About

JEFFREY ZELDMAN publishes A List Apart “for people who make websites,” a leading journal of web and interaction design thought, and co-founded the multi-city user experience design conference An Event Apart with Eric Meyer. The conference launched in December, 2005, and closed in late 2023, after nearly twenty years of service.

Jeffrey has written two books, notably the foundational web standards text, Designing With Web Standards, currently in a 3rd Edition coauthored with Ethan Marcotte. It has been translated into 15 languages, including (for the last edition) Italian, Chinese, Hungarian, Polish and Portuguese.

The book, together with The Web Standards Project, which Jeffrey co-founded with Glenn Davis and George Olsen in 1998, and led from 1999–2003, is credited with converting the web design industry from tag soup and Flash to semantics and accessibility via the correct use of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Jeffrey’s first book, Taking Your Talent to The Web, is now available as a free download and website.

In February 2019, after closing his design studio, Jeffrey joined Automattic, Inc.—the people behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, and other fine open-source web software. He is currently an Executive Creative Director there.

Jeffrey co-founded and published A Book Apart (“brief books for people who make websites”), a small press with a big impact in the field of web and digital design and UX. Among titles published by A Book Apart during its first years of operation are Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte and Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski. The complete titles, comprising approximately 50 books, form a comprehensive canon of the industry’s most important innovations and best practices. Katel LeDu ran the operation as both CEO and editor-in-chief. Katel launched liminal bloom after Jeffrey and cofounder Jason Santa Maria closed A Book Apart in October, 2024.

Jeffrey was also a founding faculty member in the MFA, Interaction Design program at School of Visual Arts, New York, where he taught for ten years, and is the founder and host of the internet radio program The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”), twice named Podcast of the Year by .net Magazine. Jeffrey has served on the Advisory Boards of Automattic, the SXSW Interactive Festival (Emeritus), and Readability (RIP), and is the Founder Emeritus of Happy Cog, an award-winning digital design studio in New York that he launched way back during the dot-com crash. (Kids, ask your parents.)

In 2012, Jeffrey Zeldman was the first designer inducted in the SXSW Interactive Hall of Fame. He posts on BlueSky, is the subject of a lynda.com documentary, and has blogged and shared web design concepts and advocated user- and content-focused design techniques at Jeffrey Zeldman Presents since 1995.