Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Recent Reports

Recent Reports

The gold and the glory. (Posts prior to March 2006 WordPress conversion may be accessed here.)

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.

Your US tax dollars at work

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.

Customer support on the march

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?

Not at his desk

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

Around the Word with Web Talent

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.

ALA No. 262: Binding & Subversion

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.

Lube Tube

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

Office Koan No. 37

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.

Life Needs a Rewind Button

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.

What 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.

AEA Boston 2008 session notes

Linked session notes and downloads from An Event Apart Boston 2008.

So long, Boston. We’ll be back.

An Event Apart Boston 2008 is over but the memories and photos linger on.
Eric and I started An Event Apart because we saw the need for a live, concentrated, learning and sharing experience about best practices and inspiration for the standards-based web design community. Thanks to brilliant speakers, phenomenally dedicated and supremely competent staff, [...]

Video: Jeff Veen on Data Overload

Live onstage at An Event Apart New, Jeff Veen explains the magnitude of data we process every hour, and the responsibility of designers to help us make sense of it.

Dialog from life

“I want a baby sister.”

Art direction on the web?

On Tuesday morning, while Malarkey was furiously getting himself permanently uninvited to Håkon Lie’s Christmas parties, and the jungle drums spoke of nothing but Firefox 3, Jason Santa Maria quietly slipped a torpedo into the harbor. He didn’t just redesign his website, he issued a call to arms. And what he called for was real art direction on the web.

Video: Cameron Moll on natural mapping

Onstage at An Event Apart New Orleans, 2008, designer Cameron Moll discusses what happens when a computer novice bumps heads with a computer expert. HD video by Bonnemaison of Baltimore, MD. Edited by Ian Corey. The next show is An Event Apart Boston, June 23–24, 2008.

ALA 261: CSS layout redux; in praise of prototyping

CSS layout is awesome, except when your layout calls for a header, a footer, and columns in between. “Faux Absolute Positioning” combines the strengths (and removes the weaknesses) of absolute positioning and float-based layouts. Plus: the rise of Ajax and rich internet applications has thrown the limitations of traditional wireframing into painful relief. “Sketching in Code: the Magic of Prototyping” can help you focus on what you’re building and convey its impact and “magic” to that all-important stakeholder.

Number Nine

Early this morning, in my last deep sleep, I was tormented by a nightmare concerning our three-year-old. In my dream, she was chasing some happy bauble. Call it a big floating bubble filled with sunshine. The bubble blew out of the park. She ran after it. I ran after her.
The bubble floated above a big [...]

Video: Got Live in New Orleans

Caught live at An Event Apart New Orleans 2008, video clips featuring Andy Clarke on web layout and yours truly on journalism and the web are now online for your viewing pleasure at An Event Apart’s website. More video clips are on their way. Keep watching the skies.

Hope is the daughter of dawn

Awake at 4:30 AM at the end of a four-day heat wave. Sweating, but not from the weather. Running a business during a recession gets you out of bed with the chickens.
I have always moved counter to my time. I started Happy Cog as the dot-com boom went bust. We bought our first home in [...]

Video: Eric Meyer on generated content

Live onstage at An Event Apart New Orleans, 2008, web design conference co-founder and CSS expert Eric Meyer explains why the W3C’s recommendation to allow browsers to insert quotation marks doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense.

Where do you begin?

Q. I’m searching for your archive. Whenever I find a really good blog, I like to start at the beginning so I can understand better some of what you’re talking about. And I can’t find any link to your archives. A. Thanks for writing….

Return of the Son of Moto

We regret that we cannot debug the style sheets of the universe.

ALA 260: Bolton vs. Boulton

In Issue No. 260 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
Writing an Interface Style Guide
by JINA BOLTON
Ever designed or developed a beautiful interface only to find your hard work ruined months later by gaudy graphics or invalid markup? With proper documentation you’ll have a better chance at seeing your interface stay beautiful. Jina [...]

Dear New York Times Mobile

Dear New York Times Mobile Edition:
While we applaud your use of typographically correct punctuation—a cause we ourselves have long advocated—we’d appreciate it even more if you would do it like professionals. Author in Unicode, the cross-platform standard.
Please stop using proprietary Windows characters in a bumbling, amateurish attempt to generate typographically correct open and [...]

UX Zeitgeist (beta)

A colleague who is interested in learning more about user experience (UX) design, information architecture, and usability, asked what sites he should visit. I suggested he check the UX Zeitgeist (beta) section of Rosenfeld Media. Not only is it UX Zeitgeist interesting and informative in its own right; it’s also a reasonable who’s who, with [...]

Fish tacos FTW nom nom nom

If Twitter is a medium for text-messaging, then content such as “Dude, where are you? We’re in the mezzanine” is perfectly appropriate, and “Fish tacos FTW nom nom nom” is practically overachievement. If it’s micro-blogging, then you may be obliged, like any writer, to consider your reader’s need for value. I look at it as the world’s smallest magazine, published by me.

Maybe that’s why they call them Kodak moments

It was the last day of our daughter’s first year of school. Party time. All the three-year-olds dressed like dolls; teachers relieved and sad; parents misty-eyed, promising to stay in touch over the summer. Moments like these are once in a lifetime. Fortunately I carry an iPhone. Unfortunately, my iPhone’s camera is once again taking blanks instead of photographs.

A Tweet Too Far

Ariel Waldman’s “Twitter Refuses to Uphold Terms of Service” makes a disturbing read and a depressing revelation.
To summarize: Twitter’s Terms of Service (TOS), modeled on Flickr’s, forbid one Twitter user to harass another. If you harass, you lose your account, according to the TOS. Yet Twitter user Ariel Waldman experienced painfully offensive harassment from another [...]

ALA 259: Career and Content

In Issue No. 259 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome
by Pepi Ronalds
Clients love to write copy. Well, they love to plan to write it, anyhow. On most web design projects, content is the last thing to be considered (and almost always the last thing to be delivered). We’ll [...]

Flowers in your hair

An Event Apart, the design conference for people who make websites, has posted its San Francisco 2008 schedule. Join us August 18–19, 2008 at the Palace Hotel for two jam-packed 9.5-hour-long days of learning and inspiration with Heather Champ, Kelly Goto, Jeremy Keith, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Cederholm, Tantek Çelik, Jeffrey Veen, Derek Featherstone, Liz Danzico, Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman.

CSS Menu Writer debuts

Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer™ for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs.
I got to spend an hour with the program prior to its release, and was impressed with its flexibility and extreme ease of use. For instance, creating primary and secondary menu [...]

A List Apart saved from the deep

Due to an almost magical series of administrative, record-keeping, and usability errors, the domain registration for A List Apart momentarily lapsed this morning.
It was like a disturbance in the Force, or a warp in the Matrix.
While the site continued to display correctly here in New York City (and in many other places), it [...]

Content precedes design

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

ALA 258: art of community, science of design

What does it take to build an online community like Flickr’s? And how can we tell if interface design conventions we take for granted actually help or hurt users? In Issue No. 258 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, George Oates, a key member of the core team that shaped the Flickr [...]

An e-mail from Chip Kidd

I’ll never forget the day Chip Kidd sent me an e-mail. Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys, the book that does for design school what Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust did for Hollywood.
I wrote about Chip Kidd’s work and he sent me a polite e-mail in response. He called me “Mr Zeldman.” [...]

Stick out your tongue

While employed at a famous New York advertising agency twenty years ago, a partner and I created a TV commercial touting an over-the-counter medicine client’s revolutionary new cold and flu remedy for young children.
Only when the shooting and shouting was over did we learn that the product did not, in fact, exist.
The commercial [...]

The vanishing personal site

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional [...]

An Event Apart New Orleans: thank you and adieu

An Event Apart New Orleans is over, but the memories and photos linger on.
Maybe it was the people. Maybe it was the extraordinary speakers. Or the staff, who made everything hum and shine. Or the keenly focused film crew. Maybe it was the sponsors. Or that crazy party. Maybe it was just the king [...]

ALA 257: the why and how of Ruby on Rails

Issue No. 257 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is about the why and how of Ruby on Rails. Learn how to get started with Dan Benjamin, and find out from Michael Slater if your web app hits the “RoR sweet spot.”

Breach of Peace (Freedom Riders site launch)

In the spring and summer of 1961, several hundred Americans—the Freedom Riders—entered Southern bus and train stations to challenge their segregated waiting rooms, lunch counters, and bathrooms.

The feed is gone

For a busy blogger, some content creation shortcuts work, and others don’t.

A show about nothing, part 11

Adjusting position of dirty glasses and plates in dishwasher. “Geometry or physics?” I asked. “Generalized anxiety disorder,” she replied.

Looks good to Mies

The Seed Conference, held in Crown Hall (the “Cathedral of Modernism” designed by Mies van der Rohe) is a one-day event about design, entrepreneurship, and inspiration. Speakers include Jason Fried (37signals), Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners), Carlos Segura (T26), Jake and Jeffrey (Threadless), Edward Lifson (NPR, Harvard), and Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV).

ALA 256: map rolling & data viz

In Issue No. 256 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Wilson Miner shares three techniques for incorporating data visualization into standards-based web navigation patterns, and Paul Smith shows how to replicate Google Maps’ functionality with open source software to produce high-quality mapping applications tailored to your design goals.

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project matches accessibility experts with companies that would like a brief review of their site for accessibility. In return, the site owner is asked to contribute a minimum of $500 to The John Slatin Fund.

WordPress 2.5 unleashed

WordPress 2.5, designed by Happy Cog and built by Automattic, is now available for your downloading pleasure.

Books of Luke and Aarron

In Issue No. 255 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Sign Up Forms Must Die – Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal of Product Ideation and Design at Yahoo! and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008), calls for the abolition of sign-up forms where web services are concerned. Via “gradual engagement,” says Luke, we can get people using and caring about our web services instead of frustrating them with forms. And in Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond (New Riders, 2008), provides an overview of this essential web discipline, explains how it is like SEO but different, and tells how every member of your team can contribute to your site’s content’s findability. You can see Luke and Aarron live at upcoming An Event Apart design conferences in Boston and New Orleans. Plus: they’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace (and staff at ALA). I’m verklempt!

WordPress 2.5 Preview

Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg opened the kimono on WordPress 2.5, built by Automattic and designed by Happy Cog:
“For the past few months, we’ve been working with our friends at Happy Cog—Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danzico—to redesign WordPress from the ground-up. The result is a new way of interacting with WordPress that will remain [...]

SXSW Parents Cooperatives

Attending a two-day educational conference without your kids is not a huge deal, but SXSW lasts a week. The choices are not good: See the whole show but miss your kids for a week? Bring your kids and miss practically the whole show? Attend for only a couple of days, missing your kids and most of the show? On the third day I found myself in a costly hotel room across from the conference center, skipping a keynote to play with Barbie dolls, it occurred to me that groups of parents could band together to create a more optimal experience. Here’s how SXSW Parents Cooperatives could work.

Zeldman on Talk Radio Today

Live today from 3:00 to 4:00 pm Eastern Time, I’m this week’s guest on “Design Matters with Debbie Millman,” the leading internet talk radio show on the “challenging and compelling canvas of today’s design world.”

Podcast news

The first video podcasts from SXSW.

Designers wanted

Happy Cog, Apple, Amazon, Flickr, Woot and more are looking to hire great designers.

Lost, Ffffound, and Clusterflocked

The Deck welcomes Ffffound.com and Clusterflock.

Microsoft reverses version targeting default

IE8’s version targeting will now work the same way other browsers work, i.e. advanced standards support will be on by default. Some people will say Microsoft caved; others, that they listened to public opinion; some may even buy the company’s own explanation, which is that, given a company-wide reorientation away from proprietary winner-take-all competitiveness and toward interoperability, “web standards by default” takes precedence over “supporting all those badly made websites that were created specifically to work in IE.”

A List Apart 254: Design, Design

Issue No. 254 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is all about design.

Monday links

Chopsticks by Segura. A greener LA via Boston. Stealing patterns, making models. Samurai errata and SXSW bowling.

Night and day

Two homeless men have taken up residence in the temporary supply hut of the Chinese Embassy construction on the corner.

The SXSW Diet

A minute later she came back, revolving them a few inches from my lips.

Dear anonymous

Nicest fuck-you ever.

Version targeting, take two

In Issue No. 253 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Jeremy Keith says version targeting in IE8 is all right but its default is all wrong. I argue that the default seems wrong but is actually right and necessary. Read, discuss, decide.

Lord of the Rains

I saw the bus doors closing. I saw a strange lady taking my daughter away.

Facebook, Twitter, and Bird Flu

If “Our Broken Borders” should someday turn into a ratings loser for CNN’s Lou Dobbs, perhaps he can switch to “The Dwindling Productivity of the American Worker: Is Facebook Sapping Our National Vigor?”

Happy fourth birthday, real world semantics

Four years ago today, Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks gave a presentation on real-world semantics. Working backwards from HTML extensions like XFN (created by Tantek, Matt Mullenweg, and Eric Meyer), the paper showed how designers and developers could add semantics to today’s web rather than starting from scratch or waiting for a “purer” markup language.

ALA 252: New library, long hallway

Keep your markup clean with DOM scripting and learn to play nice in the long hallway.

All Bits on Deck!

We’re as pleased as pale punch to welcome web designer, CSS whiz, microformats monger, icon designer, outstanding public speaker, and best-selling CSS-design-book author Dan Cederholm and his freshly redesigned SimpleBits site to The Deck, our advertising network targeting web, design and creative professionals.

In defense of version targeting

We knew when we published this issue of A List Apart that it would light a match to the gaseous underbelly of standards-based web design, but we thought more than a handful of readers would respect the parties involved enough to consider the proposal on its merits. Alas, the ingrained dislike of Microsoft is too strong, and the desire to see every site built with web standards is too ardently felt, for the proposal to get a fair viewing.

Not your father’s standards switch

For seven years, the DOCTYPE switch has stood designers and developers in good stead as a toggle between standards mode and quirks mode. But when IE7 “broke the web,” the quest was on to find a more reliable ensurer of forward compatibility. Is version targeting the answer?

The no-access road

A stranger and I just helped a disabled lady in a motorized scooter mount the inaccessible curb adjoining the treatment center for disabled people in wheelchairs and scooters. The medical center has been there for probably thirty years. And for probably thirty years, the inaccessible curb has barred the way for people seeking treatment.

Girl. Dog. Night. Day.

A series of incidents.

Usability problems with .Mac sync

I’m afraid this is another of those entries outlining bizarre design decisions and perplexing usability quirks in the otherwise brilliant world of Apple computers and phones

Everything that can be iPhonelike, will be

The iPhone is too great a leap forward in interface design to be confined to, well, the iPhone.

An Event Apart New Orleans

An Event Apart, the design conference for people who make websites, kicks off its 2008 season with An Event Apart New Orleans, a monster, 19-hour, two-day creative session. Join us April 24–25 at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside for two intense, 9.5-hour-long days of learning and inspiration, featuring twelve of your favorite web design authors.

Self-publishing is the new blogging

When you’ve flown this far from Gutenberg, the only place to travel is back.

Morning has broken

A technological lament in eight Tweets.

Let me hear your standards body talk

Jeremy Keith’s “Year Zero” beautifully explains why the W3C needs our backs, not our bullets.

Re: CSS Unworking Group

Proposing change when the change makes sense is good. Proposing change because you are disappointed and frustrated isn’t good enough.

Adios, Technorati?

Without my permission, Technorati has stuck my photo and its logo in the sidebar of my site’s front page.

Quentin Tarantino has a lot to answer for

Dragging my cheap three-wheeled suitcase home from Penn Station after a Boston business trip late Tuesday night, I passed three businessmen standing in the middle of Park Avenue with their raincoats awry. White, pushing 40, a few beers past sober. The one who slightly resembled Larry of the Three Stooges was trying to keep the party going.

Homeownership is a privilege, not a right

The throbbing Christmas music that has accompanied all action thus far seems inappropriately sedate as I cross the lobby perspiring like a bridegroom, bearing my newly filled-out forms.

Stealing design

Don’t worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop.

ALA 250: HTML 5, design for flow

Go with the flow and open your mind to HTML 5.

No heat at $5,000/month

Libertarians blame rent stabilization for the problems of tenants in cities like New York, but there are few rent stabilized apartments left in this town or in this building. Most people in this building pay $4000 to $5000 a month for a “luxury rental” the size of a working-class Hoosier’s garage.

Certainly the fee the landlord collects is luxurious. Nothing else about the place is. Particularly not luxurious is the lack of heat, now in its second day. Snow falls, arctic winds blow, but the $5000/month luxury building is as cold as a dead seal.

A date with Sandra Bernhard

A bowel movement in the shape of a swan.

Facebook and your privacy

Months after geeks who hate walled gardens hailed Facebook as the great exception, Facebook announces that it is wholesaling our privacy to any turdball with a dirty nickel to spend. So what else is new?

Give HTML e-mail a chance

Ten years into the web standards revolution, e-mail client support for standards remains sketchy. A new group is doing something about it. They need your support.

Guestbook spam gambit of the week

I love the smell of guestbook spam in the morning.

Appreciating web design; setting type

Appreciating web design for what it is instead of wishing it were something it’s not; plus a better best practice for setting type on the web via CSS. And from the past: why typographically correct punctuation matters, and how to make it happen on the web. Authors: Erin Kissane, Richard Rutter, Jeffrey Zeldman.

Blue Beanie Day

On Monday, November 26, 2007, don your blue beanie to show your support for web standards and accessibility.

Messed update

Installed Tiger update 10.4.11 this morning, which mainly provides Safari 3, which cannot access web content. It quits on launch every time.

iPhone “disappearing photos” bug

With this bug, the iPhone camera does everything a camera should do, except take pictures. It seems to obliterate photographic data the moment you snap the shutter. If you take five photos, you get five white boxes indicating the photos you would have had, if the iPhone hadn’t erased them the moment it snapped. Taking lots of photos seems to initiate the bug. There is no fix.

Facts and Opinions about Zeldman

Yesterday I spoke at BusinessWeek and was interviewed for a podcast that airs next week. Tomorrow I will speak for Carson at Future of Web Design. I will not be nicely dressed.

ALA 248: Obscure meanings and addresses

In Issue No. 248 of A List Apart: Make people read your copy! Stop robots from reading your e-mail address!

DWWS Facebook group

A few days ago, Douglas Vos of Dearborn, Michigan, created a Designing With Web Standards group in Facebook just to see what would happen.

Deck deal

We have a slot open for November in The Deck, our advertising network for reaching creative, web and design professionals. Give us a holler if you can pull the trigger quick and we’ll make a nice deal for a first-time advertiser.

Into the murky deep

Tucked away in a quiet corner of The New York Public Library at 42nd Street sits a small, clean, neatly appointed classroom. At 3:30, we commandeered it for an impromptu meeting with an attorney.

Don’t sleep here

Barely noticed in the builders’ gold rush, the poorest poor, pushed off the benches of Madison Square Park, take shelter in the very construction sites that signify their doom. (Photo essay.)

Faster, pussycat

Have you ever bought clothes while traveling, and been unable to fit everything in your suitcase when it was time to go home? That suitcase is what my days are like now.

That’s me all over

In the coming weeks, I’ll speak at Future of Web Design (NYC), Business Week (NYC), Web Design World (Boston), and Web Directions North (Vancouver, BC).

Findings from the Web Design Survey

In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals participated, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide. Months of data crunching later, what emerges in our free 80-plus page report is the first true picture of our powerful yet little-studied profession. Presenting the Findings From the Web Design Survey.

We live as we dream

My cold is in its second week; I slept less than four hours last night. Yesterday we decided to check out the housing market in our neighborhood and ended up making a bid. Tomorrow, if all goes to plan, we will publish the findings of the web design survey.

Congrats, Al

One day our daughter, who is now three, will thank you. And so will her children, whose existence you will have helped make possible.

Please and thank you

An Event Apart thanks its attendees, speakers, and sponsors for a great 2007, and announces dates and locations for 2008.

Testing designs for color-blindness

Even experienced designers can find it hard to predict how their work willappear to people with various kinds of color-blindness. Two tools can help.

Not at our desk

Apologies for the quiet, here. We’ve been enjoying family time in San Francisco, leading up to the final Event Apart show of the year.

Say hello to web standards

There’s something new at Apple’s online store: web standards and accessibility.

God Knocks

“It’s becoming a bedroom community for people who work on Wall Street,” the Wife says of our beloved NYC. Today a small one-bedroom costs over a million. But if Osama bin Laden could not chase us off this island, neither will housing prices. Which brings me to God and the knocking sound.

The Joy of Technology

Good morning. Twitter, Facebook, iLike, and Word have imploded. M’mm, that’s good coffee!

To be of use to others is the only true happiness. Although a 160 GB iPhone would also be nice.

iPhone and iPod classic compared.

Just My Type of Site

i love typography cites 15 examples of typographic excellence in web design. A List Apart, ShaunInman.com, FontShop, Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, and BearskinRug Shop lead a pack of inspiring sites worth studying.

Inappropriate “Talk Like a Pirate Day” remarks

Aaaaar! Ye have cancer, Mr Finkelstein.

Facebook Considered Harmless

I design interfaces so I’m supposed to know about this stuff. That’s the rationale behind my spending hours of billable time adjusting my Facebook preferences. The real reason, of course, for all this stuff, is that it provides a way to blow off work you should be doing, while creating the illusion that you are achieving something. At least in most offices, you can’t masturbate at your desk. But you can Tweet.

First day of preschool

Nothing says Buddhism like raising a child.

An Event Apart savings end tomorrow

$100 savings on our final Event Apart conference of the year end Saturday, September 15. If you’re planning to attend An Event Apart San Francisco, reserve your seat before the price goes up.

Proposed Catch-Phrases for the Next Bruce Willis Film

Hi-ho, the motherfuckin’ dairy-o, motherfucker! etc.

September 12

A gloomy, rainy September 11th in New York City. An eye doctor visit in the morning left my eyes dilated. For hours, I was overly sensitive to light. It was a perfect way to experience this city on that day.

Client input, iPhone constraints

Collaborative work sessions that actually work; designing and coding with the iPhone in mind.

How to make love to a ghost

Sunday morning, while dreaming, I began receiving messages from the other world. They covered matters of etiquette when interacting with the dead, and even offered glimpses of what the spirit life is like. They were also the perfect content for Twitter.

I’ll show you mine

What’s on your dashboard?

Block

The longest journey begins. Or doesn’t.

The Deck turns 21

Content wants to be free, but content providers want three squares a day.

Event Apart Chicago wrap-up

The sights, sounds, and some of the sense of An Event Apart Chicago 2007.

Web type, iPhone content

In Issue 244 of A List Apart, father of CSS Håkon Lie advocates real TrueType fonts in web design, while Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry describes in detail how to optimize websites for iPhone.

Hog butcher

A car is coming. It will take me to a building. In the building I will enter a ramp. The ramp will take me to a jet. The jet will take me to Chicago for two days of web standards, best practices, and creative inspiration.

Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor

CSS Sculptor includes 30 of the most common web page layouts—fixed-width, liquid, elastic, and combinations thereof—coded the way Eric Meyer would code them.

San Francisco, here you come

I last left San Francisco on September 10th, 2001. It was a good day for flying….

What is Art Direction (No. 9)

A provocative poster deconstructed. How art direction communicates wordlessly, and how it differs from design. Disabled veterans, Gap ads, and James Gandolfini.

10 Things the Next iPhone Will Do

iPhone, the next generation. The features will astound you.

What crisis?

Have web standards died and gone to hell?

Don’t design on spec

Happy Cog receives its share of RFPs, and sometimes these requests stipulate that our proposal include design work. Even if the project looks promising, we just say no.

Staying creative

Everyone is creative. But some stay that way longer. How can you designers, writers, and the like, stay motivated and productive? (Plus: When the client says, “Make it like eBay,” what exactly does that mean?)

A Sale of Two Cities

Join an amazing line-up of talented designers, developers, and thinkers for An Event Apart San Francisco — the final Event Apart show of 2007.

The King of Web Standards

A new article in Business Week might help designers who aren’t named Jeffrey Zeldman sell web standards to their bosses or clients.

No end in sight

The story of the American occupation of Iraq, NO END IN SIGHT shows how a military victory in 2003 descended into a seemingly endless nightmare of war.

InterNetwork

Social Network Portability means never having to re-invite your friends.

Words, words, words

Writing has always been the beating heart of online user experience. It is also the part that designers and developers are least likely to study, discuss, or consider. The exceptions to this rule are almost always the people who move the medium forward.

For web developers and iPhone users

Tools for web developers. Tricks for iPhone and iPod users.

Event Apart Savings End Friday

Earlybird savings on An Event Apart Chicago end this Friday.

What Apple copied from Microsoft

Apple has learned the marketing psychology lesson that Microsoft got first. For many consumers, convenience is of greater value than choice. A platform built of parts that work together seamlessly beats a self-curated collection of apps that don’t.

Better Know a Speaker: Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith, one of Brighton’s loudest web developers and a featured speaker at An Event Apart Chicago, holds forth on microformats, lolcats, and applying best practices learned from CSS to writing good JavaScript.

Bang!

Had I known that there was an explosion in midtown Manhattan and that my wife and daughter were out in the chaos, I would have been far more anxious during my train ride home from Philadelphia.

Link ‘n Park

A lifetime’s worth of comic book covers, deep thoughts on ubiquitous digitization, Spool on lessons learned when new features tank, and much more.

That Busted GIF Feeling

A pesky bug in the iLike sidebar eludes the happy fix.

ALA 241: better UI, scriptless trick ponies, and the deathly hallows

Unlearn a web interface design convention that causes users grief, and learn how to create a scrolling, fixed/liquid hybrid layout without using JavaScript (not that there’s anything wrong with it).

Better know a speaker: Dan Cederholm

What’s up with Dan Cederholm these days?

My Ding-a-Links

Fight for your right to publish. Ponder a Google-Wikipedia mashup, recycle old ipods and cell phones, generate diagonal backgrounds (with or without gradients), study Hitchcock’s visual storytelling techniques, and more.

It’s a dirty job…

And we hope you’ll take it. Happy Cog Philadelphia seeks a fabulous project manager. Must communicate superbly, value great work and great client relationships, respect deadlines and the creative process, enjoy Basecamp and love Philadelphia. Details are available on the 37signals Job Board.

Let there be web divisions

Almost no one who makes websites works in their company or organization’s web division—because almost no company or organization has a web division. That void on the org chart is one reason we have so many bloated, unusable websites. While many good people work in IT and marketing, neither area is ideally suited to craft usable websites or to encourage the blossoming of vital web communities. Business and non-profit decision makers, let there be web divisions.

WCAG Controversy and Human Design

By introducing testability and dumping accessibility criteria that are untestable, WCAG 2.0 may hurt the very people who need it most, argues former working group invited expert Gian Sampson-Wild in an important and timely ALA opinion piece. (The deadline for WCAG 2.0 comments is 29 July.) Plus Sharon Lee on Human-to-Human Design, and Joe Clark on PDF accessibility.

An Event Apart iMix

By popular demand: most of the music from between sessions at An Event Apart Seattle 2007.

“Maybe” is one option too many

“Maybe” is one option too many. As a best practice, we should dispense with it, just as we should replace five-star rating systems with four-star ones.

The Beatles slept here

My body insists it’s 10:30 at night, but the sun tells a different story. That orb has barely begun to set over Puget Sound, whose ripples magnify and fragment its blinding whiteness. The sun and its watery reflection are all I can see from my waterside hotel window. This is Seattle and I’ve come here to put on a show.

Hi, Mom!

In a Special Report, Business Week focuses on designers creating innovation by crossing disciplines and combining technologies. I’m one of ten designers they profile. I kind of had to blog this.

bgcolor follies

If you forget to set your site’s background color, your visitors may do it for you. A mini-photo gallery. Collect your own!

When is e-mail like a bad website?

Nokia sent a friend an HTML e-mail message. I’ve broken it into five screen shots, because it won’t fit on one. E-mail, as a medium, really doesn’t want to carry all this freight.

ALA 239: Designer frameworks and robot designers

Take web design off the production line. Design better by offloading routine tasks.

Eight points for better e-mail relationships

Okay, so under the right circumstances, when people have requested it, e-mail can be a platform for design. Here are eight ways to make it work better (and avoid pissing off people who hate HTML mail).

E-mail is not a platform for design

ASCII means never having to say you’re sorry.

Daily Reports from 1997 on

You don’t need the WayBack machine to go way back in zeldman.com history. Enjoy these representative Daily Report pages from 1997 on (including the famous HTML Fist).

Since 1995

On 31 May 2007 we celebrated another anniversary. Twelve years of juicy Web 1.0 Goodness™.

iTunes, iLike, and iWish

At long last, the latest iTunes upgrade lets you replace DRM versions of music bought at the iTunes store with higher-quality, non-DRM-protected versions. But after purchase, you may not be able to download them. In public beta, iLike is a wildly addictive web app, part Truman Show, part personal radio station. It will change the way you listen to music. It might even change the music you listen to.

ALA 238: copywriting 101, evangelizing 102

Convince large companies to openly support web standards; enhance site effectiveness by improving copy.

An Event Apart Chicago 2007

Tickets are now available for An Event Apart Chicago—two days of web standards, best practices, and creative inspiration from Dan Cederholm, Louis Rosenfeld, Liz Danzico, Jeremy Keith, Jim Coudal, Luke Wroblewski, Derek Featherstone, and Jason Santa Maria, plus hosts Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman.

An Event Apart Seattle sells out

An Event Apart Chicago goes on sale Monday.

Conference speaker’s pledge

I will not yodel. I will not introduce my first slide by saying, “Here is my first slide.”

Web Design Survey closes soon

If you haven’t already taken the web design survey, speak now, or forever hold your PC.

How now brown wow?

Windows Vista. Adobe CS3. Which are you more excited about, and why?

ALA 237: client school

Generally, Issue 237 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is all about education. Specifically, it’s about educating bosses and clients to approve good design and make better strategic decisions.

The heartbreak of technology

Why this tech support call took an hour is a mystery. Why it is called “support” is a more profound one.

The profession that dare not speak its name

No one has tried to measure web design because web design has been a hidden profession.

The Web Design Survey

In all the years people have been creating websites, nobody has bothered to gather statistics about who does this work, using what skills, under what conditions, and for what kinds of compensation. It’s time for a change. Presenting The Web Design Survey, 2007. Also in this issue of A List Apart: Jonathan Follett on “The Long Hallway”—learn how to work the virtual conference room—and Andy Rutledge on how contrast creates meaning in design.

Noware

The age of ubiquitous computing may be here, but nobody told the companies that installed my DSL.

Women in web design: just the stats

The underrepresentation of women and minorities in the information technology workforce is like the weather: everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything. We commissioned a study. Its findings are disturbing.

Where are the Women? Where are the Links?

R/GA have created unforgettable movie magic. And unusable websites.

Comments are the lifeblood of the blogosphere

When I returned to New York City, 193 comments awaited me in the moderation queue. 191 were spam.

ALA 235: vertical grids, accessible web apps

Increase your web application’s accessibility via WAI-ARIA and take control of your online typography with a baseline grid.

Ambient Informatics at Cooper Union

How will the advent of ubiquitous computing change urban places?

Quit Your Day Job

You’re too good to stick at that dead-end job.

From Bulgaria With Love

They hailed from Bulgaria (2), Canada (12), Estonia (1), Finland (2), India (1), Ireland (1), Latvia (1), Singapore (1), Sweden (1), the UK (3), and the US (510). In all, 546 web artisans descended on Boston for our two-day event. Here is what some of them said afterwards.

ALA 234 triple-header

In triple issue no. 234 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: probe your users’ minds, progressively enhance your interface, and unleash your inner DOM geek.

Eric Meyer, 1:00 a.m.

As the cover band upstairs kicks off its fourth set.

Web 2.0 Buyouts: Butchers vs. Farmers

As Web 2.0 Buying Season winds down, it is pleasant to consider what was different about it. This time, for the most part, the buyers have been farmers, not butchers. They bought to nurture, not to kill.

Happy Cog Philadelphia is Hiring

Happy Cog Philadelphia is looking for an experienced freelance front-end (presentation layer) developer with strong design sensibilities.

Tickets now available for AEA Seattle 2007

Limited seating is now available for An Event Apart Seattle, June 21-22, at Bell Harbor International Conference Center on breathtaking Puget Sound.

Independent content is the new web app

Web 1.0 is the new Web 2.0. A report from SXSW Interactive.

A List Apart dinner at SXSW

About 25 A List Apart staffers, Happy Cogs, and friends broke bread at SXSW.

Austin Power

As snow falls prettily on the island of Manhattan, Mrs Zeldman and I prepare for our annual junket to sun-baked, star-studded Austin, Texas, accompanied by the keynote speaker of 2025 and cradling the blessed StarTAC.

Happy Cog redesigns AIGA

How do you redesign the flagship site of the professional association for designers? Very carefully.

An Event Apart Boston sells out

Let’s rock!

swfIR (swf Image Replacement)

Working around accepted limitations of the HTML image object.

ALA 233: Semantic Flash, Valid Arguments

Flash and standards, the love that dare not speak its name. Plus: valid and invalid reasons for, um, validating and not validating.

Gender and ethnic imbalance in web design

Real change is more valuable than cosmetic change.

An Event Apart Seattle 2007

Spend two days with Tim Bray, father of XML; Google’s Jeff Veen; Andy Budd of Clearleft; Khoi Vinh, design director at NYTimes.com and author of subtraction.com; Shawn Lawton Henry of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI); Mint creator Shaun Inman; Newsvine CEO/ESPN redesigner Mike Davidson; and messieurs Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer, and Zeldman.

Happy Cog redesigns, 2/7/2007

Good redesigns are like Mr Mancini’s mustache. Happy Cog has redesigned.

ALA 232: Flash cage match, multi-column CSS

Make sense of Flash embedding and build elastic multi-column layouts with columns of equal height.

An Event Apart Boston selling fast

Seats for An Event Apart Boston are disappearing faster than donuts in a firehouse.

StarTAC Memories

Going to SXSW? Have I got a phone for you.

Cold

Nice weather we’re having.

Near-death, non-birth

Carrie Zeldman writes about traumas our family experienced during the final months of 2006.

Praise the Lord and Pass the Pliers

A List Apart 231 is strictly for tools.

Register for An Event Apart Boston

Registration is now open for An Event Apart Boston 2007. Enjoy two days of design and code plus meals, a party, and a bag of swag for $795. Save more with discount code just for zeldman.com readers.

Design Relief: Katrina Corps

Swing a hammer or click a mouse.

ALA 230: Make the logo smaller

Learn to love whitespace and think intuitively about web standards.

Gas

A smell takes Manhattan.

Tanks

The art of war and parenting.

Our Year in Review

And yours?

Adaptive Layouts, Accessible Forms

Shoehorn your forms into small spaces without sacrificing accessibility; serve your site to a plethora of devices regardless of screen size using adaptive layouts.

Goodbye

Moment of silence.

Moustaches, goatees, and beards

The semantics of facial hair.

Inflamed linkazoidal tissues

Worthy causes, worthless internet acquisitions, and more.

ALA 228: Take the Edge Off

Issue 228 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is all about smooth.

Safari better than Firefox?

Safari handles text much more beautifully and accurately than Firefox.

Better Know a Speaker: Steve Krug

Event Apart Boston speakers up close. A series.

Enable caching to upload files

Disabling caching in Safari is good for web design but prevents file uploading over http.

Return of the Son of XHTML Fist

In praise of bad clients. Gradient goodness without the Photoshop fuss. Strike a pose in new ALA T-shirts.

Pardon Mon Oncle

Linky-dinks for you!

Patronizing Joe Clark

Why are you buying that latte, when you could be helping Joe do what he does?

Shiny happy people

An Event Apart Austin 2006 (photo pool).

The Polling Place Photo Project

A nationwide experiment in citizen journalism.

An Event Apart Austin: Details, Details

An Event Apart Austin. Everything you wanted to know about parking, WI-FI, lunch, laptops, cocktails, freebies, and Flickr.

Monday breakfast links

Yummy, yummy!

IE7 CSS tweak show and tell

What hacks have you jettisoned, and with what have you replaced them?

IE7 Bugs and Fixes, Part I

Holly hackery.

Better community through printing

The care and feeding of online communities; providing a print preview option that supports web standards and user expectations.

Web 2.0 Thinking Game

Come and play. It’s fun!

A Jewish King

Kids say the darndest things.

Birth Announcement

Welcome “Things I Learned the Hard Way.”

Crash Boom Bop

Good design from bad events; talk, talk, talk.

ALA 225: tested premises, proven resources

Brown and gold are the colors of this truly lovely issue.

Black box

Mac OS X 10.4.8. No extra charge for the black box.

Happy Cog Philadelphia

The Cog expands.

Blahg

Blogs, blogging, blah.

ALA 224: Krista, Q tags & trench wisdom

Introducing a new editor who needs no introduction. Plus CSS without fear, and Q tags without IE/Win worries.

Show Pix, Seattle stylie

Photos from An Event Apart Seattle 2006.

Cruising Seattle with Eric Meyer

In town for An Event Apart.

Kiss the sky

Airplane! Airplane!

Black and Brown and 960 all over

Mini-link-fest.

ALA 223: tricks, guides, and giggles

Learn something new or explore something classic in a triple issue of A List Apart.

Five years

“My Glamorous Life” entries from September 11, 12, 13, 14, and 23, 2001.

An Event Apart Austin

Join us for a day of design and code.

ALA 222: wraparounds and wordsmithing

Write better text. Then wrap images around it.

Photos from Paradise

Pictures from a vacation in progress.

Time off for good behavior

Zeldman is on vacation.

Get your kicks on Pier 66

An Event Apart Seattle’s early bird discount ends Friday, August 18th.

Inspiration and perspiration

Colors from the earth, death from the skies, trends, tools, and forecasts.

Get a job, fill a job

The 37signals Job Board comes to zeldman.com.

Thursday links

Typography, design, art, illustration, internet politics, and more.

ALA 221: Navigation and writing basics

Building better website navigation. Engaging your readers with writing that keeps them coming back. ALA Issue 221 is all about the basics.

Is this thing on?

Zeldman.com now accepts comments.

Amazonked! (or, the 2nd Edition Dilemma)

The “second edition problem” at Amazon.com, and what Amazon should do about it.

ALA 220: Problems and Solutions

Stuck for design ideas? Lost your work? Issue 220 of A List Apart can help.

An Event Apart Seattle

Join Kelly Goto, Erin Kissane, Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman for a jam-packed day of design and code on beautiful Puget Sound.

Applications on parade

Waferbaby’s open source CMS, Webchick et al’s open source photo gallery, and the debut of Dandelife.

An angry fix

Some of the best minds in web standards are abandoning the W3C.

And boy are my arms tired

Thanks for An Event Apart NYC 2006.

ALA 219: Automatic layouts and goodbye to <embed>

Automatic magazine layouts that look great, plus an end to <embed>.

We hold most of these truths

A version of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand reveals a tragic compromise.

The Power of Positive Whining

“Write about a usability error at Amazon, and 100 sites that copy Amazon will improve.”

My friend Flickr

Design, usability, and the high bar.

Flick’d Away

A modest suggestion for improvement.

A Fine Day to Quit Sniffing Glue

An Event Apart briefly absents itself.

An Event Apart NYC Schedule

Details, details.

ALA 218: Beauty, behavior, and power

Separating behavior from presentation and structure, planning appropriate levels of manpower for your site, and creating forms that are accessible and pretty. Yep, you heard right.

DWWS 2e Cover Preview

What’s up front (and what’s behind) the second edition.

Friends in Need

Joe Kral needs dough, Nick Finck needs an editor.

An Event Apart Seattle

Join us for a concentrated, one-day learning session.

Silent phone, secret phone

Or, The Lost Verizon.

A List Apart intern

A List Apart is looking for one good intern.

My Count of Monte Cristo

Summer means warm lemonade and field-tested books.

zefrank or zebeans

zefrank is coming to An Event Apart NYC.

Baggage

Writing turns nuisances into opportunities to write about nuisances.

Wrapping Chicago

At An Event Apart Chicago, everything clicked.

In Chicago

Here we are in Chicago, city magnificent.

A List Apart adds Job Board

Today, the 37signals Job Board comes to A List Apart. Tomorrow, standardistas go to work at leading companies.

Your commercial website

…is not as successful as you would want it to be?

All in

If you can write your book while those around you…

WCAG 2: the clock is ticking

A must-read critique of WCAG 2, plus internationalization standards and protecting your site from hackers: savor three great reads in A List Apart 217.

Through a glass, lightly

Of rats, rug- and otherwise.

Of writing and rosters

Tantek Çelik joins An Event Apart NYC. Derek Powazek and Ryan Carson illuminate ALA.

She Blinded Me With Christian Science

Lovely links for a fab Friday.

May Day, May Day

Every year or two a fresh crop of internet blowhards decides design doesn’t matter.

An Event Apart New York City

Two days of design and code in the ♥ of NYC.

Hi, Mom!

Monday would have been my mother’s birthday.

A List Apart 215: triple issue

Create accessible web maps. Protect your community site from scripting attacks. Plan for ubiquitous computing before it plans for you.

Kottke Joins The Deck

Everyone’s favorite blogger joins The Deck, our targeted ad network for creative, web, and design professionals.

Happy Cog redesigns Advertising Age

From head lamps to tail fins.

ALA 214: today’s talk, tomorrow’s interface

A List Apart 214: Managing today’s web communities. Preparing for tomorrow’s computerless interfaces.

Everyware

Adam Greenfield has written one of the most provocative books in years.

Heartwarming

Baseball weather arrives, Atlanta beckons, and links delight.

An Event Apart Chicago

Join Jim Coudal, Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer, and your host.

It’s a new morning in adland

The Morning News becomes the sixth card in The Deck ad network.

Unmixed

Sparkling wine from sour grapes. Microsoft’s Mix 06 from the outside.

Fine Corinthian Leather

Fine links from recent Ma.gnolia marks.

SXSW III: Things That Were Said

Moments to remember.

SXSW II

See you in the hallways, comrades.

SXSW I

Kiddie at conference.

Zeldman.com Reloaded

(Re)tooling along in WordPress on Media Temple. Now with full-text feeds.

ALA 213

Why you shouldn’t herd your users through arduous forms, plus a bonus primer on Ajax.

Fr.oz.en en.tre.es

Linkroll meets bullet time.

Panelicious

Roll your own web conference.

Selling AJAX by the pound

US gov’t grants AJAX patent.

Six minutes of pleasure

A snapshot of A List Apart’s international readership.

Fresh outta beta

Not just another pretty interface. Introducing Ma.gnolia.

My friends all drive Porsches

Web two point woe.

A List Apart 212: Love and Hate

Hearts and hugs for the web.

Beneath the law, beyond the validator

O, say, can you see? If not, can you sue?

Don’t be a beta hater

Or, How I Quit Worrying and Learned to Love IE7.

Read these now

Rutledge and Storey deconstruct, Kottke compares, Benjamin rebuilds.

Dominey, Santa Maria, join Event Apart roster

Two great designers join the Event Apart Atlanta speakers lineup.

A List Apart 211

A better 3-column CSS layout. Home pages that work harder.

Event Apart registration begins

An Event Apart Atlanta registration begins. Seating is limited.

An Event Apart Atlanta

America’s favorite pastime (designing with web standards) is coming to Turner Field.

Four things

Meme o’ the mornin’ to ya.

Bookmarks for a rainy Monday

Two swell photo gallery tools and futurist food for thought.

iPhoto , iTunes, iForgotToTest

Is Apple deliberately breaking RSS or just goofing up as it hurries new software to market?

A film apart

An Event Apart Philadelphia in two minutes and 4MB. Video by Ian Corey.

Web 3.0 and other delights

In web technology, as in fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day you’re out.

Year-end blowout

Lou Rosenfeld, co-creator of Information Architecture, is looking for people who like to read. Technorati, search engine of the blogosphere, is looking for people who like to code. Freight makes onscreen reading a pleasure. The children of prostitutes in Calcutta use cameras to create unforgettable images — and to emerge from poverty. Plus Ruby on Rails podcasts and Fairplay defined.

A List Apart 209

In A List Apart’s swell year-end issue: making forms usable and designing outside the grid.

Style vs. Design

The article that dared to suggest that design was more than a chance to show off one’s knowledge of current visual vernacular is back after five years away.

Roadside link jamboree

Ubiquitous computing ubiquitously blogged. In search of a perfect plug-in technique. Seed takes root, DropSend takes big files, and more.

An Event Apart Philadelphia Postpartum

An Event Apart Philadelphia: look back in angora.

ALA 208, AIGA podcasts

Back from Spain, prepping for Philly. A List Apart 208 sports Printing a Book With CSS (by the creators of CSS) and Power to the People by Keith Robinson. You dad doesn’t care about AJAX, Mr Robinson discovers. Also, more AIGA podcasts: AIGA’s Liz Danzico interviews Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman in the weeks leading up to An Event Apart.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0