Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 107
March 26, 2010
George Lois Tee
TypographyShop presents the first design in its new series, the Ten Commandments of George Lois, created with the approval and cooperation of the hall of fame art director himself.
The new shirt reads: "Great ideas can't be tested. Only mediocre ideas can be tested." Sport it at your next client meeting. Wear it, live it.
Younger readers may ask, "Who is George Lois?" Typography Shop supplies a mini-bio:
From his groundbreaking work at Doyle Dane Bernbach to his controversial...
March 25, 2010
Blur
Presumably in order to avoid having to pay the child model and secure a release, Google deliberately blurred the Gap Kid model's face on the giant outdoor Gap Kids poster before uploading this photo (and hundreds of seamlessly interwoven related photos) to Google Maps Street View.
Notice that, unlike the Gap Kids model, the human beings on the street do not get to have their features blurred. Presumably, humans photographed in Google Street Maps don't sue, but models do.
Does...
A List Apart: Just the Stats
Continuing with our "data, and what we can learn from it" theme, here are A List Apart's four most popular individual pages this week (excluding the home page, with 178,270 page views). Pay particular attention to the publication dates:
Page Views This
Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web by Daniel Mall, MARCH 9
Drop-Down Menus, Horizontal Style by Nick Rigby, JUNE 29
CSS Design: Taming Lists by Mark Newhouse, SEPTEMBER 27...
March 24, 2010
Love Me Long Time
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...
In The Wind
When the young Bobby Womack told Sam Cooke he didn't understand [Bob:] Dylan's vocal style, Cooke explained that: "from now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth."
Only in dreams
I dreamed about you again last night.
I guess it will pass.
March 23, 2010
Crowdsourcing Dickens
As an experiment in new new media thinking, I recently crowdsourced a new new literature version of Charles Dickens's musty old old old lit chestnut, Great Expectations—the familiar tale of Pip, Ms Havisham, the convict Magwitch, et al.
Creative excellence and spin-worthy results required a pool of 10,000 people who had never read Great Expectations. Fortunately, I had access to 10,000 recent American college graduates, so that was no problem.
To add a dab of pseudoscience and ...
Crowdsourcing Great Expectations
As an experiment in new new media thinking, I recently crowdsourced a new new literature version of Charles Dickens's musty old old old lit chestnut, Great Expectations—the familiar tale of Pip, Ms Havisham, the convict Magwitch, et al.
Creative excellence and spin-worthy results required a pool of 10,000 people who had never read Great Expectations. Fortunately, I had access to 10,000 recent American college graduates, so that was no problem.
To add a dab of pseudoscience and ...
Hockney and Friends
Circa 1963, Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney and David Goodman; photo by Dennis Hopper.
Scads more in "DAVID HOCKNEY | STYLE" at The Selvedge Yard.
March 22, 2010
My Love/Hate Affair With Typekit
Georgia and Verdana, Lucida and (to a lesser extent) Arial and Times New Roman have served us well. For fifteen years, these cross-platform default fonts have been faithful stewards of our desire to read, write, design, and publish web pages. Yet we designers have always wanted more. As far back as 1994, we hoped for the day when we could brand our layouts as magazine and poster designers do, by setting our pages in Franklin and Garamond, our headlines in Gotham and Rosewood. ...
