Ask HN: How do you write CSS in 2019?

2 points by dvasdekis 6y ago ↗ HN

I'm a solo founder with a backend-development background and low artistic ability. Although I can write the backend, JS and HTML without issue, I'm looking to hire a freelancer for the UX design and implementation, particularly for the CSS component.

Sniffing around the freelancer marketplaces, the international freelancers with solid portfolios who are prepared to work at the lower end of the pay scale ($15-20USD/hour) are all using tooling that generates the CSS for them - particularly Webflow.

I've looked at the CSS that Webflow generates, and it's extremely lengthy and not intuitive or human readable IMHO. Code generation also makes me shudder from an engineering perspective. However, I am self-funded and I don't have an existing customer base. I'm also building an MVP to launch with, not something at massive scale.

What would you recommend? How should I approach CSS development for an MVP in 2019? What are the gotchas to these code generation tools, if I should use them? Or, should I hunt down and pay for someone who can develop UX and code CSS by hand?

2 comments

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meerita 6y ago ↗

This is how I write CSS http://minid.net/2019/04/07/the-css-utilitarian-methodology/ and more arguments on why I do Functional CSS http://minid.net/2019/08/12/in-defense-of-functional-css/

smacktoward 6y ago ↗

Two points.

1) $15-20 an hour is next to nothing. In a lot of U.S. cities, $15/hour is the minimum wage! It does not surprise me that the only people willing to work for that little depend on automated code-generation tools to do the work for them. If they knew how to do the work themselves, they would be earning much more.

2) If you've got sufficient front-end skill to be able to do the HTML and JS yourself, and you're just looking at this stage to get an MVP out the door, my advice would be to just do this bit yourself too and use something like Bootstrap (https://getbootstrap.com/). Bootstrap gives you sane, usable styles for just about everything out of the box, so the only time you have to write CSS yourself is when what you want to do departs from the default Bootstrap presentation.

It's possible to style Bootstrap so thoroughly that nobody can tell it's Bootstrap, but for an MVP I wouldn't worry about that -- just focus on the functionality, and live with the default Bootstrap presentation for now. If the MVP finds a market, you'll be able to pay someone who knows what they're doing to theme Bootstrap for you; if it doesn't, you haven't wasted any money paying for a bunch of cruddy auto-generated CSS that probably doesn't look as good as the default Bootstrap styles do anyway.