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Results of Questionnaire CSS Branding
The results of this questionnaire are available to anybody.
This questionnaire was open from 2013-12-13 to 2014-02-03.
7 answers have been received.
Jump to results for question:
- Who are the key stakeholders?
- How should the audience react?
- What action do we want the audience to do?
- CSS Key Words
- Other thoughts
1. Who are the key stakeholders?
Who would benefit most from a CSS branding effort (e.g. graphics, messaging, etc.)? (For example: designers, developers, CSS evangelists, organizations that make CSS-based products, and so on.)
Details
| Responder | Who are the key stakeholders? |
|---|---|
| Henrik Andersson | Standard authors, browser vendors, content authors and tool vendors. |
| Jon Rimmer | Developers and designers using CSS infrequently or through necessity, many of whom view the task with foreboding due to their perception of it as difficult, inconsistent, incomplete, etc., and developers who avoid using CSS altogether due to those same perceptions. |
| François Remy | Developers using CSS to implement designs && Organizations that make CSS-based products |
| Christian Heilmann | Organisations that create CSS based products, training and certifaction companies, fans of web technologies who want to label their current tutorials to stand apart from outdated ones. Community builders who want to rally people. |
| Julee Burdekin | designers, developers, CSS communicators, orgs that make CSS-based products |
| David Singer | CSS tool developers, CSS educational material developers... |
| Steve Zilles | The most likely to benefit are the creators of Web content and applications; that is, typically designers and developers. But, the providers of CSS also benefit if CSS can be used interoperably across the range of products. |
2. How should the audience react?
Which emotions do we hope to evoke from our audience? Should consumers feel happy, excited, confident, impressed, unique, in-on-a-joke, etc?
Details
| Responder | How should the audience react? |
|---|---|
| Henrik Andersson | Confident in the product quality |
| Jon Rimmer | Most importantly, they should feel *confident* in their ability to understand CSS and use it to solve their use-cases, without having to worry about missing functionality, hacks, or browser compatibility issues. If this is true, then they will as a consequence feel happy, impressed and many other warm and fuzzy emotions. |
| François Remy | We should make people ==confident== that CSS solve their use cases, and ==excited== about the future of CSS and what it means for them. |
| Christian Heilmann | confident, excited, professional |
| Julee Burdekin | think fugues |
| David Singer | they should feel they are up to date, modern, stylish, cutting edge |
| Steve Zilles | Curiosity - What does this mean; why should I care? Respect - Oh, this is likely to be good (work). Desire - Can I use this? |
3. What action do we want the audience to do?
What is our desired next step for our audience after seeing our CSS branding? What should they do? Learn CSS, teach a friend, talk about it publicly, promote it, associate themselves with it, participate in the CSS WG discussions, etc?
Details
| Responder | What action do we want the audience to do? |
|---|---|
| Henrik Andersson | Read up on the actual standards and contribute to the process. |
| Jon Rimmer | We want them to adopt a positive attitude to CSS, seeing it not as a necessary evil or a blight on the web platform, but instead as an important part of their skill set. One they wish to develop further, and evangelise to colleagues, peers, strangers on the bus, etc. |
| François Remy | Ideally, people would teach friends about what they discovered and share their excitment with peers |
| Christian Heilmann | Learn, teach, advocate the differences between CSS and preprocessors, publish best practices. |
| Julee Burdekin | use it like a mesh shopping bag |
| David Singer | adopt it more, promote it, explain it, want to do more so as to stand out |
| Steve Zilles | I would want people to find out more about CSS if they are ignorant and to advertise it if CSS helps them do their work. But, I would also expect that a brand would inspire trust; trust that CSS can be used to solve your problems and it will work reliably. |
4. CSS Key Words
If you had to distill our message about CSS into five key concepts - and for this exercise you do - what are those concepts? What resonates with our audience? Speed, Power, New, Different, Solid, Simple, Timeless, Fun? Please give 5 individual words (not phrases) that best represent CSS.
Details
| Responder | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Henrik Andersson | Fresh | Combinatorial complexity | Easy to learn | ||
| Jon Rimmer | Improved | Powerful | Comprehensible | ||
| François Remy | Responsive. In more details "The simplest language for truly responsive designs". | Simple | Trustable | ||
| Christian Heilmann | Reliable | Simple | Creative | Visual | Compatible |
| Julee Burdekin | lightweight | modular | dark matter | reticulated | fugal |
| David Singer | Style (in the design sense) | Flexibility | Balance | Powerful | Adaptable |
| Steve Zilles | Creative | Communicates | Power | Simple | Useful |
5. Other thoughts
If you have other thoughts on CSS branding, please provide them below.
Details
| Responder | Other thoughts |
|---|---|
| Henrik Andersson | |
| Jon Rimmer | Right now, the tagline for CSS should probably be "Not as bad as it used to be". Unfortunately, CSS still *does* have many problems, ones that are not just misconceptions. There are still simple use-cases that are not well addressed, required vendor prefixes, browser compatibility concerns, and the requirement to use preprocessors to make CSS syntactically tolerable. Any rebranding effort must contend the fact that CSS, while much improved from the bad old days, is still far from perfect. Overselling it will only lead to more frustration when developers realise things like flexbox, grid, multi-column, regions, sticky positioning, rule nesting, variables, etc. are still not fully standardised and available in all browsers. |
| François Remy | |
| Christian Heilmann | The biggest issue CSS faces is developers flocking to preprocessors like SASS and LESS because of their terser syntax. A good CSS branding should show that relying on the standard means not more work, but less work in the long run. |
| Julee Burdekin | |
| David Singer | |
| Steve Zilles | CSS helps developers and designers present documents, applications and user interfaces that draw people in, are easy to understand and are reactive. |
More details on responses
- Henrik Andersson: last responded on 18, December 2013 at 16:15 (UTC)
- Jon Rimmer: last responded on 18, December 2013 at 16:43 (UTC)
- François Remy: last responded on 18, December 2013 at 17:10 (UTC)
- Christian Heilmann: last responded on 28, January 2014 at 23:10 (UTC)
- Julee Burdekin: last responded on 28, January 2014 at 23:21 (UTC)
- David Singer: last responded on 29, January 2014 at 00:22 (UTC)
- Steve Zilles: last responded on 29, January 2014 at 23:56 (UTC)
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