It happened again. The desire to change up the design of my site hit me. But…

The ad-hoc CSS model that I had created made everything so fragile. Turns out, if you have no system in mind, then everything is very fragile. Who knew! The only formal CSS model I have experience with is Tailwind (atomic?), so I stuck with that. Sorry BEM and BOM and and all those other three-letter acronyms. The desire it to spend my time using the design system, not creating one.

Really, though, I still love the CSS Zen Garden approach. It’s possible with Tailwind—just set up some CSS variables. Christopher Kirk Nielsen’s personal site is beautiful and shows that you can still have a CSS Zen Garden-style themeable design system in 2025. Great job Chris.

I think the next order of business is to create myself a design system. I have kind of been orbiting a paper-inspired design on my three main sites (this one, Yazzy, my reader-mode website, and my RSS reader). It would be great to unify all those into a single CSS file full of Tailwind themes that I can import into each site. Unify, you know. Brad Frost’s book, Atomic Design looks like it is a good place to start formalizing the “carterworks” theme. Then when I decide I don’t like sepia-toned pages, I can just change up a few “design tokens” and be on my way, just like Chris.

Until next time, plebs.