Category: The Essentials

This Web of Ours, Revisited

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 19 April 2024
1 Comment on 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.

Tags aesthetics, columns, constraints, designing, HTMHell, HTML, limitations, ThatWasThen

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Akismet means never having to say you’re sorry

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 9 April 2024
4 Comments on Akismet means never having to say you’re sorry

The wizards behind AI have been busy lately providing meaningful employment for digital nonpersons.

One of the hottest jobs for non-humans is crafting and deploying website guestbook spam. This market’s on fire!

If you thought the guestbook spam of yore was impressive, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The new, AI-assisted comment spam has improved keyword stuffing, fewer grammatical mistakes, and, best of all, there’s tons more of it. Your Comment section was never so useless!

And we’re not just talking quantity, here; we’re talking quality.

Compared to the spammers of yore, the new signal depressors have a bold confidence that proclaims, “Hello, world! I’m here to waste your time and extinguish what’s left of your hard-won reader community. Watch me work!”

Yes, the bots who shit in your sandbox are bigger, brassier, and better than ever at wasting your readers’ time and abusing your content to score points on the Google big board.

What’s that you say? You’re not a comment spam enthusiast?

In that case, do as I do: use Akismet to keep cruft where it belongs: off your website. Akismet was strong enough for the comment, form, and text spam of the past, and it’s strong enough for the new junk, too.

(Full disclosure: I work at Automattic, makers of Akismet, but I penned this post this morning purely as an Akismet customer, after happily reviewing the blocked comment spam on this here WordPress site of mine. Thanks, Akismet!)

Tags Akismet, FightBack, spam

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Our Lady of Perpetual Profit

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 1 April 2024
No Comments on 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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“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.

Tags design principles, principles

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In search of a digital town square

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 21 February 2024
7 Comments on In search of a digital town square

Ever since an infantile fascist billionaire (hereafter, the IFB) decided to turn Twitter over to the racially hostile anti-science set, folks who previously used that network daily to discuss and amplify topics they cared about have either given up on the very premise of a shared digital commons, continued to post to Twitter while holding their noses, or sought a new digital place to call their own. This post is for the seekers, to compare notes.

These are my personal observations; your views may differ (and that’s more than okay). In this quick survey, I’m omitting specialty platforms like Tribel, Post, and Substack. Feel free to comment, if you like.

The platforms

BlueSky: The most beautifully elegant web interface. Also the best features (other than omission of hashtags). What Twitter should have become. I joined late—Jack didn’t invite me, likely a sign that I was no longer industrially relevant. I have few followers there, and my posts so far get little traction, but that could change. It’s so pretty (and the few friends that use it matter so much to me) that I keep using it, and I reserve judgement as to its future potential. https://bsky.app/profile/zeldman.bsky.social

Threads: Currently my primary alternative to Twitter, and the only place besides Twitter where my posts get at least some response. Not as visually refined as BlueSky, and with a curiously restricted single-hashtag-only policy. Although this editorial decision helps focus the mind, and likely also cuts down on spam, it interferes with amplifying multidimensional posts. But I digress.

Rough edges and restrictive tagging aside, Threads feels like the place that’s likeliest to inherit the mantle of default town square—if any social platform can do that in these new times, that is.

Threads got its huge jump start because, while the IFB was busy finding new ways to make Twitter less useful and more dangerous, Meta leveraged its huge installed Instagram base to give users a more or less instant social network hookup. If it’s easy, and comes with a built-in network of people I already follow, it wins—at least initially.

Meta may also blow their opportunity if they pursue misguided policies, such as impeding (by algorithmic fiat) “political speech” when democracies hang in the balance, regional wars threaten to become world wars, and the climate crisis is approaching a point of no return. https://www.threads.net/@zeldman

Mastodon: How do you decentralize a digital town square? Provide universal social connection without locking in participants? Mastodon (and federation generally) are an attempt to do those things.

These are important and noble goals, but Mastodon (and federation generally) are a long shot at replacing a primary walled garden like Twitter because they require a fair degree of geekery to set up, and the price tag of mass acceptance is ease of setup. (Compare Threads—easy set-up, built-in friends and followers if you already use Instagram—versus the learning curve with Mastodon.)

If BlueSky is MacOS and Threads is Windows, Mastodon is Linux: a great choice for techies, but likely too steep a hill for Ma and Pa Normie. A techie friend invited me to join, and I write there frequently, but, for whatever it’s worth, my Mastodon posts get very little in the way of responses. It is, nonetheless, a highly effective network for most who use it. https://front-end.social/@zeldman

Tumblr: A bit o’ the OG weird wacky wonderful web, and a special place for nonconformist creative types. By its nature, and the nature of its fiercely loyal users, it is a cult jam. I was an early and enthusiastic Tumblr fan, but it was never my main axe, probably because, since the dawn of time itself, I have had zeldman.com.

For a while, when the IFB first started wrecking Twitter, an uptick in Tumblr usage suggested that the funky old network just might take over as the world’s town hall, but this hope was unrealistic, as Tumblr was never about being for everybody, and Tumblristas are mostly happy keeping the platform a home for self-selecting freaks, queers, and creatives.

I’ll note that Tumblr is part of the Automattic family, and I work at Automattic (just celebrated my fifth anniversary there!), but my opinions here are mine alone. BTW—in nearly 30 years of blogging, that’s the first time I’ve used that phrase. https://apartness.tumblr.com

LinkedIn: A comparatively safe social network with a huge network built up over years, hence a great place to share work-related news and ideas.

Some early Twitter adopters of my acquaintance—especially those who mainly write about work topics like UX—have made LinkedIn their primary social home. For most working folks, it is undoubtedly a place to post and amplify at least some of the content that matters to you. OTOH, it’s not a place where I’d share deep takes on CSS (that’s probably Mastodon), cosplay (Tumblr), or personal true confessions (one’s blog, Threads, Twitter before the IFB took over). https://www.linkedin.com/in/zeldman

Twitter itself: During its heyday, before the IFB, and when it was the only game in town, I loved going there to see what clever things my smartest friends were saying, post my own bon mots, and promote content that mattered to me.

I’ll limit my comments on Twitter’s current state to noting that I still post there, from stubbornness as well as habit, and primarily in the (increasingly forlorn) hope that the IFB will eventually tire of his toy, or of the ceaseless financial hemorrhage, and go away, leaving the site to rebirth itself as an open source project or under the care of new, non-fascist owners.

Though the algorithm punishes my posts, and though I’m continually appalled by the MAGA posts, Russian disinformation, racist/ misogynist/ anti-semitic spew, and Trumpian ego of the current owner, I shall, at least for now, continue to defend my tiny turf there.

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7 responses to “In search of a digital town square”

L. Jeffrey Zeldman

21 February 2024

Psst. Comments are back. This is a test.

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dusoft

28 February 2024

I follow you on Mastodon and even when usually don’t respond to bunch of posts, I can still appreciate people being there. Since I use RSS, I get to read your posts that way usually coming to your website.

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Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design

2 March 2024

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…

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letture suggerite del 3 marzo 2024 » kOoLiNuS ☞ il blog

3 March 2024

[…] In search of a digital town square – L. Jeffrey Zeldman, non l’ultimo dei fessi sul web, cerca di fare il punto sullo stato dell’arte del self publishing oggi; […]

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suggested reads for March 3, 2024 – /home/kOoLiNuS

3 March 2024

[…] In search of a digital town square – L. Jeffrey Zeldman, talks about the state of the art on mantaining a presence on the web today, with the available tools. […]

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Weekly Links 02.26–03.03 – ntdln

4 March 2024

[…] In search of a digital town square (Jeffrey Zeldman) […]

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Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design

13 March 2024

Bluesky introduces open-source, collaborative moderation for federated social media websites: Bluesky was created to put users and communities in control of their social spaces online.…

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Knowledge Management for the win

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 22 January 2024

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.

#

Read these next:

The Dogs Won’t Eat It
The Cult of the Complex (in A List Apart)

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Algorithm & Blues

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 10 November 2023

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.

Tags algorithm, Fediverse, indieweb

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Design Kickoff Meetings

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 17 November 2019

Posted here for posterity:

Design kickoff meetings are like first dates that prepare you for an exciting relationship with a person who doesn’t exist.
— zeldman (@zeldman) November 13, 2019

Design kickoff meetings are like first dates that prepare you for an exciting relationship with a person who doesn’t exist.

Tags own your content, twitter, wit and wisdom

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On Teaching (plus Monday links)

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 29 April 2019

Morpheus (from "The Matrix") seated in a leather chair in a dark room.

TEACHING is a great way to find out what you know, and to connect with other human beings around a shared passion. It’s an energy exchange as well as an information one, and the energy and information flow both ways.

I’ve been a faculty member in the MFA in Interaction Design program at New York’s School of Visual Arts since my colleague Liz Danzico cofounded the program with Steven Heller in 2009. As with all programs and departments at School of Visual Arts, the MFA IXD program is run by a faculty of busy, working professionals who teach one three-hour class per week, one semester per year. It’s the kind of gig that doesn’t interfere with your full-time job, and even makes you better at it.

(Fun facts: In 1988, I moved back to New York, the city of my birth, specifically so my then-girlfriend could study computer graphics at SVA; the highlight of my advertising career, which preceded my ascension into web and UX design, was spent working for top SVA advertising instructor Sal DeVito; and I subsequently enjoyed a long romantic relationship with an artist who’d moved to New York to study painting at SVA. So you could say that my eventually teaching at the place was overdetermined. When Liz told me of her new program and invited me to teach in it, it was as if half the prior events in my life had been whispers from the future. But I digress.)

Helping students have better careers

Since the program began, I’ve taught a class called “Selling Design,” which helps students completing their Masters thesis decide what kind of work they’d like to do when they leave with their MFA, a few months after the class begins. There are so many opportunities now for people who design experiences, digital or otherwise. What should they do? Where will they be happiest? Inside a big company or a small one? A product company or an agency/studio? Should they start their own business?

And there are so many kinds of workplaces. In some, it’s your work that matters most. In others, it’s politics. How can you tell the difference before taking a job? We illuminate the right questions to ask and the clues in a student’s own personality that can lead to a great career or a blocked one.

The main teaching method is discursive: I invite designers who’ve had interesting and varied careers to come into the studio and have a conversation in front of the class. Mainly I ask questions and the guest speaker answers; then the class asks questions. Over time the speakers’ experiences and the takeaways I synthesize from them for the class create a picture of everything from how to tell if someone’s lying to you in a job interview to the signs that you’ve come to the right place.

A blaze of glory

This Thursday, May 2^nd, at 10:00 AM, I teach my last class of the year, and I’m thrilled that my guest speaker will be Alexis Lloyd, Head of Design Innovation at Automattic, and previously Chief Design Officer at Axios, and Creative Director of The New York Times R&D Lab. In my initial months at Automattic, I’ve reached out to Alexis many times for help and insight, and she’s always generous, patient, and illuminating. It will be an honor and a pleasure to end my teaching year in what will surely be a great conversation with this experienced design leader.

For more about the MFA IXD program at School of Visual Arts, follow @svaixd on Twitter and visit https://interactiondesign.sva.edu/ . And for those who don’t yet know Alexis, here are some points of reference:

And now for something completely different

This being Monday, here are some additional links for your pleasure, having nothing to do with the above:

Yeah, but can you dance to it?

Animators, find the musical beats for your animation. A Twitter mini-tutorial, with some usefully illuminating comments. (Hat tip: Val Head’s UI Animation Newsletter. Subscribe here: https://uianimationnewsletter.com/.)

From the same source, this cute Earth Day animation.

Accessibility Insights

The “Top 5 Questions Asked in Accessibility Trainings,” by Carie Fisher of Deque, is a wonderful, inclusively written introduction to digital accessibility. From “what’s WCAG, even?” to why the “first rule of ARIA is: do not use ARIA” (use supported HTML elements instead), answers to just about all your questions may be found here. (Hat tip: David A Kennedy.)

And if you like that, Deque has plenty of other great accessibility articles, including a whole series by the great Glenda Sims.

“Solve the Right Problem: Derek Featherstone on Designing for Extremes” is a two-minute read that tells the famous “map for the blind” story—one of my favorite UX parables ever (not to mention a great #a11y insight). Thanks to Michelle Langston for reminding me about this 2016 post.

Everything means something to me

Every once in a while, life gifts you with a genuine moment. “>Here’s my friend designer/author Justin Dauer and his newborn, exchanging important information during, of all things, a business conference call. (By the way, Justin is now hard at work on the second edition of his book, Cultivating a Creative Culture, which I recommend for anyone leading a team: www.the-culturebook.com/.)

For your viewing pleasure…

We’re standing at the threshold of an entirely new era in digital design—one in which, rather than hacking layouts together, we can actually describe layouts directly. The benefits will touch everything from prototyping to custom art direction to responsive design. In this visionary talk, rooted in years of practical experience, Jen Simmons shows you how to understand what’s different, learn to think through multiple stages of flexibility, and let go of pixel constraints forever.

“Everything You Know About Web Design Just Changed” by Jen Simmons (60-minute video, captioned).

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Authoritative, Readable, Branded: Report from Poynter Design Challenge, Part 2

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 6 February 2017

THIS year’s Poynter Digital Newspaper Design Challenge was an attempt by several designers and pundits, working and thinking in parallel, to save real news via design. In Part 1 of my report from Poynter, I discussed the questions driving the challenge, and talked about the design work done in response to it by my colleagues Kat Downs Mulder, Mike Swartz, Lucie Lacava, and Jared Cocken. Here in Part 2, I’ll discuss my own work and the approach we took at my studio. But we begin with a quick look back at the past designs that brought us to this point:

Experiment 1: The Deck

During the past decade and a half, as both a publication designer and a publisher, I watched in horror as our publications became reader-hostile minefields of intrusive ads, overlays, and popups. The first thing I tried to do about this (besides removing the web equivalent of chart junk from my magazine) was to offer an alternative approach to advertising via The Deck, an ad network I cofounded with Jim Coudal of coudal.com and Jason Fried of Basecamp (formerly 37signals). The Deck permitted only one appropriately targeted ad per each page of content viewed. As primary instigator Jim Coudal put it:

A buy in The Deck reaches the creative community on the web in an uncluttered, controlled environment, far more valuable than a standard banner or a single text ad among dozens of others.

Jim, Jason, and I hoped that our cost-per-influence model would replace the CPM race to the bottom, and that our quasi-religious use of whitespace would be widely imitated by the smartest publications online.

But that didn’t happen. Advertising just got more intrusive. The Deck succeeded as a small business supporting a network of interesting small publications, but not at all as a primary influencer on the direction taken by advertising that supports web content.

Experiment 2: Readability

Then about seven years ago, my friend Rich Ziade and his engineers created Readability, an app that sat between you and the ugly site you were trying to read, the way screen readers sit between visual websites and blind web users. Readability grabbed an article page’s primary content, removed the junk, and replaced the cluttered and illegible layout with a clean, readable page inspired by the clarity of iBooks and Kindle, which were just taking off at the time.

Rich released Readability 1.0 as open source; Apple immediately absorbed it into the Safari browser, where it continues to provide Safari’s built-in “reader” mode. (Safari’s “reader” mode was Apple’s first step in decluttering the web and returning it to the people who use it; “content blocking” would be the second step.)

Moreover, Readability 2.0, released by Rich’s then-company Arc90 the following year, added automatic payment for content creators slash publishers, as I explained at the time to anyone who would listen. Had Readability been allowed to continue the experiment, content monetization might have been less of a problem than it is today, and publication brands (the notion that it matters who publishes what we read) would be in exactly the same pickle they’re in anyway—except that readers would get their news in Readability’s attractive and customizable format, instead of from Apple News, Facebook, and the like.

I used to go around the world on lecture tours, warning my fellow designers that if we didn’t figure out how to declutter and compellingly brand sites, apps like Readability would do it for us. I still go around on lecture tours, but I’ve moved on to other issues. As for Readability, it was killed by a digital lynch mob after one powerful blogger, misunderstanding the motivation behind it, issued the digerati equivalent of a fatw?. But that’s another story.

Experiment 3: Big Type Revolution

In 2012, inspired by Readability and frustrated by the industry’s determination to make ever less legible, ever more cluttered sites full of tracking and popups and everything except what readers need, I bet big on large type:

This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers might soon not be designing for anyone.)

Writing in Forbes, Anthony Wing Kosner saw the future in my initially crude experiment:

If you want to know where the web is going, one clue is to look at the personal sites of top-tier web designers. And one trend that just bubbled to the surface is large body type—the kind you don’t have to command-plus to read.

Jeffrey Zeldman…made a particularly strong point about it in his “Web Design Manifesto 2012,” that he published yesterday.

—Large Type: One Web Designer Puts Content First in a Big Way

Not to brag (okay, too late), but he wasn’t wrong. It was the future.

(Also, I’m fairly sure I wasn’t the only designer at the time who reacted against tiny type and cluttered anti-user layouts by stripping pages down to only their most necessary elements, and boosting the type size to enforce a more relaxed reading posture. The idea was in the air.)

The experiment becomes the norm

In any case, soon enough, readable (big type and plenty of whitespace) layouts starting popping up everywhere. At medium.com. In Mike Pick’s redesign of A List Apart. In article pages for The New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and, eventually, many other publications.

An uncluttered page focused on the reading experience (reminder: big type and plenty of whitespace) is now the default at several leading news publications. But many smaller publications, struggling just to survive, have not kept up. And so we have a perfect crisis:

Publications that do not encourage reading, loyalty, or repeat visits are struggling to survive at the very moment real news is under attack from an authoritarian president. What to do?

My response to the Poynter Design Challenge

There are many ways to respond to an existential crisis like the one facing most news publications. You can rethink the relationship between reader and publication. Rethink the job of the publication. Make news work more like a lifestyle app. Make it more immersive. My colleagues followed those paths out brilliantly (as described in Part 1).

But I went for the low-hanging fruit. The thing any publisher, no matter how cash-strapped, could do. The thing I had seen working since I started yelling about big type in 2012. I went for a clean, uncluttered, authoritative, branded page. Authoritative because this isn’t fake news. Branded because the source matters.

The easiest, fastest, most readily attainable path to clean, uncluttered, authoritative, branded design is through typography.

Any publication can be readable

Any newspaper, however poor, can afford better typography. Any newspaper with a designer on staff can attain it, if the paper stops treating design as a lackey of marketing or editorial or advertising, and sets designers free to create great reading experiences.

In my work, which is still underway (and will continue for some time), I focused on creating what I call “reader” layouts (and probably other designers call them that too; but I just don’t know). Layouts that are branded, authoritative, clean, uncluttered, and easy to read.

I played with type hierarchies and created simple style guides. Most of my little pages began as Typecast templates that I customized. And then Noël Jackson from my studio cleaned up the HTML and CSS to make it more portable. We put the stuff up on GitHub for whoever wants to play with it.

Reader layout & readme
Style guide (from a template by John Martins) & readme

These are only starting points. Any designer can create these kinds of layouts. There’s nothing special about what I did. You can do the same for your paper. (And if you can’t, you can hire us.)

The work I share here is the start of a project that will continue at our studio for a long time. #realnews for the win!

Additional reading

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Kiss My Classname

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 3 January 2017

SORRY. I disagree. Nonsemantic classnames that refer to visual styles will always be a bad idea.

I’m sure you’re a good coder. Probably much better than I am these days. I know most of you weren’t around for the standards wars and don’t know how much damage non-semantic HTML and CSS did to the web.

I’ve worked on big sites and I understand how bloated and non-reusable code can get when a dozen people who don’t talk to each other work on it over a period of years. I don’t believe the problem is the principle of semantic markup or the cascade in CSS. I believe the problem is a dozen people working on something without talking to each other.

Slapping a visually named class on every item in your markup may indeed make your HTML easier to understand for a future developer who takes over without talking to you, especially if you don’t document your work and create a style guide. But making things easier for yourself and other developers is not your job. And if you want to make things easier for yourself and other developers, talk to them, and create a style guide or pattern library.

The codebase on big sites isn’t impenetrable because developers slavishly followed arbitrary best practices. The codebase is broken because developers don’t talk to each other and don’t make style guides or pattern libraries. And they don’t do those things because the people who hire them force them to work faster instead of better. It starts at the top.

Employers who value quality in CSS and markup will insist that their employees communicate, think through long-term implications, and document their work. Employers who see developers and designers as interchangable commodities will hurry their workers along, resulting in bloated codebases that lead intelligent people to blame best practices instead of work processes.

The present is always compromised, always rushed. We muddle through with half the information we need, praised for our speed and faulted when we stop to contemplate or even breathe. Frameworks built on newish worst practices seem like the way out, but they end up teaching and permanently ingraining bad habits in a generation of web makers. Semantics, accessibility, and clarity matter. Reusability is not out of reach. All it takes is clarity and communication.

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To Save Real News

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 19 December 2016

IN a world where newspapers are dying and half the public believes fake news, what online news experiences need is design that is branded, authoritative, and above all, readable:

Branded, because we need to convert the current hummingbird model (where readers flit from flower to flower) back to the idea that your news source matters—and that it is worth your time to return to a source you trust.

Brand helps the social-media-driven seeker notice that they’re returning time and again to a certain resource, facilitating a mental model shift back toward destination web browsing. When every site looks the same, it’s easy to see all content as equal—all spun from the same amorphous mass. A strong brand, which is individual to the given newspaper, can cut through that amorphousness, which is the first step in building (or rebuilding) loyalty.

Authoritative, because combating fake news means visually cueing the reliability of a particular source—one staffed by real journalists and editors, with real sources in real countries. In the coming years this will be more important than ever.

Readable, because an informed public needs to grasp stories that can’t always be reduced to headlines or sound bytes. Readability means even longer articles actually get read, sometimes even all the way through. Readability requires a combination of typeface, type size, leading, measure, hierarchy, contrast, etc.—as well as the introduction of visual information, both to break up the flow of text, and to further illuminate what is being said.

From climate change to Swedish hip hop

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 7 November 2016

Peyo Almqvist I SPENT yesterday with my Swedish friend Pär (“Peyo”) Almqvist, who returned from LA Sunday morning and headed home to Sweden Sunday night. We met in Stockholm in 1999, when Peyo was 19, and have been close ever since. In 2000, Peyo wrote “Fragments of Time” for A List Apart. Reading it, you can see how thoughtful he is as a creative person.

A few years ago, Peyo cofounded OMC Power, a start-up that brought affordable solar power to rural villages in India—profoundly poor villages where, until that time, folks had relied on dirty gasoline-powered generators to get what little electricity they could.

National Geographic TV covered OMC’s work just this week in their special, “Years of Living Dangerously;” in the video clip on their site, you can watch David Letterman interview one of Peyo’s co-founders about what they’ve accomplished so far, and why it matters.

Letterman went to India to cover the threat of climate change and what’s being done to fight it. OMC Power is providing clean energy and a model for India to electrify itself without adding to the pollution that contributes to climate change. OMC started in India because folks in India needed the power and therefore welcomed them; and also because, by working with small rural villages, they encountered less violent opposition from the oil companies than they would have if they had attempted the experiment in Europe or North America. When the power grid fails in the west, folks in India will still have power—an irony of developed nations’ dependence on dirty fossil fuels.

In a time when so many of us feel helpless about climate change, and others, at the behest of corporate masters, cynically deny that it exists, it is good to know people who are making a difference and earning a living in doing so.

While Peyo remains an advisor to OMC Power, he has since co-founded a music startup, which I can’t talk about yet, but which I believe will meet real a need in music and may even change how some music gets made. (Like me, Peyo has a musical background, although, unlike me, as a producer and composer he has had hits in Sweden.)

It was his new music start-up music business that brought Peyo to New York and LA during the past week. I missed the chance to spend the week with him as I was in San Francisco doing the final AEA conference of 2016. It was great to spend a day together in New York, talking about our families, our businesses, and the world.

Also published in Medium.

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Private Parts: unlikely advocate fights for online privacy, anonymity

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 30 October 2016

MESMERIZED as we have been by the spectacle of the flaming garbage scow of U.S. election news, it would have been easy to miss this other narrative. But in the past few days, just as Google, AT&T, and Time-Warner were poised to turn the phrase “online privacy” into a George Carlin punchline, in marched an unlikely hero to stop them: the American Federal Government. Who have just…

approved broad new privacy rules on Thursday that prevent companies like AT&T and Comcast from collecting and giving out digital information about individuals — such as the websites they visited and the apps they used — in a move that creates landmark protections for internet users.

— Broadband Providers Will Need Permission to Collect Private Data, by Cecilia Kang, The New York Times, Oct. 27, 2016

Given the increasingly deep bonds between corporate overlords and elected officials, this strong assertion of citizens’ right to privacy comes as something of a surprise. It’s especially startling given the way things had been going.

On Friday, Oct. 21, shortly before a massive DDOS attack took out most U.S. websites (but that’s another story), ProPublica reported that Google had quietly demolished its longstanding wall between anonymous online ad tracking and user’s names. I quote ProPublica’s reporting at length because the details matter:

When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.”

And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts.

But this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand – literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools.

The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer.

The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow people around on the web may now be customized to them based on your name and other information Google knows about you. It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct.

The move is a sea change for Google and a further blow to the online ad industry’s longstanding contention that web tracking is mostly anonymous.

—Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking, by Julia Angwin, ProPublica, Oct. 21, 2016

Et tu, Google

Google has long portrayed itself as one of the good guys, and in many ways it continues to be that. I can’t think of any other insanely powerful mega-corporation that works so hard to advocate web accessibility and performance—although one of its recipes for improved web performance, making up a whole new proprietary markup language and then using its search engine dominance to favor sites that use that language and, of necessity, host their content on Google servers over sites that use standard HTML and host their own content, is hardly a white hat move. But that, too, is another story.

On privacy, certainly, Google had shown ethics and restraint. Which is why their apparent decision to say, “f–– it, everyone else is doing it, let’s stop anonymizing the data we share” came as such an unpleasant shock. And that sense of shock does not even take into account how many hundreds of millions of humans were slated to lose their privacy thanks to Google’s decision. Or just how momentous this change of heart is, given Google’s control and knowledge of our searches, our browsing history, and the contents and correspondents of our email.

Minority Report

Scant days after ProPublica broke the Google story, as a highlight of the proposed merger of AT&T and Time-Warner, came the delightful scenario of TV commercials customized just for you, based on combined knowledge of your web using and TV viewing habits. And while some humans might see it as creepy or even dangerous that the TV they’re watching with their family knows what they were up to on the internet last night, from an advertiser’s point of view the idea made $en$e:

Advertisers want … to combine the data intensity of internet advertising with the clear value and ability to change peoples’ perceptions that you get with a television ad. If you believe in a future where the very, very fine targeting of households or individuals with specific messaging makes economic sense to do at scale, what this merger does is enable that by making more audience available to target in that way.

—Individualized Ads on TV Could Be One Result of AT&T-Time Warner Merger by Sapna Maheshwari, The New York Times, Oct. 26

An unlikely privacy advocate

Into this impending privacy hellscape marched the U.S. Government:

Federal officials approved broad new privacy rules on Thursday that prevent companies like AT&T and Comcast from collecting and giving out digital information about individuals — such as the websites they visited and the apps they used — in a move that creates landmark protections for internet users. …

The new rules require broadband providers to obtain permission from subscribers to gather and give out data on their web browsing, app use, location and financial information. Currently, broadband providers can track users unless those individuals tell them to stop.

The passage of the rules deal a blow to telecommunications and cable companies like AT&T and Comcast, which rely on such user data to serve sophisticated targeted advertising. The fallout may affect AT&T’s $85.4 billion bid for Time Warner, which was announced last week, because one of the stated ambitions of the blockbuster deal was to combine resources to move more forcefully into targeted advertising.

—Broadband Providers Will Need Permission to Collect Private Data, by Cecilia Kang, The New York Times, Oct. 27

What happens next

The consequences of these new rules—exactly how advertising will change and networks will comply, the effect on these businesses and those that depend on them (i.e. newspapers), how Google in particular will be effected, who will cheat, who will counter-sue the government, and so on—remain to be seen. But, for the moment, we’re about to have a bit more online privacy and anonymity, not less. At least, more online privacy from advertisers. The government, one assumes, will continue to monitor every little thing we do online.

Co-published in Medium.

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Ten Years Ago on the Web

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 22 September 2016

2006 DOESN’T seem forever ago until I remember that we were tracking IE7 bugs, worrying about the RSS feed validator, and viewing Drupal as an accessibility-and-web-standards-positive platform, at the time. Pundits were claiming bad design was good for the web (just as some still do). Joe Clark was critiquing WCAG 2. “An Inconvenient Truth” was playing in theaters, and many folks were surprised to learn that climate change was a thing.

I was writing the second edition of Designing With Web Standards. My daughter, who is about to turn twelve, was about to turn two. My dad suffered a heart attack. (Relax! Ten years later, he is still around and healthy.) A List Apart had just added a job board. “The revolution will be salaried,” we trumpeted.

Preparing for An Event Apart Atlanta, An Event Apart NYC, and An Event Apart Chicago (sponsored by Jewelboxing! RIP) consumed much of my time and energy. Attendees told us these were good shows, and they were, but you would not recognize them as AEA events today—they were much more homespun. “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” we used to joke. “My mom will sew the costumes and my dad will build the sets.” (It’s a quotation from a 1940s Andy Hardy movie, not a reflection of our personal views about gender roles.)

Jim Coudal, Jason Fried and I had just launched The Deck, an experiment in unobtrusive, discreet web advertising. Over the next ten years, the ad industry pointedly ignored our experiment, in favor of user tracking, popups, and other anti-patterns. Not entirely coincidentally, my studio had just redesigned the website of Advertising Age, the leading journal of the advertising profession.

Other sites we designed that year included Dictionary.com and Gnu Foods. We also worked on Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking tool with well-thought-out features like Saved Copies (so you never lost a web page, even if it moved or went offline), Bookmark Ratings, Bookmark Privacy, and Groups. We designed the product for our client and developed many of its features. Rest in peace.

I was reading Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, a delightfully written text that anticipated and suggested design rules and thinking for our present Internet of Things. It’s a fine book, and one I helped Adam bring to a good publisher. (Clearly, I was itching to break into publishing myself, which I would do with two partners a year or two afterwards.)

In short, it was a year like any other on this wonderful web of ours—full of sound and fury, true, but also rife with innovation and delight.

As part of An Event Apart’s A Decade Apart celebration—commemorating our first ten years as a design and development conference—we asked people we know and love what they were doing professionally ten years ago, in 2006. If you missed parts one, two, three, or four, have a look back.