Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 33

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Medium?

IN 2003, long before he was a creative director at Twitter, Douglas Bowman wrote articles about design, posted case studies about his design projects, and shared his photography on his personal/business site, stopdesign.com.

A year previously, Doug had attained instant fame in standardista circles by recoding Wired.com using CSS for layout. That sounds nonsensical nowadays, but in 2002, folks like me were still struggling to persuade our fellow web designers to use CSS, and not HTML tables, for layout. Leading web designers had begun seeing the light, and there had been a sudden profusion of blogs and personal sites that used CSS for layout, and whose markup strove to be semantic and to validate. But nobody had as yet applied web standards to a large commercial site—giving rise to the charge, among Luddite web designers, that standards-based design was “okay for blogs” but had no business on the “real” web.

Then Doug recoded Wired.com with CSS, Mike Davidson did the same for ESPN.com, and all the old reactionary talking points were suddenly as dead as Generalissimo Franco—and the race was on to build a standards-compliant, open web across all content and application sectors.

IN THE PROCESS of helping to lead this sea change, Douglas Bowman became famous, and anybody who was anybody in web design began passionately reading his blog. And yet.

And yet, when Doug had a really big idea to share with our community, he published it on A List Apart, the magazine “for people who make websites.”

Did he do so because blogging was dead? Because the open web was in trouble? Of course not. He did it because publishing on A List Apart in 2003 allowed Doug to share his innovative design technique with the widest possible audience of his peers.

PUBLISHING in multiple venues is not new. Charles Dickens, the literary colossus of Victorian England, did it. (He also pioneered serial cross-cutting, the serial narrative, and the incorporation of audience feedback into his narrative—techniques that anticipated the suspense film, serial television narratives like Mad Men, and the modification of TV content in response to viewer feedback over the internet. But those are other, possibly more interesting, stories.)

Nobody said the open web was dead when Doug Bowman published “Sliding Doors of CSS” on A List Apart.

Nobody said the blog was dead when RSS readers made it easier to check the latest content from your favorite self-publishing authors without bothering to type their personal sites’ URLs into your browser’s address bar.

Forward thinkers at The New York Times did not complain when Mike Davidson’s Newsvine began republishing New York Times content; the paper brokered the deal. They were afraid to add comments to their articles on their own turf, and saw Newsvine as a perfect place to test how live reader feedback could fit into a New York Times world.

When Cameron Koczon noticed and named the new way we interact with online content (“a future in which content is no longer entrenched in websites, but floats in orbit around users”), smart writers, publishers, and content producers rejoiced at the idea of their words reaching more people more ways. Sure, it meant rethinking monetization; but content monetization on the web was mostly a broken race to the bottom, anyway, so who mourned the hastening demise of the “web user manually visits your site’s front page daily in hopes of finding new content” model? Not many of us.

By the time Cameron wrote “Orbital Content” in April of 2011, almost all visits to A List Apart and zeldman.com were triggered by tweets and other third-party posts. Folks were bookmarking Google and Twitter, not yourhomepage.com. And that was just fine. If you wrote good content and structured it correctly, people would find it. Instead of navigating a front-page menu hierarchy that was obsolete before you finished installing the templates, folks in search of exactly your content would go directly to that content. And it was good.

So just why are we afraid of Medium? Aside from not soliciting or editing most of its content, and not paying most of its authors, how does it differ from all previous web publications, from Slate to The Verge? Why does publishing content on Medium (in addition to your personal site and other publications) herald, not just the final-final-final death of blogging (“Death of Blogging III: This Time It’s Personal”), but, even more alarmingly, the death of the open web?

You may think I exaggerate, but I’ve heard more than one respected colleague opine that publishing in Medium invalidates everything we independent content producers care about and represent; that it destroys all our good works with but one stroke of the Enter button.

I’ve even had that thought myself.

But isn’t the arrival of a new-model web publication like Medium proof that the web is alive and healthy, and spawning new forms of creativity and success?

And when the publisher of a personal site writes for Medium, is she really giving up on her own site? Couldn’t she be simply hoping to reach new readers?

(If she succeeds, some of those new readers might even visit her site, occasionally.)

Thanks to Bastian Allgeier for inspiring this post.

This piece was also published on Medium.

Eight Days in April

I’VE BEEN BUSY this week:

Know Yourself by Jeffrey Zeldman, Fournova, April 16, 2015
What Can Web Designers Learn From the Past, Creative Bloq, April 16, 2015
Designer Blindness by Jeffrey Zeldman, Medium, April 13, 2015
LISP by Jeffrey Zeldman, Medium, April 12, 2015
‘Seventeen coats of bullshit’ with Dan Mall and Jeffrey Zeldman, Unfinished Business podcast, April 7, 2015

And stay tuned for today’s Big Web Show episode, taping live at 2:00 pm Eastern.

LISP – Fresh on Medium

LISP

Responsive Web Design’s Debut (with video)

IT WAS FIVE years ago today, Ethan Marcotte taught the web to play…nicely with all kinds of devices in all kinds of contexts. And he did it live on stage at An Event Apart Seattle 2010. Watch the video that changed the web forever.

Progressive Enhancement FTW with Aaron Gustafson

IN EPISODE № 130 of The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”), I interview long-time web standards evangelist Aaron Gustafson, author of Adaptive Web Design, on web design then and now; why Flipboard’s 60fps web launch is anti-web and anti-user; design versus art; and the 2nd Edition of Aaron’s book, coming from New Riders this year.

Enjoy Episode № 130 of The Big Web Show.

Show Links

A Bit About Aaron Gustafson

Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences with Progressive Enhancement

Responsive Issues Community Group

Easy Designs – Web Design, Development & Consulting

Web Standards Sherpa

Code & Creativity

WebStandardsProject (@wasp) | Twitter

A List Apart: For People Who Make Websites

Genesis – Land Of Confusion [Official Music Video] – YouTube

Photo by John Morrison for An Event Apart

Marchgasm!

I’VE BEEN BUSY this month:

Zen and the Art of Wearable Markup, by Jeffrey Zeldman, The Pastry Box Project, March 21, 2015. Should my pants understand HTML? (My first Pastry Box piece!)
You, Inc: Going from Developer to Web agency (interview with Jeffrey Zeldman), by Jeff Pflueger, Pantheon, March 20, 2015. Career tips.
Interview: Jeffrey Zeldman, PSD To WordPress, March 20, 2015. Cartoons, music, and web design.
Automan, The Dan Benjamin Show, March 19, 2015. Dan and I discuss the death of Internet Explorer.
Designing the Web with Jeffrey Zeldman, The Web Ahead, March 18, 2015. Jen Simmons conducts a remarkable, in-depth interview on web design history, the state of web design and development, the future of our medium, and our masochistic love affair with Big Brother.
Jeffrey Zeldman on What He Wants All Designers to Know, Founder Dating, March 4, 2015. I’m an entrepreneur, and you can, too!
Jesus and the Uber Driver by Jeffrey Zeldman, Medium, March 3, 2015. The panic and the passion. (My first Medium piece!)

And March is only half over.

I’m an Entrepreneur, And You Can Too: FounderDating cofounder Jessica Alter on Big Web Show № 129

TODAY’S BIG WEB SHOW guest is Jessica Alter (@jalter), Cofounder & Chief Connector of FounderDating, “a Linkedin for entrepreneurs.” Jessica and I discuss growing an online community while maintaining quality and avoiding spam and anti-patterns; how to become an advisor or cofounder; the biggest mistake budding entrepreneurs make; getting to your first customers; why the people side of things—experiential information—is more important than ever (and more important than fundraising); and how listeners can empower themselves to become entrepreneurs.

Sponsored by DreamHost and An Event Apart.

☛ Listen to Episode № 128 of The Big Web Show.

URLs

founderdating.com

twitter.com/jalter

twitter.com/founderdating

The Arc of a Design Career: Khoi Vinh on The Big Web Show № 128

KHOI VINH IS my guest in Episode № 128 of The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”).

Khoi is a web and graphic designer, blogger, and former design director for The New York Times, where he worked from January 2006 until July 2010. Prior to that, Khoi co-founded and was design director for Behavior, a New York digital design studio. He is the author of  How They Got There: Interviews With Digital Designers About Their Careers (coming in 2015) and Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design (New Riders, 2010), and was a leading proponent of bringing grid-based graphic design principles to web design in the mid-2000s. In 2011, Fast Company named him one of “The 50 Most Influential Designers in America.”

☛ Listen to Episode № 128 of The Big Web Show.

URLs

http://www.subtraction.com

https://twitter.com/khoi

http://howtheygotthere.us

http://trywildcard.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21askthetimes.html

http://www.creativebloq.com/khoi-vinh-using-sketch-instead-photoshop-6133901

http://www.behaviordesign.com

http://vllg.com/constellation/galaxie-polaris

Sponsored by DreamHost.

Big Web Show № 127: Those Who Can Teach with Jared Spool

IN EPISODE № 127 of The Big Web Show, Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering and I discuss the goals and workings of Center Centre, a new school Jared cofounded with Dr Leslie Jensen Inman to create the next generation of industry-ready UX designers. Topics include “teaching students to learn,” what schools can and can’t do, working with partner companies, “Project Insanity,” and designing a program to make students industry-ready.

WEBSITES & URLS MENTIONED

Center Centre

User Interface Engineering

@jmspool

@UIE

@CenterCentre

UX Mobile Immersion

Unicorn Institute

Brain Sparks (UX writing by Jared and others)

All You Can Learn

Big Web Show № 126: Dribble ‘n Flow with Dan Cederholm (@simplebits)

IN EPISODE № 126 of The Big Web Show, author (“Sass For Web Designers”), designer, and Dribbble co-founder Dan Cederholm (@simplebits) sits down with Jeffrey Zeldman to discuss using tools and templates versus rolling your own design and code, whether web design was really simpler in the good old days, his favorite Dribbble features, community-building, empire-building, freelancing in the early days of Happy Cog, and the joys of the fretless banjo.

Enjoy: Big Web Show № 126 with Dan Cederholm.

URLS MENTIONED

http://simplebits.com

https://dribbble.com

http://www.abookapart.com/products/sass-for-web-designers

http://simplebits.com/books/

https://thegreatdiscontent.com/interview/dan-cederholm

http://simplebits.com/about/

Sponsored by Thinkful and Flywheel