CSS Freelancer

The Road to Enlightenment

At first glance you may be right to think this site is just a rip off of the highly successful and constant inspiration of the CSS Zen Garden project and other such CSS gallery sites, it's not. 

For years we have naturally turned to the web for design ideas an inspirational creativity and have witnessed a dramatic increase in CSS gallery design based websites.

Thanks ... we salute you all!

What's it all about? 

CSS Freelancer is the project of Solv.IT, a Brighton based web design and development agency with an increasing customer demand for high quality, standards compliant CSS and XHTML based website design.

Rather than sitting on our skills and expertise, the time had come to take the lead from other site's that have continued to be an inspiration to us, by building our own CSS design resource site, demonstrating the flexibility of our Content Management System to our clients.

A word of warning? 

Long gone are the days of table based website design layouts. If you're still designing in this way, do yourselves a favour and STOP NOW! The reality is, even with partial CSS usage your skills will soon be of little value.

The claims that CSS design are found to be limiting are over. Research will demonstrate that CSS design and XHTML designs have long been paving the way in website design.

Don't panic your skills are not lost. CSS is relatively easy to pick up once you know the basics and there are numerous free resources for getting started. 

Do it NOW, you have been warned!

Who should be interested?

The purpose of this project is to invite experienced freelance CSS, XHTML design specialists to submit designs enabling us to promote your skills to our clients for a number of wide and varied projects.

Alternatively, you may wish to gain recognition from the design community, increase your general exposure or just practice your skills. Although, we ultimately retain the final approval of all designs being posted to the site.

We hope that fledgling CSS designers will find this site a useful resource with the availability for downloading sample files, see Getting started. However, for the purpose of this project experience is essential.

Requirements

We would like to see as much CSS1 as possible. CSS2 should be limited to widely-supported elements only. The CSS Freelancer website is about functional, practical CSS and not the latest bleeding-edge tricks viewable by 2% of the browsing public. The only real requirement we have is that your CSS validates.

Unfortunately, designing this way highlights the flaws in the various implementations of CSS. Different browsers display differently, even completely valid CSS at times, and this becomes maddening when a fix for one leads to breakage in another.

Full browser compliance is still sometimes a pipe dream, and we do not expect you to come up with pixel-perfect code across every platform. But do test in as many as you can. If your design doesn’t work in at least IE5+/Win and Mozilla (run by over 90% of the population), chances are we won’t accept it.

We ask that you submit original artwork. Please respect copyright laws. Please keep objectionable material to a minimum; tasteful nudity is acceptable, outright pornography will be rejected.

Getting started

Download the sample HTML file and CSS file locally where you may modify the CSS style sheet until your hearts content. However, the HMTL must remain as untouched for your resulting designs to work as anticipated.

This is a learning exercise as well as a demonstration. You retain full copyright on your graphics (with limited exceptions, see submission guidelines), but we ask you release your CSS under a Creative Commons license identical to the one on this site so that others may learn from your work.

Once you have completed your masterpiece (and please, don’t submit half-finished work) upload your .css file to a web server under your control.

Send us a link to the file and if we choose to use it, we will spider the associated images. Final submissions will be placed on our server.

Please read our design guidelines for more information before proceeding with your beautiful creation.