Zeldman: Web design news

One of my happiest memories is the day I quit my job. No longer was I a mere office shlub, meekly thanking life for the cold mashed potatoes it deigned to drop onto my plate. I was somebody now—somebody with a destiny. I was a web designer.

Times being what they are, more and more of us are working at home, not always by choice.

Working from home as a freelancer or remote employee can be fabulous. But if you share that home with a family and kids, creating a productive, professional environment can be challenging.

In Issue No. 263 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, Natalie Jost discusses the joys, sorrows, and coping techniques of Walking the Line When You Work from Home.

Natalie is a great writer and as a freelance web designer, wife, and mother of three girls, she knows whereof she speaks.

If you identify with what Natalie has to say, and if you have some home-working tips of your own to share, please tell us how you overcome distractions and deal with deadlines while walking the blurry line between work and home.

Tags: freelance, working, workathome, alistapart, nataliejost

Filed under: A List Apart, Freelance, Web Design, Working, work, writing

This post has earned 22 responses so far.

The Computing Community Consortium “supports the computing research community in creating compelling research visions and the mechanisms to realize these visions” and steals copyrighted design layouts from A List Apart magazine. (Judging by the color scheme, they stole the layout from Issue No. 254.)

The Computing Community Consortium is supported by National Science Foundation. Maybe if they steal enough layouts they can balance the budget.

Hat tip: Diwaker Gupta.

Tags: alistapart, design, theft, stealing, ethics, nsf.gov, Computing Community Consortium

Filed under: A List Apart, Design, ethics, stealing, theft

This post has earned 60 responses so far.

You know that new thing where you call customer support and a robot tells you that there’s no need to wait; just leave your phone number and you’ll be called back in three minutes? So you do it, and three minutes later, the robot calls you back and asks you to hold while your call is connected? And then you sit on hold for twenty minutes waiting to get connected?

Tags: customersupport, userexperience, badexperience, UX

Filed under: UX, Usability, User Experience

This post has earned 14 responses so far.

Have left town for a funeral. Will be gone a week. Updates may be sparse.

Filed under: events, family, zeldman.com

This post has earned bupkis so far.

My first book didn’t sell very well but it had an effect on people’s hearts. Web designers around the world circulated a single copy of Taking Your Talent to the Web, adding their autographs, drawings, photos, and other verbal and visual messages to every page—even the covers and spine.

While unpacking from the office move, I found this special world-traveled copy of the book and snapped a few pages at random. Some people who signed this book went on to do amazing things on the web. Others lowered their profiles but continued to do work of quality and significance. Still others simply disappeared. (At least they disappeared from the worldwide web design community.) I love every one of them. Thank you all again.

A photo spread on Flickr Around the Word with Web Talent.

Tags: webdesign, community, talent, takingyourtalenttotheweb, newriders, publishing, book, books, zeldman, writing, dreamless

Filed under: Blogroll, Community, Design, Ideas, Web Design, Zeldman, art, art direction, books, content, creativity, experience, industry, people, work, writing

This post has earned 18 responses so far.

In Issue No. 262 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, Ryan Irelan invites us to collaborate and connect with Subversion, and Christophe Porteneuve explains how to get out of binding situations in JavaScript.

Comments off.

Tags: alistapart, webdesign, webdevelopment, javascript, binding, subversion, Christophe Porteneuve. Ryan Irelan

Filed under: A List Apart, Web Design, development, writing

This post has earned bupkis so far.

Friedrolling: vt. Gratuitously posting Basecamp referral links disguised as tweets or blog posts.

“Man, damn the internets! That’s the third time today I’ve been Friedrolled when I thought I was clicking on porn!

Tags: 37signals, basecamp, referral

Filed under: 37signals, Blogs and Blogging, tweets

This post has earned 7 responses so far.

Speakeasy will only honor my request to discontinue DSL service in my old office if I call the company from my old phone number, which I no longer have access to because I moved out.

Tags: speakeasy, verizon, DSL, customerservice, happycog

Filed under: Happy Cog™, Tools, Zeldman, business, work

This post has earned 13 responses so far.

The new office is so new to me that I entered the address incorrectly while ordering CS3 suites for the studio. Amazon is consequently rush-delivering Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Pro, and Fireworks to the wrong address, and it’s too late to change the address on the order. Someone in Harlem is going to be very happy.

Tags: adobe, CS3, amazon, happycog

Filed under: Adobe, Design, Happy Cog™, Zeldman, work

This post has earned 19 responses so far.

It’s been a month for milestones.

On May 31, my site turned 13 years old.

On June 7, making the previous milestone and all others possible, I had 15 years without a drink or drug.

On Saturday June 28, Carrie and I celebrated five years of marriage by hiring a babysitter, eating a meal, and bumming around the east village.

Between these landmarks came a flight to Pittsburgh and back-to-back train trips from New York to Washington DC, and Boston.

In the last-named burg we put on a two-day design conference for people who make websites.

At home during this same period, our daughter outgrew last month’s clothes, began swimming, got a big-girl bed, attended and graduated summer camp, stopped being even slightly afraid of school, hung out with her grandma, and advanced so much intellectually and emotionally that it would qualify as science fiction if it weren’t the lived experience of ’most everyone who has kids.

Between all that came the usual tumult of client meetings, client projects, and potential new business, giddily intermingled with the publication of two A List Apart issues. Make that three issues as of tomorrow.

Been busy.

If I had to pick an image to symbolize the month, it would be me on a rerouted slow Amtrak train from Boston to New York, using an iPhone and one finger to peck out a strategic response to an 80 page RFP.

That would have been the image, but now there’s a new one. For now there’s today.

On the calendar it is Happy Cog New York’s moving day. Today I pack up what for 18 years was either my apartment or Happy Cog’s New York City headquarters (and was most often both).

I hit bottom in this place. Ended a short-lived, tragically wrong first marriage. Rebuilt my life one cell at a time. Found self. Found love. Became a web designer. Found the love of my life. Married well, had a magical child. Wrote two books. Made money and lost it a couple of times over. Founded a magazine. Co-founded a movement. Worked for others. Freelanced. Founded an agency. Grew it.

It all happened here.

This gently declining space that has been nothing but an office since December and will soon be nothing at all to me, this place I will empty and vacate in the next few hours, has seen everything from drug withdrawal to the first stirrings of childbirth. Happiness, anguish, farting and honeymoons. Everything. Everything but death.

Even after our family moved, the place was never empty. The heiress to an American fine art legacy came here, to this dump, to talk about a potential project. Two gentlemen who make an extraordinary food product came here many times to discuss how their website redesign was going.

When I wasn’t meeting someone for lunch, I went downstairs to this wonderful little place to take away a small soup and a sandwich, which I ate at my desk while reading nytimes.com. Helming the take-away lunch place are three Indian women who are just the sweetest, nicest people ever. The new studio is just far enough away that I will rarely see these ladies any more. I will miss them.

I will miss Josef, the super here, with his big black brush mustache and gruff, gently-East-European-accented voice. He will miss me, too. He just told me so, while we were arranging for the freight elevator. We were kind to him after his heart attack and he has been kind to us since he arrived—the last in a long series of supers caught between an aging building and a rental agent that prefers not to invest in keeping the place up. The doormen and porters, here, too, some of whom I’ve known for nearly twenty years, my God. Can’t think about that.

I will miss being able to hit the gym whenever I feel like it and shower right in my workplace.

And that is all.

This is the death of something but it is the birth of something more. We take everything with us, all our experiences (until age robs us of them one by one, and even then, they are somewhere—during the worst of my mother’s Alzheimer’s, she reacted, however subtly, to Sinatra). We take everything with us. The stink and glory of this place will stay on me even when we are set up in our slick new space. It will be with me long after the landlord’s collection letters have stopped. This place, what happened here, will live until my head cracks like a coconut, and then some.

And now I pre-pack. Adieu, adieu.

Tags: happycog, moves, moving, newyork, NYC, design, webdesign, alistapart, wedding, anniversary, zeldman, zeldman.com, 5years, 13years, 15years

Filed under: 13 years, A List Apart, An Event Apart, Boston, Career, Design, Happy Cog™, Philadelphia, Publications, Publishing, Web Design, Zeldman, business, cities, conferences, dreams, eric meyer, events, experience, family, glamorous, parenting, people, zeldman.com

This post has earned 54 responses so far.