Style Stage invites contributors to restyle the home page HTML in the spirit of CSS Zen Garden. The project has in fact been blessed by Dave Shea.
Style Stage began with a Twitter poll testing receptiveness to the idea of rebooting something similar to CSS Zen Garden. After receiving a fairly positive response, I set to work and launched StyleStage.dev a week later (July 10, 2020) with six initial contributions.
CSS Zen Garden stopped submissions in 2013. Things in CSS-land have improved a lot since then, including the available properties, the tools we have to build with, our greater understanding of addressing accessibility concerns, and increased awareness of performance impacts.
The main goals for contributors are to increase their knowledge of modern CSS properties, boost their CSS styling capabilities, and provide an open playground for showing off their creativity. Additionally, Style Stage guidelines promote basic accessibility best practices such as correct contrast, use of a skip link, and use of the prefers-reduced-motion media query to remove any added animations.
Within the first two weeks, there were 15 contributed stylesheets, 90K pageviews, 20K unique visitors, and 290 stars on the GitHub repo.
Style Stage has attracted many upcoming developers, but also recognized experts such as Lynn Fisher, Miriam Suzanne, and Andy Bell.
Visit StyleStage.dev to learn more, review the guidelines for submission, and of course to view all the available styles. You can subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates of new styles and features. There are also sponsorship opportunities.
Press and Events
- Official launch announcement
- Launch livestream - originally broadcast on Twitch, this is the lightly edited version on YouTube
- CSS Masters Talk - interview that focused heavily on Style Stage
- LondonCSS meetup - my recorded talk about modern CSS and Style Stage