Category: Best practices

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Web typography: a refresher and history

Many designers still think in px first when creating baseline styles. But we know intellectually that various relative typography approaches are better suited to our medium in all its complexity. Better for accessibility. Better for avoiding bizarre typographic disasters linked to user preference settings, device limitations, and the unforeseen ways our overwrought styles can interact with one another.

As I contemplate a long-overdue redesign of my own site, it’s worth taking a refreshing dip into what we’ve learned about web typography over the past 20+ years. From the pages of (where else?) A List Apart:

Bojan Mihelac: “Power to the People: Relative Font Sizes” (2004)

An early and simple creative solution for text resizing that respects users’ choices and also gives them an additional option for resizing despite the limitations of some of the most popular browsers of the day. Presented for its historical importance, and not as a how-to for today. https://alistapart.com/article/relafont/

Lawrence Carvalho & Christian Heilmann: “Text-Resize Detection” (2006)

Detect your visitors’ initial font size setting, and find out when they increase or decrease the font size. With this knowledge, you can create a set of stylesheets that adapt your pages to the users’ chosen font sizes, preventing overlapping elements and other usability and design disasters. Presented for its historical importance as an insight into the complex dancing we’ve done in the past to ensure readability. https://alistapart.com/article/fontresizing/

Richard Rutter: “How to Size Text in CSS“ (2007)

Sizing text and line-height in ems, with a percentage specified on the body (and an optional caveat for Safari 2), provides accurate, resizable text across all browsers in common use today. An early move toward more responsive type and away from the accessibility problems created by setting text sizes in px in some browsers and devices. https://alistapart.com/article/howtosizetextincss/

Wilson Miner: Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid

The main principle of the baseline grid is that the bottom of every line of text (the baseline) falls on a vertical grid set in even increments all the way down the page. The magical end result is that all the text on your page lines up across all the columns, creating a harmonious vertical rhythm. https://alistapart.com/article/settingtypeontheweb/

Tim Brown: “More Meaningful Typography” (2011)

Introduces modular scales, the golden ratio of readable typography. Delivers accessibility plus aesthetic beauty derived from the math underlying all of creation. https://alistapart.com/article/more-meaningful-typography/

Tim Brown: “What is Typesetting?” (2018)

“We must now practice a universal typography that strives to work for everyone. To start, we need to acknowledge that typography is multidimensional, relative to each reader, and unequivocally optional.” https://alistapart.com/article/flexible-typesetting/

Keep going…

For more web design community wisdom and web typography history, see Typography & Web Fonts in A List Apart, for people who make websites.

And in the Comments below, please share your favorite resources for creating websites that look great and read beautifully, no matter what technical and human capabilities get thrown at them.

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Understanding MARTI: A New Metadata Framework for AI

At its core, MARTI is a bridge. It harmonizes with existing metadata standards like the Content Authenticity Initiative, Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy, and the W3C’s PROV. It anticipates the needs of future standards, laws and practices, such as those proposed by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, and Making Data FAIR.—Carrie Bickner

As I study Carrie Bickner’s initial posts on the MARTI Framework she’s developing to manage AI metadata across various disciplines, a familiar feeling steals over me.

It’s similar to how I felt during the early days of The Web Standards Project (WaSP), when a handful of us took on the quarreling browser makers in what seemed a Quixotic attempt to bring consistency, predictability, usability, and accessibility to an already Balkanized web.

Fortunately, at that time, we had two aces up our sleeves: 1., the standards already existed, thanks to the W3C, and 2., the EU and Clinton Administration were suing Microsoft, which meant that the tech press was interested in hearing what we had to say—even if evangelizing web standards had little to do with accusations that Microsoft was abusing its monopoly power.

Once more with feeling: standards from the community

Years after The WaSP declared victory, and browser stagnation had begun to set in, I felt that same thrill vicariously when Eric Meyer, Tantek Çelik, and Matt Mullenweg invented XFN (XHTML Friends Network), inverting the standards creation pyramid so that great ideas were empowered to bubble up from small groups to the wider community, Open Source style, rather than always coming from the top (W3C) down.

I’ve no doubt that microformats were the spark that lit the HTML5 fuse, and we all remember how Steve Jobs used the new markup language to power the first iPhone, initiating the mobile era we now live in.

More about microformats history is available, and you can read Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers online for free—or buy the 2nd Edition, coauthored with Rachel Andrew, directly from Jeremy.

And now I feel those same stirrings, that same excitement about possibilities, as I study Carrie’s first posts about MARTI, an emerging object-oriented metadata framework that can be used to articulate rights-permissions, preservation metadata, provenance, relationships between objects, levels of AI involvement, and contextual information such as usage history and ethical considerations. 

Here’s why I’m excited (and you may be, too).

What do you wanna do tonight, MARTI?

For better or worse, our ideas create our reality. For better or worse, we have atomic power, the web, and social media. There’s no putting these genies back into their bottles. And there’s certainly no shutting down AI, however you may feel about it. Nor need we, as long as we have smart guardrails in place. 

I believe that MARTI—particularly as it promotes responsibility, transparency, and integrity in documenting AI’s role in content creation and curation—has the potential to be one of those guardrails.

Drafted by a career digital librarian, this provisional  metadata framework for human/generative AI output won’t stop bad actors from scraping content without permission. But if it is extended by our community and embraced by the companies and organizations building AI businesses, MARTI has the potential to bring rigor, logic, and connectedness to the field. In Carrie’s words:

The emergence of generative AI marks a transformative moment in human creativity, problem-solving, and knowledge-sharing. MARTI (Metadata for AI Responsibility, Transparency, and Integrity) is a provisional metadata framework designed to navigate this new landscape, offering a standardized yet adaptable approach to understanding, describing, and guiding the outputs of human-AI collaboration—and even those generated autonomously by AI.

At the heart of MARTI lies a robust object model—a modular structure that organizes metadata into reusable, interoperable components. This model ensures transparency, traceability, and ethical integrity, making it the cornerstone of the MARTI framework.

MARTI is not just an architecture for describing AI output, but it offers a way of structuring policy and a possible foundation for a new literacy. This is not about teaching every individual to code or engineer prompts. It’s about empowering humanity to collectively understand, describe, and guide everything we make with AI, ensuring accountability, transparency, and ethical integrity at every step.

MARTI is a framework for creating structured, standardized documentation that is attached to or embedded in AI-generated content. This documentation, or metadata, can be created by people collaborating with AI tools to produce content. Additionally, AI processes themselves can generate and embed metadata into their outputs, ensuring transparency, traceability, and accountability at every stage of content creation.

MARTI also offers a variety of potentially transformative business applications.

Disclaimer: the author is a friend of mine. But then again, so is every other thought leader mentioned in this article (with the exception of the late Steve Jobs, although our lives did touch when he fired me from a project—but that’s another story).

For more MARTI magic, check these posts:

And if you’ve a mind to do so, please pitch in!

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What happened to the Share button in Zoom?

Where did the button go? Jeffrey Zeldman can no longer find it.

Zoom has always included a clickable button/badge at the top left of its primary meeting interface window. Click the badge to copy the URL of that meeting. You can then, with just one more click in any messaging system, send that URL to the other meeting participants. Fast. Simple. Drop-dead easy. Elegant.

It comes in especially handy when people didn’t get (or didn’t see or for some reason can’t click on) the meeting link in their invite. Or when the meeting link is hidden behind a tab behind a tab behind a tab in their browser. Or for any of a dozen other reasons you might want to grab the URL of a meeting you’re in, and zap it to a colleague.

How wise are the designers of Zoom to have solved this problem!

And talk about usable! The button’s placement at the top left of the meeting window, with plenty of free open space around it, means that any user (regardless of software experience level) can quickly find the button when they needed it. It’s placed right where your eyes know to look for it.

Good design! Smartly focused on what’s most important to the user.

So, anyway, Zoom seems to have removed the button.

—As I discovered during a Zoom meeting with a colleague 30 minutes ago. (Or, more accurately, a Zoom meeting without that colleague.)

—Who texted me to request the Zoom URL. But I couldn’t send it to them. I couldn’t send it, because I couldn’t see it, because the interface was hiding it.

—Because Zoom has decided to remove that affordance, replacing it with… well, nothing, actually.

It is possible that the affordance still exists somewhere within the Zoom interface, in some gloomily cobwebbed, rarely visited subscreen or other. Possibly with a rewritten label, so that any Zoom customers lucky enough to find it will fail to recognize it, even if staring directly at it with the fixed gaze of an astronomer.

I don’t say Zoom has definitely removed one of the nicest (and possibly, in its humble way, most important) tools their product offered. I don’t say that because I can’t be sure. I merely say, if they haven’t removed this function, they might as well go ahead and do so, for all the good its hidden presence does for Zoom’s millions of users. If the tool is hidden somewhere in the deep background layers of Zoom, I sure couldn’t find it.

So, after wasting time hunting for and texting about the missing Zoom link affordance (here comes the punchline), my colleague and I ended up holding our Zoom call…

… in Google Meet.

If I were a Zoom executive or investor, this might worry me.


Offered with love, UX is hard, and not all decisions are in our hands.

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One weird trick

They say you should manage down. You’re supposed to manage the people who work for you. For many people who become leads, it’s the toughest and least satisfying part of the job. This is especially true for people who become leads primarily because they’ve been on the job longer than the people around them—not because they had a management jones to satisfy.

They also say you should manage up—subtly assert control of the people you work for. Help them stop short of a bad idea and find their way to a better one. If you can manage up without being obvious about it, you just might save your job, your boss’s job, and your team’s work. 

And yet—

Management goes only so far.

The pains of managing up and down are better than the pains of not being able to manage at all. Further, if you swear by managing up or down, I’m not here to discredit you, nor would I dream of doing so, nor would I have cause.

But I am here today to ask you to also try thinking a different way.

Do keep helping people, whether you work for them, work with them, or they work for you.

But don’t think of it as managing them.

Think of it as helping a colleague, just as you’d help a friend, a family member, or (when you’re at your best, and when it’s safe) a stranger.

Help to help, because we’re built to help. We feel better when we do it.

Life is not a contest. At least, it doesn’t need to be chiefly or primarily a contest. If you request feedback and I provide it, what counts is that it helps you. Same when I ask for your help. My position versus yours within this particular hierarchy doesn’t matter. The ideas matter. And the best idea can come from anyone.

Hierarchy matters at times, sure. But not most of the time. Most of the time what matters is showing up, doing your work, and helping others do theirs. 

Have a better day!

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This Web of Ours, Revisited

ONE MONTH and 24 years ago, in “Where Have All the Designers Gone?” (my HTMHell design column for Adobe of March 20, 2000), I discussed the deepening rift between aesthetically focused web designers and those primarily concerned with creating good experiences online:

More and more web designers seem less and less interested in web design.

Over the past 18 months or so, many of the best practitioners in the industry seem to have given up on the notion that a low-bandwidth, less than cutting-edge site is worth making. Much of the stuff they’ve been making instead has been beautiful and inspiring. But if top designers wash their hands of the rest of the Web, whose hands will build it, and whose minds will guide it? The possibilities are frightening.

An Imperfect Medium for Perfectionists

Why were many of the leading graphic designers and studios at the time uninterested in web design? For one thing, designers trained to strive for visual perfection found the web’s unpredictability depressing. The article provided clues to the frustrations of the time:

Good designers spend hours tweaking typography in Illustrator and Photoshop. Then visitors with slow connections turn off images.

Of course, where professionals trained in graphic design saw a distressing lack of control, others glimpsed in the infant technology a tremendous potential to help people, pixel-perfection be damned. To reduce the conflict to a cartoon, you might characterize it as David Carson versus Jakob Nielsen—though doing so would trivialize the concerns of both men. Designers already charged with creating websites found themselves somewhere in the middle—barking themselves hoarse reminding clients and managers that pixel-perfect rendering was not a thing on the web, while arguing with developers who told designers the exact same thing.

Visually inspiring websites like K10k showed that the web could, if approached carefully and joyfully, provide aesthetic delight. But many designers (along with organizations like AIGA) were unaware of those sites at the time.

Us and Them

Another source of tension in the medium in 2000 sprang from the discrepancy between the privileged access designers enjoyed—fast connections, up-to-date browsers and operating systems, high-res monitors (at least for the time) offering thousands of colors—versus the slow modems, aging and underpowered computers, outdated browsers, and limited-color monitors through which most people at the time experienced the web.

Which was the real design? The widescreen, multicolor, grid-based experience? Or the 216-color job with pixelated Windows type, a shallow “fold,” and pictures of headline text that took forever to be seen?

To view your masterpiece the way most users experienced it, and at the syrup-slow speed with which they experienced it, was to have an awakening or a nightmare—depending on your empathy quotient. Some designers began to take usability, accessibility, and performance seriously as part of their jobs; others fled for the predictability of more settled media (such as print).

A New (Old) Hope

My March, 2000 article ended on an upbeat note—and a gentle call to action:

For content sites to attain the credibility and usefulness of print magazines; for entertainment sites to truly entertain; for commerce sites and Web-based applications to function aesthetically as well as technically, the gifts of talented people are needed. We hope to see you among them.

That was my hope in 2000, and, all these years later, it remains my vision for this web of ours. For though the browsers, connections, and hardware have changed substantially over the past 24 years, and though the medium and its practitioners have, to a significant extent, grown the Hell up, beneath the surface, in 2024, many of these same attitudes and conflicts persist. We can do better.

Minus the framesets that formerly contained it, you may read the original text (complete with archaic instructions about 4.0 browsers and JavaScript that broke my heart, but which Adobe’s editors and producers insisted on posting) courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

☞  Hat tip to Andrey Taritsyn for digging up the article, which I had long forgotten.

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The More Things Change… (or: What’s in a Job Title?)

I’m not a “[full-stack] developer,” regardless of what my last job title says.

I’m not even a front-end developer, thanks to the JavaScript–industrial complex.

I’m a front-of-the-front-end developer, but that’s too long.

So, I’m a web designer. And I also specialise in accessibility, design systems, and design.

…Why do I think that this is the best title? Here’s why.

I’m designing for the web. The infinitely flexible web. The web that doesn’t have one screen size, one browser, one operating system, or one device. The web that can be used by anyone, anywhere, on any internet connection, on any device, on any operating system, on any browser, with any screen size. I’m designing with the web. Using the web platform (HTML, CSS, JS, ARIA, etc.), not a bloated harmful abstraction. I have a deep understanding of HTML and its semantics. I love CSS, I know how and when to utilise its many features, and I keep up-to-date as more are added. I have a strong understanding of modern JavaScript and most importantly I know when not to use it.

Front-end development’s identity crisis by Elly Loel

See also:

The Wax and the Wane of the Web (2024): Forget death and taxes. The only certainty on the web is change. Ste Grainer takes a brief look at the history of the web and how it has been constantly reinvented. Then he explores where we are now, and how we can shape the future of the web for the better. – A List Apart

The Cult of the Complex (2018): If we wish to get back to the business of quietly improving people’s lives, one thoughtful interaction at a time, we must rid ourselves of the cult of the complex. Admitting the problem is the first step in solving it. – A List Apart

Dear AIGA, where are the web designers? (2007): For all the brand directors, creative directors, Jungian analysts, and print designers, one rather significant specimen of the profession is missing. – zeldman.com

Standardization and the Open Web (2015): How do web standards become, well, standard? Although they’re often formalized through official standards-making organizations, they can also emerge through popular practice among the developer community. If both sides don’t work together, we risk delaying implementation, stifling creativity, and losing ground to politics and paralysis. Jory Burson sheds light on the historical underpinnings of web standardization processes—and what that means for the future of the open web. – A List Apart

The profession that dare not speak its name (2007): “No one has tried to measure web design because web design has been a hidden profession.” – zeldman.com

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Our Lady of Perpetual Profit

Corporations that take investors make an impossible promise to increase profits forever. Accordingly, they hire MBAs whose role is to juggle numbers to create ongoing, short-term profit. This juggling is frequently labeled “leadership.”

The juggling methods—abusing data, diminishing the primacy of the customer relationship, repeating what worked last year as if the demand for it will never end, and perpetually cutting costs—invariably remove value from the company. This, of course, results in more staff and cost cutting.

People who understand the customer and the product are ignored in favor of the number jugglers; research is disparaged in favor of a dogmatic relationship to data. 

The people who wreck the company get the big paychecks. Eventually a bigger company buys the first company, further destroying its value. The wreckers exit with more money, 1980s-corporate-raider-style. Skilled workers are laid off, quality plummets, and the cycle begins again. 

This picture of a business world with deeply misguided priorities—exemplified by horror stories from the worlds of tech, gaming, and entertainment—is brought to you by Doc Burford, whose discursive post, “the biggest threat facing your team, whether you’re a game developer or a tech founder or a CEO, is not what you think,” takes a while to get through, but is nonetheless worth reading.

It is not a picture of every company, to be sure. But it applies to many, and accounts for much of the worker unhappiness plus customer frustration that characterize this time and contribute to our political unrest.

I wrote this post so you’d know to check that one. Do it.

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AI Roundup: The Bad, the Ugly, and the Pretty Cool

Ay, ay, AI! Hype, fear, and strongly voiced opinions—the traditional currency of internet conversation—are unequal to this moment, where the Fate of Everything™ dangles from a single gossamer thread. So here are four useful links to pieces of the web that make differing and complementary sense of the threat and promise of AI.

Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101—north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto—and every single billboard is advertising some kind of AI company. Every business plan has the word “AI” in it, even if the business itself has no AI in it…

Tech bubbles come in two varieties: The ones that leave something behind, and the ones that leave nothing behind. Sometimes, it can be hard to guess what kind of bubble you’re living through until it pops and you find out the hard way…

Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?

de Vries calculates that by 2027 the AI sector could consume between 85 to 134 terawatt hours each year. That’s about the same as the annual energy demand of de Vries’ home country, the Netherlands. 

The Verge: How much electricity does AI consume?

The Elements of AI is a series of free online courses created by MinnaLearn and the University of Helsinki. We want to encourage as broad a group of people as possible to learn what AI is, what can (and can’t) be done with AI, and how to start creating AI methods. The courses combine theory with practical exercises and can be completed at your own pace.

Elements of AI

We define AI literacy as a set of competencies that enables individuals to critically evaluate AI technologies; communicate and collaborate effectively with AI; and use AI as a tool online, at home, and in the workplace. We conducted an extensive review of literature (see paper) and distilled a set of key AI literacy competencies and considerations for designing AI literacy learning interventions, which can be used to guide future educational initiatives as well as foster discussion and debate in the AI education field. This page lists and describes the competencies and design considerations that we have outlined.

AI Unplugged
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CAPTCHA excludes disabled web users

What’s widely used, no longer particularly effective, and makes web content inaccessible to many people with disabilities? It’s our old friend CAPTCHA! In a group note dated 16 December 2021, the W3C explains how CAPTCHA excludes disabled users, and suggests alternatives which may be kinder and more reliable:

Various approaches have been employed over many years to distinguish human users of web sites from robots. The traditional CAPTCHA approach asking users to identify obscured text in an image remains common, but other approaches have emerged. All interactive approaches require users to perform a task believed to be relatively easy for humans but difficult for robots. Unfortunately the very nature of the interactive task inherently excludes many people with disabilities, resulting in a denial of service to these users. Research findings also indicate that many popular CAPTCHA techniques are no longer particularly effective or secure, further complicating the challenge of providing services secured from robotic intrusion yet accessible to people with disabilities. This document examines a number of approaches that allow systems to test for human users and the extent to which these approaches adequately accommodate people with disabilities, including recent non-interactive and tokenized approaches. We have grouped these approaches by two category classifications: Stand-Alone Approaches that can be deployed on a web host without engaging the services of unrelated third parties and Multi-Party Approaches that engage the services of an unrelated third party.

W3C: Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA: Alternatives to Visual Turing Tests on the Web

We can do better!

Tell your friends. Tell your boss. Tell your clients.

Tip o’ the blue beanie to Adrian Roselli.

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“Where the people are”

An Event Apart 2013 limited edition lunchbox; illustration by Kevin Cornell. Eric Meyer as Spock, Jeffrey Zeldman as Kirk.
An Event Apart 2013 limited edition lunchbox; illustration by Kevin Cornell.

It’s nearly twenty years ago, now, children. Facebook had only recently burst the bounds of Harvard Yard. Twitter had just slipped the bonds of the digital underground. But web geeks like me still saw “social media” as a continuation of the older digital networks, protocols, listservs, and discussion forums we’d come up using, and not as the profound disruption that, partnered with smartphones and faster cellular networks, they would soon turn out to be. 

So when world-renowned CSS genius Eric Meyer and I, his plodding Dr Watson, envisioned adding a digital discussion component to our live front-end web design conference events, our first thought had been to create a bespoke one. We had already worked with a partner to adapt a framework he’d built for another client, and were considering whether to continue along that path or forge a new one.

And then, one day, I was talking to Louis Rosenfeld—the Prometheus of information architecture and founder of Rosenfeld Media. I told Lou about the quest Eric and I were on, to enhance An Event Apart with a private social network, and shared a roadblock we’d hit. And Lou said something brilliant that day. Something that would never have occurred to me. He said: “Why not use Facebook? It already exists, and that’s where the people are.”

The habit of building

Reader, in all my previous years as a web designer, I had always built from scratch or worked with partners who did so. Perhaps, because I ran a small design agency and my mental framework was client services, the habit of building was ingrained. 

After all, a chief reason clients came to us was because they needed something we could create and they could not. I had a preference for bespoke because it was designed to solve specific problems, which was (and is) the design business model as well as the justification for the profession. 

Our community web design conference had a brand that tied into the brand of our community web design magazine (and soon-to-emerge community web design book publishing house). All my assumptions and biases were primed for discovery, design, development, and endless ongoing experiments and improvements.

Use something that was already out there? And not just something, but a clunky walled garden with an embarrassing origin story as a hot-or-not variant cobbled together by an angry, virginal undergraduate? The very idea set off all my self-protective alarms.

A lesson in humility

Fortunately, on that day, I allowed a strong, simple idea to penetrate my big, beautiful wall of assumptions.

Fortunately, I listened to Lou. And brought the idea to Eric, who agreed.

The story is a bit more complicated than what I’ve just shared. More voices and inputs contributed to the thinking; some development work was done, and a prototype bespoke community was rolled out for our attendees’ pleasure. But ultimately, we followed Lou’s advice, creating a Facebook group because that’s where the people were. 

We also used Twitter, during its glory days (which coincided with our conference’s). And Flickr. Because those places are where the people were. 

And when you think about it, if people already know how to use one platform, and have demonstrated a preference for doing so, it can be wasteful of their time (not to mention arrogant) to expect them to learn another platform, simply because that one bears your logo.

Intersecting planes of simple yet powerful ideas

Of course, there are valid reasons not to use corporate social networks. Just as there are valid reasons to only use open source or free software. Or to not eat animals. But those real issues are not the drivers of this particular story. 

This particular story is about a smart friend slicing through a Gordian Knot (aka my convoluted mental model, constructed as a result of, and justification for, how I earned a living), and providing me with a life lesson whose wisdom I continue to hold close.

It’s a lesson that intersects with other moments of enlightenment, such as “Don’t tell people who they are or how they should feel; listen and believe when they tell you.” Meet people where they are. It’s a fundamental principle of good UX design. Like pave the cowpaths. Which is really the same thing. We take these ideas for granted, now.

But once, and not so long ago, there was a time. Not one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot. But a time when media was no longer one-to-many, and not yet many-to-many. A time when it was still possible for designers like me to think we knew best. 

I’m glad a friend knew better.

Afterword

I started telling this story to explain why I find myself posting, sometimes redundantly, to multiple social networks—including one that feels increasingly like Mordor. 

I go to them—even the one that breaks my heart—because, in this moment, they are where the people are. 

Of course, as often happens, when I begin to tell a story that I think is about one thing, I discover that it’s about something else entirely.

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Get it right.

Airship city

“Led” is the past tense of “lead.”

L.E.D. Not L.E.A.D.

Example: “Fran, who leads the group, led the meeting.”

When professional publications get the small stuff wrong, it makes us less trusting about the big stuff. Trust in media is already at an all-time low. Don’t alienate liberal arts majors and obsessive compulsives. We may be the last readers standing.

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Knowledge Management for the win

Knowledge management (KM) is the process of organizing, creating, using, and sharing collective knowledge within an organization. 

Unlock and unblock

For companies, institutions, and projects struggling to become more efficient and productive—and who these days is not?—solid knowledge management can unlock productivity and unblock awareness of customer needs, awareness of unrecognized gaps, creativity, alignment, product improvements, and greater success. 

Conversely, lack of knowledge management—or half-hearted knowledge management that is incomplete and/or not widely shared—holds back any organization afflicted by it.

Most institutions, companies, and groups suffer from at least a partial lack of solid knowledge management. Fortunately, this is fixable by acknowledging the problem, understanding its sources, and addressing them in planned phases. Open source organizations can implement via iterative sprints, traditional companies via top-down project management.

The three main areas of knowledge management

The three main areas of knowledge management are:

  • Accumulating knowledge.
  • Storing knowledge.
  • Sharing knowledge.

Accumulating knowledge happens every time any member of a team achieves a task—or fails to achieve it and analyzes why.

Storing knowledge can be as team-limited as reminders I jot down in my personal Notes app (useful only to me), or widely shared. Shared is better.

Much of our knowledge resides in individual brains. Knowledge management enables it to be shared. Successful knowledge management enables everyone to find it.

Examples of successful knowledge management

Successful knowledge management includes maintaining information in a place where it is easy to access, such as a centrally located online handbook or field guide. Examples include the Automattic Employee Field Guide (limited, public version; a richer version is available to employees only), IBM Design Language, the BBC News Style Guide, A List Apart Style Guide, and the W3C documentation such as Mobile Accessibility at W3C. Those just getting started compiling an organizational field guide—or improving an existing one—may find Workable’s Sample Employee Handbook templates useful, whether or not you use their product.

Taking advantage of all the expertise within an organization is a great way to maximize its potential. Companies have a well of untapped knowledge within their workforce that is lying dormant or siloed to individual staff or departments.

With the proper management structures in place, this knowledge can be found, stored, and made accessible to the wider workforce, offering tangible business – Human Resources: Knowledge Management

Ponder this now, and either proactively agitate for it, or, at the very least, keep awareness of it on a sticky note that you can return to when a C-level executive asks why you or your team haven’t made as much progress, or worked as effectively and efficiently, as possible.

Knowledge management is the secret sauce that enables organizations staffed by smart people to unlock their full potential.

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Algorithm & Blues

Examining last week’s Verge-vs-Sullivan “Google ruined the web” debate, author Elizabeth Tai writes:

I don’t know any class of user more abused by SEO and Google search than the writer. Whether they’re working for their bread [and] butter or are just writing for fun, writers have to write the way Google wants them to just to get seen.

I wrote extensively about this in Google’s Helpful Content Update isn’t kind to nicheless blogs and How I’m Healing from Algorithms where I said: “Algorithms are forcing us to create art that fits into a neat little box — their neat little box.”

So, despite Sullivan’s claims to the contrary, the Internet has sucked for me in the last 10 years. Not only because I was forced to create content in a way that pleases their many rules, but because I have to compete with SEO-optimized garbage fuelled by people with deep pockets and desires for deep pockets.

Is the Internet really broken?

For digital creators who prefer to contain multitudes, Tai finds hope in abandoning the algorithm game, and accepting a loss of clout, followers, and discoverability as the price of remaining true to your actual voice and interests:

However, this year, I regained more joy as a writer when I gave upon SEO and decided to become an imperfect gardener of my digital garden. So there’s hope for us yet.

As for folks who don’t spend their time macro-blogging—“ordinary people” who use rather than spend significant chunks of their day creating web content—Tai points out that this, statistically at least a more important issue than the fate and choices of the artists formerly known as digerati, remains unsolved, but with glimmers of partially solution-shaped indicators in the form of a re-emerging indieweb impulse:

Still, as much as I agree with The Verge’s conclusions, I feel that pointing fingers is useless. The bigger question is, How do we fix the Internet for the ordinary person?

The big wigs don’t seem to want to answer that question thoroughly, perhaps because there’s no big money in this, so people have been trying to find solutions on their own.

We have the Indieweb movement, the Fediverse like Mastodon and Substack rising to fill the gap. It’s a ragtag ecosystem humming beneath Google’s layer on the Internet. And I welcome its growth.

For more depth and fuller flavor, I encourage you to read the entirety of “Is the internet really broken?” on elizabethtai.com. (Then read her other writings, and follow her on our fractured social web.)


“The independent content creator refuses to die.” – this website, ca. 1996, and again in 2001, paraphrasing Frank Zappa paraphrasing Edgar Varese, obviously.

Hat tip: Simon Cox.

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Immersive Content and Usability

So little time, so many wonderful, evergreen titles. The A Book Apart library for people who design, write, and code ... in coffee mug format.

As the lines between our physical and digital surroundings continue to blur, it’s more important than ever to design usable and accessible content for our ever-expanding array of contexts.

In 2021, A Book Apart and I were delighted to bring you Preston So’s Voice Content and Usability, the definitive book on voice content, and A Book Apart’s first voice title.

Now, in 2023, we’re thrilled to present Preston’s brilliant follow-up, Immersive Content and Usability, coming April 18.

Armed with this book, you’ll create incisive and inclusive user-centered experiences across augmented, extended, and virtual realities, transforming the physical world into an exciting new canvas for content.

Pre-order now! https://abookapart.com/products/immersive-content-and-usability

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Blue Beanie Day 2021

Photo of astronaut David Bowman from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 wearing a blue beanie in support of web standards.

Blue Beanie Day in support of web standards is celebrated around the world on November 30. Hey, that’s today.

So how can you help? Glad you asked! Take a self-portrait wearing a blue beanie (toque, tuque, cap) and post it to your website and social media channels with the hashtag .

And for that extra extra, slap a blue beanie on your web and social media avatars, as well.

Do this on November 30 as a reminder to design accessible, web-standards-based websites 365 days a year. Thank you. Love you.