘To Hell With Bad Browsers’ article on A List Apart, but then he saw that you could create a semantic markup layout for a major magazine site completely with CSS.
“I went to my boss, Rob Roesler, and showed him what Wired were doing — how flexible it was and how much less work,” Cederholm remembers. “It proved that it was possible to embrace web standards, even if you were working on a commercial website. Luckily, Rob went, ‘Yes, let’s do it!’ and from then on I was working on redesigning Fast Company into a CSS layout.”
Cederholm had always been a creative designer who’d gravitated towards code, so when CSS hit the turning point, he dived right into it and started evangelising. But then the web standards movement started to slow down.
“For a while, CSS got a little boring, once we figured out the typical browser bugs and created best practices,” he explains. “Web 2.0 started and people were worried about other things such as gradients and the business, and the current crop of browsers was stagnant in a way, too. But then they began to iterate faster and became progressive about adding CSS3.
“The new wave of CSS3 and HTML5 has got me excited again,” says Cederholm, who runs one-man design studio SimpleBits from Salem, Massachusetts. “Browsers are affecting standards and folding stuff back into draft specs such as transitions, transforms and animations. It can be a little frightening for true standards zealots in that it’s the tail wagging the dog: the standards aren’t written but the browsers implement them already.”
In his latest book, Handcrafted CSS, co-written with Ethan Marcotte, he talks about ‘progressive enrichment’, which refers specifically to advanced CSS that can enrich interfaces but that will also degrade gracefully. “Embrace CSS3 now!” he enthuses. ”We can start adding it if we choose appropriate moments. If you add CSS3 to the experience layer, it will ensure the design degrades gracefully and IE users won’t really know what they’re missing. Stay away from using it for layout: look for ways to enhance the user experience and the site’s message. That’s the safest place to dive in.
“I tend to sneak CSS3 transitions and transforms subtly into client work without even saying anything,” he adds. “Just put it in there and see what happens. If the client doesn’t notice it, it’s not detrimental and certainly not critical.
“Obviously site statistics play a part, too. If everybody is using IE6, you’re not going to spend a lot of time on it but you can still add it in. A lot of that stuff is so simple. You can do pretty impressive and flexible things with very little code. It’s good to get a leg up now and start using it experimentally.”
Organic growth
Currently, Cederholm’s best known project is Dribbble, a community for creatives to share small screenshots of what they’re working on, built together with developer Rich Thornett. The project has its origins in Cameron Moll’s Screen Grab Confab from 2004 (people put sneak peeks of their work as comments on his blog) and was inspired by Twitter, too.
“We came up with the name, probably the logo first, and started prototyping,” Cederholm explains. “It slowly evolved over time. I initially sent out some T-shirts and a handwritten invite code card to a certain group of friends. Then we started giving invites to people and it’s grown exponentially.
“Right now, we have around 3,300 people but intend to grow it slowly over time — partly to control the quality of the work that’s being shared; partly to help us control scaling.”
Cederholm and Thornett want to foster the feedback aspect and stress the importance of the community’s quality. However, up until the end of May, they were both juggling full-time jobs and family and couldn’t dedicate as much time as they wanted to Dribbble. But then Thornett quit his job to become Dribbble’s first full-time employee. “Hopefully, it sends a clear message that it’s no longer a side project and that we’re looking to grow the community and business full steam ahead,” Cederholm says.
The long-awaited API is near the top of the to-do list. Even without an API, Trent Walton and Dave Rupert have already managed to create a WordPress widget. “They were able to build it simply based on the XML feeds. It’s a poor man’s API, I guess, but it’s fantastic!” Cederholm grins. “There’s a thread on Get Satisfaction asking when the API will be up, and people post there every day. Very soon, we’ll have some sort of basic API — it just helps the visibility of the amazing content that’s being created. The more that content can be shared, the better.”
The bad with the good
Like every project, Dribbble has attracted critics alongside its fans detractors who argue that it’s just another place where the more renowned designers pat each other on the back. “Some of that small group of friends that we initially invited are well-known designers,” admits Cederholm, “and you’re probably always going to get this criticism when you have well-known content creators in the community. But, in the case of Dribbble, I feel like when there’s positive feedback on a screenshot, it’s usually attached to something that’s genuinely good.
“Also, when somebody voiced this criticism on Twitter last week, I had a look and 95 per cent of the people featured on the homepage were not the all-star designers. We need to get more visibility for the good work that’s happening; reward people who are giving good feedback and calling out the good players that aren’t necessarily well known in web design circles.”
There’s also the danger that Dribbble could turn into a haven for plagiarists. “I had this fear from day one, but luckily we haven’t had any copyright issues to this point,” Cederholm says. “Since you’re drafted by existing members, we always have this family lineage to go back. If someone is abusive on Dribbble, we can trace where they came from.” However, Cederholm concedes that they need to add some anti-social features soon, so that users can block people, delete comments and control ‘rebounds’ (a kind of visual riff off someone else’s work).
In the meantime, Cederholm continues to grow both the training and the product sides of SimpleBits. Another book, on CSS3 and the experience layer, is on the horizon and he’s a sought-after speaker at conferences such as the Future of Web Design and An Event Apart.
Client work is still “part of the pie”, as Cederholm puts it, but he’d rather take his business in the direction of Coudal Partners, who’ve weaned their way off clients and started creating their own products.
The SimpleBits shop, selling shirts and prints, is run by part-time deputy designer Meagan Fisher, but Cederholm is adamant about not turning SimpleBits into a design agency. “I enjoy the creating, the rolling up of your sleeves, and I like to do different things,” he says.
“Some days I like to code, some days to design, and some days I like to create products or think about the business. Maybe it’s attention deficit disorder.”
Cederholm still runs Dribbble and has written CSS3 for Web Designers and Sass for Web Designers
This article originally appeared in issue 206 of .net magazine in 2010. Photography by William Ireland.
