My first thought was, quite literally, "wow, someone forgot to renew the domain" :/

I literally refreshed, because I thought my browser had trouble loading the new CSS stylesheets ...

I'm nobody, but in my opinion—no offence or disrespect intended—this redesign is really bad.

Sure, the old design was not going to win any cutting-edge/avant-garde awards but at least it was recognizable. This looks like an abandoned Blogspot.

I think they may have been trying to emulate the "clean reading experience" of sites like Medium, but didn't succeed.

Not a fan personally.

Accidentaly activated the Twenty Seventeen.

Chris linked to the wrong stylesheet ;)

This is one of those redesigns where I can honestly say: "Even I would have done a better job!"

Contrast between the site and the code snippets is rather stark.

What a shame, CSS tricks always had a fun and friendly feel. This just feels so plain and lifeless.

Bring back the frog!

This is quite unexpected. Past redesigns of CSS Tricks were always bolder and more visually interesting. This one in comparison looks very vanilla. Everything about the CSS Tricks "brand" appears to be gone. There are some things about this that I like — the typography is very clean — but overall it feels like there's a lot missing.

All the criticism here is valid, but it's also very possible that this is a first draft that will keep evolving. I personally don't believe in the "big redesign" anymore, I think it makes more sense to put something functional out there as soon as possible, and then slowly refine it over time.

It's definitely a downgrade. I'm all for minimalism but like many others have said, there's no visual hierarchy; the ads draw way to much attention and there is a stark contrast between content and the code snippets.

Question is, where's the css at?

Can I ask a question? Why do you go to css-tricks.com? Is it for the content that the site has or the design of the site?

It is a popular site because of the quality of the content.

Think there is an error with the background rainbow on the logo.

Running latest Chrome: http://take.ms/c40vT

I must be the only one who kind of likes the switch. Chris has always gone big and bold which is fine but in hindsight there's something to be said in the "less is more" approach. White space isn't always necessarily bad. In fact it makes the content come front in center which I think was the big reason for the switch.

All that said. I do think the comments could use a bit more attention.

I can see the attempt to make a more simplified version of the site but CSS Tricks gave up their brand and didn't follow through with the changes to radically make the site different for the better.

I actually like the new design. I think typographically it is an improvement over the last the version. I do think that the body copy could be bumped up to 400 though.

The one thing That I do think would be an improvement to the layout would be to remove the 10px of padding on the .content-wrap . It makes all the elements especially the ones in the sidebar feel off just enough that it makes the layout feel broken a little bit.

Quite a disapointment... Bad Font is bad !

Well first of all, CSS Tricks has never been about gorgeous aesthetics, it has always been about trying different things and letting the site be the primary playground for new and interesting CSS...well, tricks. Secondly, the whole re-design is explained here in his post about it.

Thirdly, Chris Coyier's own words should remind us all what the web is:

One of the beautiful parts about the web is that it's ever-changing. It doesn't have the finality of print design. I have a huge list of things I want to do on this site, from the tiny to the huge. Look forward to this design morphing over time. I'm sure it will be quite a bit different than it is today by the time v11 is a sparkle in my eye.

Is this the future of web design?

Has it got this bad that designers are terrified of any flair, individuality or boldness? Have we become that this obsessed with minimalism?

Will the pinnacle of site design in 2016 look a lot like 1991? Or an 1800's newspaper? (Albeit with better use of whitespace)

The site is CSS Tricks, yet this design says "we know bugger all about CSS".

A site called CSS Tricks should show beautiful, intelligent, and leading edge design by the clever use of CSS.

This is just a cop out that anyone could do.

I like the style direction (look at our company site, we like black and white ;)) but the typography needs a long hard look. The font is very thin even on a retina screen. The header is large with no apparent reason.

For me the body text is hard to read... maybe because it's "font-weight: 300". Also the code snippets.. totally black.

I kind of went "what" when I loaded CSS-Tricks and saw this. A very radical change to the previous layout.

I feel like the padding at the top (above the wordmark) is too much, almost like they want to avoid having too much be above the fold or something.

Been a while since I've been on CSS-Tricks. Old design as well as the last previous few really gave the site an identity. So when I loaded up the site this morning thinking--like many--some asset hadn't loaded properly, I thought WTF? Open the site using an alternate browser, and there it is! It's the latest redesign. I'm mixed on this move despite the marked increase in performance.

Yuk... I know that people don't likes changes'n'stuff. But this feels more like step backwards into wireframes then a step forward into overall design and experience improvement.

Very, very big step backward. Or step forward into unknown. A very radical change, interesting to see what will turn out in the end.

It feels like we're judging designs not on what they enable us to do but rather on their mere aesthetics alone–their novelty, style, trendiness, etc. We like a site redesign because it's new, it's cool, it's fresh, not because it more fully makes information accessible to us and expands the enriches the ground for our growing experiences.

It's like we've become mere consumers of design, when we all know design is so much more than how it looks.

I wasn't a huge fan of the old one but damn... this is just lazy. He really Verizon logo'ed the hell out of his site.

Always admire CSS tricks but I'm finding this new design harder to engage with and read.

I don't understand why we are on 2015 and we still see designs with fixed widths. This website looks now more like a blog from the year 2003

Is it the first of april already?

Try to hover the logo... damn..

I really want to like it. Chris has done so much good for the community. That said, I can't stop cringing.

Has there been any explanation as to why the design changed? Seems like a step backwards. Sure he could have stripped it back to make it more content focused but removing almost all styling and branding all together is just a bad approach.

Yes it does look like there's a CSS file missing or it hasn't fully loaded, but have we considered that it might be for performance issues? The CSS Tricks site is massive now and a quick check of the CSS file, using CCS Stats, shows that it went from 136kbto 55kb. Lets hope this is a foundation for a new style.

The font weight it quite thin resulting in a rather low legibility on mobile.

I don't like it, but I don't dislike it either.

Sure it's very plain and looks like there's no CSS in the site, but it gets the job done.

At this point, Chris doesn't really need to be flashy in the site design because he already has the audience. People come to the site not because of the design, they come for the content.

I think in this iteration, Chris just wanted to try something new, and went for "less is more" approach.

You can argue that he can add some details and still make it clean and minimalist, but one thing is clear. The site is now really fast.

This design does not work to me at all. It looks flawed.

Wordpress fail.

Looks like he's spent $5 on Themeforest.

This is either a temporary glitch or a catastrophic redesign attempt.