There was a point in the 90s when I felt like a sucker for doing HTML and CSS.”
The .net Zeldman interview is available for your downloading pleasure (4.2 MB PDF). For more of the best in web design and development, visit netmag.co.uk.
An HTML version of the interview has now been posted on .net’s website.
[tags]webdesign, webdevelopment, magazine, interview, .net, netmag, interview, interviews, zeldman, jeffreyzeldman[/tags]
After viewing this site’s redesign in progress, Peter Petrus wrote:
[Y]ou’re using footer to clear floats (content + sidebar). This creates a large drawback, because before footer is downloaded and displayed in the browser, parent wrapper lacks any background.
It means that we’re staring on black text / orange background combo for a few moments. Well, few moments now, but should you put any unresponsive widgets in the sidebar, everything can render much slower. Having main content flash like this isn’t very pleasant – especially when you named the redesign “Designing from the content out”.
Solution is very simple – use ‘:after’ clearing for the main wrapper. Sure, it won’t work on IE, but 1) setting width to wrapper sets hasLayout and triggers clearing 2) #footer is still there, in any case.
I’d read about using “:after” clearing but hadn’t implemented it and thought I could solve the problem an easier way. This afternoon, with about five minutes’ work, I did so.
I solved the orange background flash by moving the faux column background image up in the CSS hierarchy.
wrapper element only.body element as well.Doing so fixed the orange background flash problem, because the browser no longer has to wait for the footer to clear before showing the background image.
Compare body element on new z.css and previous z-bak.css. (Likewise, compare body on alt.css and alt-bak.css.)
[tags]css, workarounds, clear, float[/tags]
Note: Top left and top right footer elements rotate. ALA element (top middle) changes every two weeks, upon publication. Bottom three elements are static, at least for now.
Thanks to Mark Huot for the rotation script (same one we use on Happy Cog) and Noel Jackson, Daniel Mall, and Media Temple for the love and support.
A couple more templates to go, and then we can build this thing. Can’t wait.
[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, design, redesign, designingfromthecontentout[/tags]
Working on the footer of zeldman.com redesign. Once footer is done, going to adjust header and Twitter sidebar blip.
[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, design, redesign, css[/tags]
And the saga continues. I took a few days off from the redesign project while in Seattle. Today I designed and quickly prototyped a simple masthead. Have a look. I’m going to live with it for a while.
Although the WayBack machine did not preserve any of this website’s first year, it did capture quite a lot of our second year, 1996. Behold the splendor of the early web:
And much more. Enjoy!
Thanks for the great feedback, folks. For those who find the orange background objectionable, I’ll offer a user-selectable alternate color scheme, like this one (quick sketch, ignore the color of the printer’s mark at the top, final colors may vary).
[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, redesign, webdesign, css, code[/tags]
Here’s a little something for a Wednesday evening. (Or wherever day and time it is in your part of the world.)
The body and bottom of the next zeldman.com design are now finished. Tomorrow I start working on the top.
Looks extra sweet in iPhone.
I’m designing from the content out. Meaning that I designed the middle of the page (the part you read) first. Because that’s what this site is about.
When I was satisfied that it was not only readable but actually encouraged reading, I brought in colors and started working on the footer. (The colors, I need not point out to longtime visitors, hearken back to the zeldman.com brand as it was in the 1990s.)
The footer, I reckoned, was the right place for my literary and software products.
I designed the grid in my head, verified it on sketch paper, and laid out the footer bits in Photoshop just to make sure they fit and looked right. Essentially, though, this is a design process that takes place outside Photoshop. That is, it starts in my head, gets interpreted via CSS, viewed in a browser, and tweaked.
Do not interpret this as me dumping on Photoshop. I love Photoshop and could not live or work without it. But especially for a simple site focused on reading, I find it quicker and easier to tweak font settings in code than to laboriously render pages in Photoshop.
If you view source, I haven’t optimized the CSS. (There’s no sense in doing so yet, as I still have to design the top of the page.)
I thought about waiting till I was finished before showing anything. That, after all, is what any sensible designer would do. But this site has a long history of redesigning in public, and the current design has been with us at least four years too long. Since I can’t snap my fingers and change it, sharing is the next best thing.
A work in progress. Like ourselves.
[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, redesign, webdesign, css, code[/tags]
In the tradition of our classic 1990s wallpapers, please enjoy Zeldman Desktop No. 211. For your home or office screen beautification needs.
[tags]desktop, wallpaper, macos, macosx[/tags]
Bigthink.com/jeffreyzeldman is your BigThink channel for all your BigThink Jeffrey Zeldman needs. Now playing at that URL are three Zeldman interview clips for your pleasure:
View early and view often. Happy watching and blogging.
[tags]bigthink, zeldman, jeffreyzeldman, interviews, internet, web, design, history, journalism, online, onlinejournalism, webpublishing, opensource, webstandards[/tags]
Join me on Blog Talk Radio at 6:00 PM Eastern Time on Wednesday 1 April 2009.
We will interview best-selling author, designer, and web standards evangelist Jeffrey Zeldman will about his career, his books, and the future of the internet and social media.
Join us live. Bring your questions about web design, web standards, client services, independent publishing, blogging, book authoring, DWWS 3e, or anything else you’d like to talk about.
Comments off.
[tags]design, webdesign, zeldman, radio, interview[/tags]
Now available on streaming video, Jeffrey Zeldman: Understanding Web Design — is a good quality 42:40 capture of my October 25, 2008 presentation at Gain: AIGA Business and Design Conference.
Author and Happy Cog founder Jeffrey Zeldman answers the question: what does a web designer need most? Skills and knowledge of software, of course, but empathy—the ability to think about and empathize with your user—is by far the most important. Good useful education is hard to find, and within companies there is often no departmental standardization. Good graphic design is not the same as good user experience design, he explains. In fact, “good web design is invisible”—it feels simple and authentic because it’s about the character of the content, not the character of the designer.
In addition to the streaming video, a surprisingly accurate PDF transcription is available, along with a downloadable copy of my slides. (The typeface is Joshua Darden’s Jubilat.)
[tags]AIGA, GAIN, Gain:AIGA, Zeldman, design, presentation, video, webdesign[/tags]
Have left town for a funeral. Will be gone a week. Updates may be sparse.
It’s been a month for milestones.
On May 31, my site turned 13 years old.
On June 7, making the previous milestone and all others possible, I had 15 years without a drink or drug.
On Saturday June 28, Carrie and I celebrated five years of marriage by hiring a babysitter, eating a meal, and bumming around the east village.
Between these landmarks came a flight to Pittsburgh and back-to-back train trips from New York to Washington DC, and Boston.
In the last-named burg we put on a two-day design conference for people who make websites.
At home during this same period, our daughter outgrew last month’s clothes, began swimming, got a big-girl bed, attended and graduated summer camp, stopped being even slightly afraid of school, hung out with her grandma, and advanced so much intellectually and emotionally that it would qualify as science fiction if it weren’t the lived experience of ’most everyone who has kids.
Between all that came the usual tumult of client meetings, client projects, and potential new business, giddily intermingled with the publication of two A List Apart issues. Make that three issues as of tomorrow.
Been busy.
If I had to pick an image to symbolize the month, it would be me on a rerouted slow Amtrak train from Boston to New York, using an iPhone and one finger to peck out a strategic response to an 80 page RFP.
That would have been the image, but now there’s a new one. For now there’s today.
On the calendar it is Happy Cog New York’s moving day. Today I pack up what for 18 years was either my apartment or Happy Cog’s New York City headquarters (and was most often both).
I hit bottom in this place. Ended a short-lived, tragically wrong first marriage. Rebuilt my life one cell at a time. Found self. Found love. Became a web designer. Found the love of my life. Married well, had a magical child. Wrote two books. Made money and lost it a couple of times over. Founded a magazine. Co-founded a movement. Worked for others. Freelanced. Founded an agency. Grew it.
It all happened here.
This gently declining space that has been nothing but an office since December and will soon be nothing at all to me, this place I will empty and vacate in the next few hours, has seen everything from drug withdrawal to the first stirrings of childbirth. Happiness, anguish, farting and honeymoons. Everything. Everything but death.
Even after our family moved, the place was never empty. The heiress to an American fine art legacy came here, to this dump, to talk about a potential project. Two gentlemen who make an extraordinary food product came here many times to discuss how their website redesign was going.
When I wasn’t meeting someone for lunch, I went downstairs to this wonderful little place to take away a small soup and a sandwich, which I ate at my desk while reading nytimes.com. Helming the take-away lunch place are three Indian women who are just the sweetest, nicest people ever. The new studio is just far enough away that I will rarely see these ladies any more. I will miss them.
I will miss Josef, the super here, with his big black brush mustache and gruff, gently-East-European-accented voice. He will miss me, too. He just told me so, while we were arranging for the freight elevator. We were kind to him after his heart attack and he has been kind to us since he arrived—the last in a long series of supers caught between an aging building and a rental agent that prefers not to invest in keeping the place up. The doormen and porters, here, too, some of whom I’ve known for nearly twenty years, my God. Can’t think about that.
I will miss being able to hit the gym whenever I feel like it and shower right in my workplace.
And that is all.
This is the death of something but it is the birth of something more. We take everything with us, all our experiences (until age robs us of them one by one, and even then, they are somewhere—during the worst of my mother’s Alzheimer’s, she reacted, however subtly, to Sinatra). We take everything with us. The stink and glory of this place will stay on me even when we are set up in our slick new space. It will be with me long after the landlord’s collection letters have stopped. This place, what happened here, will live until my head cracks like a coconut, and then some.
And now I pre-pack. Adieu, adieu.
[tags]happycog, moves, moving, newyork, NYC, design, webdesign, alistapart, wedding, anniversary, zeldman, zeldman.com, 5years, 13years, 15years[/tags]
Q. I’m searching for your archive. Whenever I find a really good blog, I like to start at the beginning so I can understand better some of what you’re talking about. And I can’t find any link to your archives.
A. Thanks for writing. I started my site in 1995. There weren’t blogging tools back then, hence there aren’t archives in the sense you are describing. I published via hand-coded HTML until around 2004, when I began using WordPress. All my pre-WordPress content is still online; you just have to keep hitting the “PREVIOUS” button to get to it. Sorry about that.
[tags]writing, blogging, wordpress, archive, archives, site, data, organization, structure, dailyreport, zeldman, zeldman.com[/tags]