Categories
37signals A Book Apart A List Apart Acclaim Adobe An Event Apart books Brands business Career Collectibles Community conferences content Coudal Partners Deck, the Designers E-Books editorial eric meyer Ethan Marcotte Free Advice glamorous Grief Happy Cog™ HTML5 Indieweb industry Jason Santa Maria Jeremy Keith launches Mentoring My Back Pages New York City NYC Products Publications Publisher's Note Publishing Responsibility Responsive Web Design San Francisco Small Business speaking State of the Web Surviving The Essentials The Profession This never happens to Gruber Typekit User Experience UX Wah! Web Design Web Design History Websites Wit and Wisdom Working writing zeldman.com

Of Books and Conferences Past

Some of A Book Apart’s 50-odd primary paperbacks, arranged like a color spectrum, and photographed against a piece of wood.

Just as nobody who marries spends their wedding day planning their divorce, almost nobody starts a business contemplating what rocks it will eventually splinter and break upon, and how to build a life raft for themselves.

I take that back. Some folks I know, who played pivotal roles in the evolution of the web, actually started their businesses with a clear goal of selling them to somebody bigger. Like Typekit was designed to sell to Adobe. Or Blogger was designed to sell to Google.

Such folks, several of whom are now post-economy wealthy, lived in the Bay Area in the 1990s and early 2000s, where building to flip was widely discussed and accepted.

Meanwhile, in NYC…

I, on the other hand, live in New York. So I started my web businesses (like Happy Cog™ design studio) to serve clients, as NYC creatives have always done, and with no understanding that I would one day need to leave the company and should have an exit plan. Why would I exit? Why would I ever stop doing work that brought excitement and meaning to my life?

Similarly, I started my personal site with its “Ask Dr. Web” tutorials in 1995, and co-founded my web design publication, A List Apart, in 1997, for the sheer joy of sharing knowledge, with no concept of making money, let alone of one day selling the business.

Eventually, despite my naivete, and mostly thanks to Jim Coudal and Jason Fried, A List Apart began making money by running one carefully screened ad per page. I used that money, as you will expect, to pay our writers, editors, and producers. And when it came time to stop running ads, I slowed our publication schedule, paid writers out of my own pocket, and worked with a small crew of fellow volunteers, who published ALA because we believed in the mission. (Still do.)

If I had come of business age in San Francisco, I likely would have sold A List Apart to somebody like O’Reilly, but that was never my plan because I make toys to play with, not to give away.

An ecosystem apart

In spite of A List Apart’s running at a loss, in the early 2010s I co-founded two businesses that spun out of it: An Event Apart design conference with Eric Meyer, and A Book Apart with Mandy Brown (later replaced by CEO Katel LeDu) and Jason Santa Maria. And during those first years, business was great.

We published HTML5 For Web Designers the day after Steve Jobs, waving an iPhone on the world’s biggest stage (okay, sitting at his desk), announced that Flash was dead because HTML5 would bring app-like dynamism to the web using open standards instead of proprietary code. It (our first book, I mean) sold brilliantly. “Gee, publishing isn’t that hard” I naively told myself. (No, I knew it was hard. My favorite publishers had been laying off my favorite editors for ten years before my partners and I took the plunge. But the early success did make me think the books we published about web design would always find a large, eager audience. In time, I would learn otherwise.)

And while we began the publishing house by relying on the best writers we knew personally to write about the topics they were most passionate about, I’m proud to say that, as we went along, we also discovered brilliant first-time book authors, helping them create perfectly polished, fluff-free manuscripts that made genuine contributions to our readers’ understanding of UX and all it entails. (And not just to our readers. The insights they brought to their work after digesting our books rubbed off on their colleagues.)

In giving these brilliant writers a platform, we not only helped them take their careers to the next level, we also helped people who create web content think and work better, which in turn helped the people who used the websites, applications, and products our readers designed and built. Of that, I am proud.

Stay hungry

An Event Apart (RIP) was also a damned fine early success. Web designers liked our innovation of a multi-day, single-track conference, with a holistic approach to web design, code, and content, and unifying themes between the individual talks. Our freaking-amazing speakers debuted Huge Ideas including Mobile First and Responsive Web Design—ideas which, like perfect contextual menus in UX, arrived at the very moment designers needed them.

Not only that, but these humble geniuses also sat in the auditorium with our audience for all three days of each conference event: listening to each other’s presentations, and updating their own presentations to better bounce off each other’s ideas and the evolving themes of that particular show. 

I could spend hours telling you how our producer Toby M. made miracles happen at every show, or how person-in-charge Marci E. brought joy to our community. How many of our speakers became authors. How some “graduated” from An Event Apart as newcomers replaced them. How the diversity of our speaking line-up, which wasn’t terrific in 2008, improved greatly each year. (Not that we ever said, “We need another black speaker” or “We need a trans speaker” or what-have-you. Just that we learned to swim outside the pool we came from, and discover great talent everywhere.) Our speakers were also almost uniformly Just Nice Good People, which doesn’t always happen when you’re collecting the greatest minds in an industry. 

That’s not even to mention the incredible people who attended our shows, some of whom became lifetime friends for me.

So why, given the joy these businesses brought to everyone connected to them, including me, would my partners and I have even conceived of an exit strategy? We wanted the Good Times to roll on forever.

But of course they never do.

Things end

COVID did in An Event Apart. Some conferences survived, of course. Different priorities, different overheads, different business models. Some that survived do not pay their speakers. Others, where the conference is an adjunct to a bigger business, laid off or reassigned conference staff while the pandemic made live events impossible. Others that survived mostly rely on volunteer labor, whereas we had paid staff. They were worth their weight in platinum, and we’d have paid them more (because they were worth more) if the pandemic and six-figure hotel contracts hadn’t made continuing the show impossible. My partner and I earned nothing during the business’s last five years, and got personally stuck with a six-figure debt when the event closed. It is what it is.

Although books should be COVID-proof, multiple financial problems eventually beset our publishing house as well. For most of the run of the business, my partner and I earned nothing beyond the glow of contributing to our community’s knowledge. We paid our CEO, authors, and editors, kept nothing for ourselves, and tried, oh how we tried, to keep the business going as its revenues tanked.

Speaking only for myself, I’ve learned that I am good at starting businesses and keeping them going creatively, as long as somebody else figures out the money. I suck at that, and I’m obsessed with the notions of fairness and self-sacrifice that were drummed into me by a narcissistic family that valued me for taking on the roles they were emotionally incapable of handling—such as bringing up my baby brother in my father’s absence, which no child is  equipped or should be asked to do, and yet it happens all the time. Growing up this way made me put my own self-interest last. Which is also why it never occurred to me to plan an exit. And by the time I needed to do so, the businesses were not in shape to sell.

Closing a conference is bad, but attendees can go to other conferences, and speakers can speak at other conferences; closing a conference doesn’t end a community. It sucks for the business but doesn’t strand participants.

But closing a publishing house hurts like hell, and you feel you let everybody down. I know how much our closing hurt some of our authors, and I think about that, instead of the good we achieved, when I look back. 

No doubt when my partner and I write the large personal checks to cover our deceased business’s outstanding debts, we’ll be regretting the harm our closing caused, not basking in the warm glow of how many careers we changed for the better. Like the standup comedian who obsesses about the guy who’s frowning at table 3, and doesn’t hear the laughter of the rest of the crowd. We also, hopefully, won’t focus too closely on our financial wreckage. Just pay the bill, and move on.

Anyway, I hadn’t publicly addressed the endings of these businesses, so I figured it was time to do so. I’m sharing my experience only. If you ask any of the people I worked with on these projects, they might have a different story to tell. And that would be their story, and it would be every bit as valid as anything I’ve said here.

I also didn’t ask permission of my partners, speakers, or authors before sharing these thoughts. Probably I should have. But, hey. As I’ve said. I’m speaking here only for myself.

So, anyway.

Parting gift

Is it worth the risk of starting a web-related business that isn’t a venture-backed startup? I still think it is, and I applaud all who try. Heck, I might even do so myself someday. If you’re doubtful because of (((gestures at everything))), it might be worth noting that I started Happy Cog™ during the dot-com crash, when studios were closing all around me. And we launched A Book Apart during the world financial crisis of late 2008. Don’t let (((all this))) deter you from trying something bold. Let me know when you do. I’ll keep watching the skies.

P.S. Under swell third-party ownership and management, Happy Cog is still going strong. Check it out!

Categories
glamorous

I’m Here

All my life I’ve known I was “creative” and “different.” Only recently have I realized that I’m both neurodivergent and bisexual.

In my youth, as I struggled with drugs, alcoholism, depression, and underemployment, it never crossed my mind that I was neurodivergent—not that the term existed then.

Even after I was diagnosed with an Anxiety Disorder some ten-plus years ago, I didn’t make the neurodivergence connection. It was only as my ex and I began coming to grips with our kid’s autism that I began to recognize many of her autistic qualities in myself and other members of our family.

And it’s only in the past year or two, and only with my daughter’s help, that I’ve come to realize I’m bisexual. 

I’ve known I was attracted to women since age five, when my mom took me into the powder room at B. Altman, where I gazed with open mouth as ladies touched up their lipstick, fluffed their hair, and adjusted how their bodies fit into their dresses. I was dressed in a wee suit with short pants and a bow tie. Two of the ladies picked me up and called me handsome. A lady kissed me. I smelled flowers as she enveloped me in a hug. A deep hunger was born in that moment. (I know. That sentence is gross.) Years later, in college, as I watched the adoration sequence during my first viewing of Fellini’s 8 1/2, I recognized my own experience of awakening.

Yet for all those years of knowing I loved women, I didn’t understand that the love I felt for male friends could also be a romantic attraction. 

How could I not know that? I suppose it’s because the other drive was more dominant—and, let’s face it, was also far more socially acceptable in those benighted days. As a short, nonathletic, curly-haired, unaggressive Jewish male in a world that beat me down for every one of those adjectives, I suppose I wasn’t eager to throw an extra (and even heavier) albatross around my own neck. 

So much so that I could not accept or even recognize that aspect of myself—not even when my unconscious tried to tell me.

I remember writing a short story about a failed connection between two male high school friends. Thinking I was another D.H. Lawrence, and that my hermetically sealed tale was secretly ripe with deep meaning and profound feelings, I shared the story with my peers in the graduate creative writing program where I was hiding to avoid growing up. 

A colleague in the program, who was a far better writer than me, and an out gay man, disdainfully labeled my work “another failed male bonding story.” I thanked him for his honesty and because his ability to use words that way amazed me, but I didn’t understand why he didn’t understand—because it was I who didn’t understand. (Understand?)

And so the decades have passed.

At this point in my life, being single works for me, and, after two marriages, I have enough to get on with, just working and being a dad. So why even share these fragments and evasions? Surely who I find attractive is of interest to absolutely no one.

Except that Fascists in my country are drawing lines, turning back the clock on human rights and human decency, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit silently warming my feet at the hearth of some late-recognized private truth.

If they want to outlaw queerness and Blackness and ovaries and pretty much any identity other than Ward or June Cleaver, then they’re not just a threat to humanity and a wrong turn in the arc of history, they’re my enemy to fight. I’m right here, motherfuckers.

Categories
glamorous Standup video

Crash Course in Judaism

Transcript

I’m Zeldman, I work on Team 51.

_APPLAUSE_

Yes! We make wonderful WordPress websites for interesting, deserving people and organizations, and *this* is my Crash Course in Judaism. Enjoy.

My mother and father are ethnically Jewish, my father was an atheist, and my mother was Canadian, so we celebrated Christmas.

_LAUGHTER_

We celebrated Christmas ’til I was six, and right before my sixth Christmas, my Nana came to visit. And she looked at the tree, and she looked at all the stuff, and she said, “These boys won’t know they’re Jewish.” So my parents were shamed and changed to Hanukah.

_LAUGHTER_

Now, Hanukah’s cool. Christmas is cool. We won’t get into saying which one’s cooler. We know.

_LAUGHTER_

But either one’s fine for a kid if you just keep going with it. Dropping Christmas at age six, I think that was the start of my Goth years, right there.

_LAUGHTER_

I felt so disappointed, so alienated. And, you know, before I turned six, like, I would go into Kindergarten and my friend would say, “Santa Claus brought me a rocket launcher and a grenade launcher and a Tommy gun and a machine gun and a Japanese Prisoner-of-War camp, what did Santa bring you?”

And I would say “Santa Claus brought me socks and a book.”

Because we weren’t materialists.

And then after age six, they would say, “Santa brought me a neutron bomb and an atomic bomb, and the Great Garloo, a monster that you can control by remote control, and a flame-shooting monster and a set of daggers, what did Santa bring you?”

And I would say, “We’re Jewish.”

_LAUGHTER_

The “fuck you” was implied.

_LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE_

And so … I didn’t get beat up as a Jew until I moved to Pittsburgh, but that was later, and I’m not going to get to that part of the story. But when I was living in New York areas and Connecticut, there were enough Jews that people were sort of laid-back about their hatred of Jews, and they would just be okay with it. They would even be okay with my saying “We’re Jewish,” and there was no retribution from that.

Anyway, I asked my Dad, “What’s God?” and he said:

“Okay, so before science, people thought there were a lot of gods, because they needed a supernatural explanation for everything.

“So if there was a fire, the fire god was angry.

“And if there was a flood, the water god was angry.

“If there was a snowstorm, the snow god was angry.

“And the Jews improved that by saying there’s only ONE God, and he’s *VERY* angry

_LAUGHTER_

“But there isn’t one.”

And then I said, “If there’s no God and we don’t go to Temple, why are we Jews?”

And my Dad said, “Hitler would’ve killed us.”

And that was my satisfaction with that.

Anyway, when I was twelve-and-a-half, my parents came to me, after no Jewish stuff for a long time, and they said, “Jeffrey, would you like to be Bar Mitzvahed?”

And I said, “What’s that?”

And they said, “You make a speech and then you get money.”

_LAUGHTER_

So I said “yes,” and, really, I’ve been doing it ever since. Thank you, Judaism!

Categories
family glamorous Zeldman

The Wind-Down

LISTENING to Coltrane. Taking a break after assembling American Girl doll bunk beds. The tuxedo cat has appropriated Ava’s American Girl doll tent as his personal summer house. Ava is making up a song about wishing on a star. End of summer. Happy.

Categories
Applications architecture art direction books business client services Code Community content creativity Design development editorial Happy Cog™ launches links people Publications Publishing social networking software Web Design Websites

The Amanda Project

Designed by Happy Cog and launched today, The Amanda Project is a social media network, creative writing project, interactive game, and book series combined:

The Amanda Project is the story of Amanda Valentino, told through an interactive website and book series for readers aged 13 & up. On the website, readers are invited to become a part of the story as they help the main characters search for Amanda.

The writing-focused social media network is designed and written as if by characters from the Amanda novels, and encourages readers to enter the novel’s world by joining the search for Amanda, following clues and reading passages that exist only online, and ultimately helping to shape the course of the Amanda narrative across eight novels. (The first Amanda novel—Invisible I, written by Melissa Kantor—comes out 22 September.)

The site developed over a year of intense creative collaboration between Happy Cog and Fourth Story Media, a book publisher and new media company spearheaded by publishing whiz Lisa Holton. Prior to starting Fourth Story, Lisa was was President, Scholastic Trade Publishing and Book Fairs; managed the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; and oversaw development of The 39 Clues. Before that she spent nearly a decade developing numerous bestselling, franchise-launching series at Disney.

Happy Cog‘s New York office developed this project. The team:

Equally vital to the project’s success were Fourth Story’s leaders and partners, including:

  • Lorraine Shanley, Principal Advisor
  • Ariel Aberg-Riger (website, Twitter), Creative Development & Marketing Manager
  • JillEllyn Riley, Editorial Director
  • Dale Robbins, Creative Director
  • David Stack, Director, Digital Partnerships
  • Melissa Kantor, Writer
  • Peter Silsbee, Writer
  • Polly Kanevsky, Art Director
  • Sam Gerstenzang, Technology Consultant

Today’s launch is not the end of our relationship with Fourth Story Media. The Amanda Project will continue to evolve, and Happy Cog will remain an active partner in its direction and growth. We thank our brilliant collaborators and congratulate them on today’s milestone.

Read more

[tags]amanda, amandaproject, theamandaproject, TAP, happycog, design, webdesign, contentstrategy, userexperience, publishing, books, aarongustafson, lizdanzico, erinkissane, whitneyhess, mattgoldenberg, kellymccarthy, jasonsantamaria, jeffreyzeldman, lisaholton, dalerobbins, davidstack, JillEllynRiley, ArielAberg-Riger[/tags]

Categories
glamorous Zeldman

Pain is my alarm clock

Today the pain woke me at 5:00 AM. One week ago today I had surgery. While most of me has bounced back, parts look like I disagreed with a mule. There is tenderness where a hernia repair botched by NYU interns 20 years ago finally got fixed. There’s throbbing, tumescent, Tim-Burton-directed pain in other places, where other things were done.

Jeffrey Zeldman

The past 12 months have been … interesting. I fired a client. My lead designer in New York decided to strike out on his own. I woke one morning with a toe the size of Cleveland, and after four months of practitioner hot potato, was diagnosed with gout and osteoarthritis. My dad had heart surgery, and airline incompetence got me to his side after it was over. (Fortunately he survived.) One of my businesses yielded a tax bill I couldn’t pay. I required intensive periodontal care. My hernia, supposedly fixed two decades ago, popped open again.

Somewhere in the middle of this—around Thanksgiving—my beloved wife screwed up the courage to confess that she was unhappy.

A year of couples counseling could not save the marriage. We did, however, save the family. Our child is well, we co-parent beautifully, and, with a lot of work on both sides, the ex and I have become good friends. Better friends, maybe, than when we were husband and wife. Friends for life. Lemonade for 200, Alex.

Holding onto yesterday

The dizzying marital sea change dwarfed everything else. At first I was stunned, like an accident victim. During one of the comic episodes of my toe enlargement mystery, I found myself alone in a hospital gown, about to have an MRI. In the mirror I reminded myself of my hospital-gowned father, whose surgery I had just attended. The doctor bustled in to ask me questions before the test. “How you doing,” he said. It took all my strength not to babble, “My wife is leaving me.”

We threw a Christmas party in the studio. My wife and child were among the guests, the wife looking radiant, the child frolicking adorably. I sensed that people viewed me as lucky and successful, and most were happy for me. They didn’t know that I was about to lose the only thing that matters. In the midst of happy celebrants, I felt alone.

During the inauguration of President Obama, while much of the world experienced hope, I focused on Laura Bush standing beside George Bush, and wondered why their marriage endured, while mine was falling apart.

It was like that. Then it got better.

The love you make

One day I realized I could not change what would happen, but I could influence how it happened. I could be the angry denier, hanging onto what no longer exists. Or I could embrace change with love and no conditions. After all, it was not about me, it was about us. And the most important thing was that the most important one of us be protected and continue to feel safe and loved.

Once you figure that out, the rest is easy, if you have a good partner.

By the time I started letting people know about the divorce, I was almost okay with it. I had stopped feeling that things were happening to me, and started taking control of my life. I enjoyed family time and single time. Although my depressed mother had raised me to view self-love as narcissism, I began taking care of myself. I ate sensibly, exercised, saw friends, took time to relax.

As part of that self-care, I opted not to leave unexploded land mines in my system.

During yesterday’s initial follow-up, the surgeon told me I was doing well—recovering fast. I celebrated by walking three miles down Fifth Avenue and meeting a friend for lunch. Then the pain told me to rush home and lie down, and I did as the pain commanded.

The pain that wakes me is good pain. It is the pain of taking care of yourself. The pain of recovery.

[tags]myglamorouslife, zeldman[/tags]

Categories
Interviews Press Publications Publishing reportage reprints Standards Typography Usability User Experience UX Web Design Web Standards wisdom Zeldman zeldman.com

.net interview

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.

Update, 27 May 2009

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]

Categories
Press Zeldman

I know that guy

Ooh, la la! Jeffrey Zeldman, photographed by Daniel Byrne for .Net Magazine.

[tags]zeldman, .net, press, magazine, webdesign, carygrant, handsome, helloladies[/tags]

Categories
Design development Redesigns Web Design work Working Zeldman zeldman.com

Redesign template finals

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]

Categories
CSS Design development Happy Cog™ HTML Web Design Web Standards wordpress work Working XHTML Zeldman zeldman.com

Orange you glad

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]

Categories
CSS Design Web Design Web Standards Zeldman zeldman.com

Alternate color scheme

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]

Categories
Appearances Browsers content creativity CSS Design Fonts HTML Layout Web Design Web Standards Websites wordpress work Working XHTML Zeldman zeldman.com

Redesign in progress

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.

Have a look.

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]

Categories
art direction books Community content creativity CSS Design downloads Free Happy Cog™ HTML Ideas industry Information architecture jobs Layout Publications Publishing reprints State of the Web The Essentials The Profession Tools Typography Usability User Experience UX W3C Web Design Web Standards Websites Working writing Zeldman

“Taking Your Talent to the Web” is now a free downloadable book

Taking Your Talent To The Web, a guide for the transitioning designer, by L. Jeffrey Zeldman. Hand model: Tim Brown.

RATED FIVE STARS at Amazon.com since the day it was published, Taking Your Talent to the Web (PDF) is now a free downloadable book from zeldman.com:

I wrote this book in 2001 for print designers whose clients want websites, print art directors who’d like to move into full–time web and interaction design, homepage creators who are ready to turn pro, and professionals who seek to deepen their web skills and understanding.

Here we are in 2009, and print designers and art directors are scrambling to move into web and interaction design.

The dot-com crash killed this book. Now it lives again. While browser references and modem speeds may reek of 2001, much of the advice about transitioning to the web still holds true.

It’s yours. Enjoy.

Oh, yes, here’s that ancient Amazon page.


Short Link

Update – now with bookmarks

Attention, K-Mart shoppers. The PDF now includes proper Acrobat bookmarks, courtesy of Robert Black. Thanks, Robert!

Categories
Apple art direction better-know-a-speaker business Career Design fashion glamorous Happy Cog™ Images industry Interviews iphone links New York City NYC Press Publications Publishing style The Profession Zeldman

Ready For My Closeup

Ready For My Closeup

DanielByrne [warning! Flash site with JavaScript auto-expand full-screen window] came to Happy Cog‘s New York office to shoot me for an upcoming feature story in .Net Magazine, “the UK’s leading magazine for web designers and developers.”

What can I say? I’m a sucker for the gentle touch of a make-up pad. Or of anything, really. I love this photo (shot by Byrne with my iPhone) because it captures the fact that I’m still really a four-year-old. It also shows what a genuine photographer can do with even the humblest of tools.

[tags]photos, photography, shoot, danielbyrne, photographer, zeldman, jeffreyzeldman, profile, bio, interview, .net, .netmag, .netmagazine, .netmagazineUK, myglamorouslife, iphone, candid, shoots, shots, Apple[/tags]

Categories
Design industry Interviews Press Web Design Web Standards Websites work Zeldman

What are web standards?

What are web standards? And why should I care? A fun new clip from the BigThink marathon Zeldman interview. See also this and that. Or just click the “CHANNELS” button in the video above.

[tags]zeldman, webstandards, bigthink, interview[/tags]