Thoughts on Using Tachyons for Rescale.com’s Redesign

Rescale Engineering recently undertook a redesign of their homepage, prompting them to reassess their CSS writing approach due to challenges in scalability and responsiveness with their existing 2000-line CSS file. They identified issues with the non-reusability of CSS classes and the difficulty in managing responsive designs due to scattered media queries. Inspired by Adam Morse's article on CSS scalability, they adopted the Tachyons CSS library, which emphasizes using small, single-property classes with responsive modifiers. This change dramatically reduced the amount of CSS needed for their redesign and made implementing responsive designs more enjoyable. Tachyons provide a system of predefined font sizes and spacing scales, simplifying design decisions and enhancing consistency. However, it introduces challenges like repetition of classes across sibling elements, which can be mitigated with template systems. Rescale Engineering views this approach as a positive direction for scalable CSS systems, where efficiency is achieved by minimizing the need to write new CSS.