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Category: Zeldman
‘Tis himself.
Update! Final audio and video are now available for your listening and viewing pleasure.
Live today, Dan Benjamin and I grill Ethan Dunham of Fontspring and Font Squirrel and Jeffrey Veen of Typekit and numerous other good things on the web about one of your favorite subjects, “real fonts on your website.”
Be part of this dialog that takes place via streaming video feed with live call-in.
Don’t miss the inaugural live broadcast of The Big Web Show today at 1:00 PM Eastern.
(And get the podcast next week by following 5by5 on iTunes.)
Calling all ears! Calling all eyes! The Big Web Show is coming! The Big Web Show is coming!
Hosted by Dan Benjamin (creator of The Pipeline) and yours truly and produced by 5by5 Studios, The Big Web Show will be a lively panel discussion on all things web.
It will feature the kinds of topics we discuss here and at A List Apart: topics like the future of publishing and the future of advertising. Art direction online. Content strategy. Content curation. (By the way, whatever happened to editing?) Women and the web. Web fonts and web typography generally. CMS/platform shootouts. HTML5. CSS3. Client services. Product development. Online education. Web design education. Creating independent content. Building an audience. And much more.
With all the guests you hope we’ll get, and plenty you’d never think of.
The show begins within the next two weeks. More will be revealed soon. Keep watching the skies.
Greetings, web design fans. I’m in Seattle doing the final prep for three days of kick-ass design, code, and content. Starting Monday, April 5 and running through Wednesday, April 8, An Event Apart Seattle 2010 features 13 great speakers and 13 sessions, and has been sold out for over a month. A Day Apart, a special one-day learning experience on HTML5 and CSS3, follows the regular conference and is led by Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm.
The all-star cast includes …
- Nicole Sullivan on object-oriented CSS;
- Dan Cederholm on “the CSS3 Experience;”
- Luke Wroblewski on the three reasons web applications should be designed for mobile first;
- Aarron Walter on emotional interface design;
- Jared Spool on the five styles of design decisions;
- Microsoft’s Pete LePage asking your help to kill IE6 (yes, really);
… And that’s just the first day.
There are also two parties (sponsored by our good friends at Media Temple and MSNBC) and seven more great speakers with topics of interest to all standards-based web designers.
If you can’t be with us, follow the Twitter stream live on A Feed Apart.
- A Feed Apart live Twitter aggregator
- An Event Apart Seattle 2010 Flickr pool (watch this space)
- My AEA Seattle 2010 photo set
- An Event Apart 2010 Musical Playlist for your pleasure
Those who say web users don’t spend time reading web pages haven’t met readers like you folks. According to Google Analytics, zeldman.com fans spent five minutes, fifty-five seconds reading the relatively short post, “My Love/Hate Affair With Typekit.” If Jakob Nielsen is right, and readers take in no more than 20% of the words on a page, y’all took a hella long time to read 190 words.
But generalized findings like Jakob’s are merely one data point in a universe of possibilities. Every site is a special snowflake, with stats and usage patterns all its own. Faced with an unfamiliar shopping site, we may indeed give it little more than a cursory scan before closing the window and returning to Google to fine-tune the search that led us there. But when we visit a familiar site to read, then read we do—as anyone with a good blog and a decent set of analytics tools can tell you.
Here are a few recent average times readers spent poring over various zeldman.com posts:
Post Title | Average Time Spent |
---|---|
My Love/Hate Affair With Typekit | 5:55 |
Crowdsourcing Dickens | 3:36 |
20 Signs You Don’t Want That Web Design Project | 7:52 |
Ed Bott’s Lament | 4:22 |
Gowalla My Dreams | 4:41 |
IE9 Preview | 4:37 |
Morals of the story:
- Don’t use Peter’s stats to paint Paul.
- If you want people to spend time reading your site, give them better content.
Headed to SXSW Interactive? Concerned about the future of books, magazines, and websites? Attend “New Publishing and Web Content,” a panel I’m hosting on the creative, strategic, and marketing challenges of traditional and new (internet hybrid) book publishing and online magazine publishing, and how these fields intersect with content strategy and client services.
Joining me in a thoughtful exploration of new and old business models and creative challenges will be people who’ve spent a decade or two butting up against and reinventing these boundaries:
- Mandy Brown, creative director, Etsy; former creative director (web and print), W.W. Norton, the oldest and largest publishing traditional house owned wholly by its employees; contributing editor, A List Apart Magazine; publisher, A Working Library; and co-director (with Jason Santa Maria and me), A Book Apart, a new publisher of mid-length books “for people who make websites.” (We’re talking book-books, made of paper, printed, bound, and distributed—not PDFs.)
- Paul Ford, critically respected novelist (Gary Benchley, Rock Star) and short fiction writer; blogger since practically the Civil War, most famously of Ftrain.com, where he has penned such classic posts as “Learning to Fear the Semantic Web;” print and web editor, Harper’s, the very definition of a traditional printed magazine of quality—also web developer, designer, and webmaster of Harper’s website since forever; and frequent contributor to The Morning News and to NPR’s “All Things Considered,” where he once offered a dissenting view on “web standards”—not that I’m bitter.
- Lisa Holton, Founder and CEO, Fourth Story Media (“a fresh perspective in storytelling”). The company “develop[s] compelling intellectual property and distribute[s] it across traditional and nontraditional channels including books, collaborative web fiction, and social media.” Previously, Lisa was President of Scholastic Trade Publishing and Book Fairs, where she managed the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and initiated and oversaw development of The 39 Clues, a widely heralded book- and web-based venture. Prior to that, she was SVP and Publisher, Disney Global Children’s Books, running all aspects of the domestic and international children’s book business at the Walt Disney Company. Before that, Lisa was Vice President, Associate Publisher and Editor-in Chief of HarperCollins Children’s Books. She serves on the Board of Directors of the New York Women’s Foundation and the Board of Trustees of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.
- Erin Kissane, publisher, Incisive.nu, a website about strong language, writing tools, and other aspects of content strategy; content strategist and editorial strategist, Happy Cog Studios; former editor-in-chief (for ten years), A List Apart Magazine; author of numerous articles on web writing, editing, and content strategy, including “Attack of the Zombie Copy,” “Your About Page is a Robot,” and “Content Templates to the Rescue;” founding strategist, A Book Apart; and author of an upcoming book on content strategy for content strategists.
As moderator, my job will be to let these geniuses speak, to occasionally lob the right question to the right genius, and to help field your questions from the audience.
If you work in web or print publishing, or just care about the written word, please join us at 5:00 PM Central Time in Ballroom A.
(What else am I doing at SXSW Interactive? Here’s my schedule so far. I also hope to see some of you at OK Cog’aoke II, SXSW Interactive’s premiere karaoke event and best party, hosted by your friends at Happy Cog.)
Dan Benjamin and yours truly discuss the secret history of blogging, transitioning from freelance to agency, the story behind the web standards movement, the launch of A Book Apart and its first title, HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith, the trajectory of content management systems, managing the growth of a design business, and more in the inaugural episode of the Pipeline.
Jeffrey Zeldman onstage at Galapagos Art Space, Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Onno de Jong from last night’s AIGA/NY talk and birthday celebration, curated by Jason Santa Maria.
My friend, the content strategist Kristina Halvorson, likes to call content “the elephant in the room” of web design. She means it’s the huge problem that no one on the web development team or client side is willing to acknowledge, face squarely, and plan for….
Without discounting the primacy of the content problem, we web design folk have now birthed ourselves a second lumbering mammoth, thanks to our interest in “real fonts on the web“ (the unfortunate name we’ve chosen for the recent practice of serving web-licensed fonts via CSS’s decade-old @font-face declaration—as if Georgia, Verdana, and Times were somehow unreal).…
Put simply, even fonts optimized for web use (which is a whole thing: ask a type designer) will not look good in every browser and OS.
Jeffrey Zeldman, Real Fonts and Rendering: The New Elephant in the Room
22 December, 2009
24 ways: The Advent Calendar for Web Developers
Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3319
Fred Blasdel said:
You’ll always draw ire for having stumbled into being the Chief of the cargo-cult side of Web Standards, with so-called ‘XHTML’ as the false idol. You did a lot of good, but not without ambiguating the nomenclature with a lot of feel-good bullshit.
You often find yourself as a mediator between designery folks (who you have a strong grasp over) and technical implementors (who will always hold a grudge against you for muddying the discourse). Asking people to wear blue toques does not particularly affect this balance.
“Cargo cult.” I love that phrase. But I’m not sure I agree with your assessment.
XHTML, with its clearer and stricter rules, came out just as many of us were rediscovering semantic markup and learning of its rich value in promoting content. It wasn’t a coincidence that we took this W3C specification seriously and helped promote it to our readers, colleagues, etc. The stricter, clearer rules of XHTML 1.0 helped enforce a new mindset among web designers and developers, who had previously viewed HTML as an “anything goes” medium (because browsers treated it that way, still do, and quite probably always will; indeed HTML5 codifies this, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing).
Future versions of XHTML became a dead-end not because there was no value in strict, semantic, structural markup, but because the people charged with moving XHTML forward lost touch with reality and with developers. This is why HTML5 was born.
That’s history and it’s human behavior. But those subsequent twists and turns in the story don’t mean that standardistas who supported XHTML 1.0 (or still do) and who used it as a teaching tool when explaining semantic markup to their colleagues were wrong or misguided to do so.
That some technical people in the standards community think we were wrong is known, but their belief does not make it so.
That a handful of those technical people express their belief loudly, rudely, and with belligerent and unconcealed schadenfreude does not make their point of view true or persuasive to the rest of us. It just makes them look like the close-minded, socially maladroit, too-early-toilet-trained, tiny-all-male-world-inhabiting pinheads they are.
Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3108
Categories
A Design Apart Q&A
“Content informs design; design without content is decoration. Content has the same relationship to design that product has to advertising. Good ads are based on the product; good designs come from and facilitate the content. This is one reason we bring content strategy to every design assignment, and one reason we insist on working with real content, not lorem ipsum (placeholder) content. Nothing is sadder than a beautiful design that works great with lorem ipsum but doesn’t actually support the real content.”
Categories
More Web Fonts
Ellen Lupton and Jeffrey Zeldman talk about web fonts, part 2. That is all.
This has been a belated part of Web Type Day.
Categories
Mission of Promo
The third edition of Designing With Web Standards has hit the shelves; excerpts and interviews are hitting digital airwaves everywhere. Among the latest:
- Creative Expert interviews Zeldman and Marcotte about DWWS3e, live, with call-in questions. Very nice. Broadcast 30 October, 2009; podcast published 31 October 2009.
- Author Talk: Jeffrey Zeldman Interview, an audio podcast at Peachpit. “Author and co-founder of The Web Standards Project Jeffrey Zeldman talks to publisher Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel about the 3rd Edition of his book Designing with Web Standards. He also reveals why writers ‘can’t edit themselves.'” Published 11 November 2009.
- The Future of Web Standards is a free sample chapter for your reading pleasure. Published 12 November 2009.
- Jeffrey Zeldman On The Setup, a Waferbaby joint, takes a break from the DWWS3e fever to talk hardware and software. Published 13 November 2009.
Coming soon:
- Video interview with Michael Nolan
- Typography Q&A with Ellen Lupton in Print Magazine
- And more!
Watch for major announcements Monday Tuesday.
Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2902
Categories
Beep ’n Me, Live
Join Ethan Marcotte and me tonight at 8:00 PM EDT on the CreativeXpert Live Show, an interview and podcast with live listener call-in via Skype and Twitter.
We’ll discuss the newly released third edition of Designing with Web Standards and such topics from its pages as selling standards to reluctant clients and bosses, changing what support for IE6 means, understanding and transitioning to HTML5, neato CSS3-based design techniques you can use right now, and more.
Tune in, call in, rock on.
Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2810