Hi there, I'm Kornelius, a self-taught web designer, photographer, graphic designer, and music producer from Romania. Music in particular has gained me significant success in the past 7 years, but the other art fields have helped me a lot in developing my own art direction, which for my current music project comes along nicely. Apart from the aforementioned hobbies, I work as a backoffice operator for one of the biggest retail companies in my country. My daily tasks involve some sort of digital logistics (such as registering/validating all invoices of goods that enter our supermarket), and simultaneously making sure the sale prices in the supermarket are up to date every day. Many other operations are included, but these are just details I'll not dive into right now. Even though my music project, Almost Vanished, began to offer me a consistently growing source of income, I knew it will not be enough just yet, so for almost 2 years I've seen myself with this amazing job, which pretty much involves the usage of a PC - which I'm the best at.

I've got a YouTube video recommendation from - who else - Kevin Powell, which was a CSSBattle duel against WebDevSimplified. I was really impressed by how CSS can be used to recreate images in the funnest way possible. Although I had little interaction with HTML/CSS in the past - for the most part I've used these two for my projects during my years of high school and college -, I thought of CSSBattle as an interesting game to play in my free time. So as soon as I created my account, I challenged myself to recreate the available targets at the time. Obviously, as soon as I checked the leaderboards, I realised I still lack a lot of information, let alone the methods that others have reached such big scores with.

Doing my homework in the past with only HTML made pretty much everything look empty, so as soon as we started to get into CSS basics, I knew it was what I needed to make my own projects more aesthetic - to put it that way. Every final project we had to present had to involve interesting website prototypes, but I wanted to set the bar as high as I could, and invested most of my time learning smarter ways of element positioning, color assigning, animations, etc. I wanted to make something that will eventually help me develop a hobby I can win something from, so I built a bunch of website prototypes, either fully functioning webpages or simply web design practice I've done from time to time. With the many features released for CSS in the past years I noticed I was way behind, and even if I try to get along with the new styles and such, people will always be faster to come up with something new.

I'm not really the qualified being to impede other people's opinions, so I'd say it's to each their own. CSS still remains just as easy and fun to learn, but it's obviously hard to master. Websites like Codepen or Github often present examples or experiments of people which, to me, push the meaning of CSS on both sides.

Read the available documentation, watch tutorials, and put everything in practice accordingly. Take the CSS properties that you want to master first and set goals for how in-depth you want to learn. Have projects built along the theoretical progress that you achieved every day and don't be afraid to leave questions whenever there's something that leaves you confused or you don't understand why something works its certain way. Last but not least - have fun. There should be nothing to worry about as long as you enjoy the learning/creative process.

CSSBattle made me realise that CSS alone holds properties with insane power, and the fact that you can generally recreate targets with as little number of characters as possible motivated me to thrive and climb the global leaderboard as much as I was able to. Thanks to some insanely skilled top players like Beo, Ilya Streltsyn, Gunnar Bittersman etc. who shared solutions/tips on Discord community or Github forums, I have managed to understand that CSS can be used in ways I've never thought of. So I'm pretty much honored to play against such amazing players, they're the reason CSSBattle is just as fun as it is right now and eventually guide me to discover tricks they wouldn't share directly.

I'd love to join a time attack battle one day since I wasn't able to fully attend the first 2 ones when the new mode was released. Other than that, I'll let time tell what CSSBattle has to offer next, I'm pretty sure you guys have been cooking some amazing things behind the scenes and I'm really looking forward to whatever it'll be.