Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 43
August 9, 2013
How Tweet It Is: An Event Apart DC in 140 Chars
IF YOU MISSED An Event Apart DC, here’s your chance to glean nuggets of knowledge shared by attendees at the event.
August 7, 2013
Deep Thoughts
Flat design is destroying the woodgrain background industry.
— Jeffrey Zeldman (@zeldman) August 6, 2013
Reality 2.0
GOING TO BE SAD when all these social networks I’ve been pouring my life into get shut down by basic economics or bought by Yahoo.
July 31, 2013
Zeldman Quarterly No. 1
#ZEL01, MY FIRST CURATED gift for Quarterly subscribers, has dropped. It contains a book of classic Blue Note jazz LP record cover designs, a jazz LP record (each recipient gets a different one), a framed Mondrian print inspired by that artist’s first encounter with jazz, and a letter from me telling the story behind the gift box.
ZEL01 is all about constraints, a topic close to my heart. When I began designing websites, we had four fonts, one language (HTML), and 16 colors to play with. It wasn’t much … only enough to make magic.
The gifts in ZEL01 exemplify the magic of constraint, reflected through the lens of jazz: from Reid Miles’s two-font, one-spot-color album cover designs for Blue Note records—classics we still turn to for inspiration, more than 50 years after their release—to Piet Mondrian’s jazz- and street-grid-inspired “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” spun from right angles and primary colors.
Thanks to Nora Johnson and her staff at Quarterly for indulging my curatorial whims, and to you early subscribers for believing. I hope you like the package. Another gift comes soon.
There are still four weeks left to subscribe to ZEL02 and future gift packages.
July 25, 2013
Thursday
ME: Why’s your girlfriend’s sweater on the back of your chair?
MALE OFFICE MATE 1: It’s my sweater.
MALE OFFICE MATE 2: He’s Metrosexual.
ME: I experimented with that in college.
Build Your App offline first: Jake Archibald of Google Chrome on The Big Web Show
IN EPISODE No. 95 of The Big Web Show (“everything web that matters”), I interview Jake Archibald of Google Chrome about upcoming web caching standards, how the network connection is merely a layer of progressive enhancement and why you should build your app offline, communicating with non-developers, accessibility standards at BBC and The Guardian, the forking of Webkit, and why the much-linked article “Why Mobile Web Apps are Slow” proves no such thing.
Jake Archibald is a Developer Advocate at Google working with the Chrome team to develop and promote web standards and developer tools. Prior to Google, Jake worked on lanyrd.com/mobile/, using modern web standards and good old hackery to work smoothly on ancient devices, while adding enhancements to newer devices such as offline support.
Jake also spent 4 years working at the BBC writing low level JavaScript that catered to their strict accessibility and browser support requirements. He authored and maintained the corporation’s Standards and Guidelines on JavaScript, and sat on their working groups for accessibility, markup, and download performance.
URLS
jakearchibald.com
@jaffathecake
Jake Archibald on Github
Jake Archibald on Google Plus
Jake Archibald
Why Mobile Web Apps Are Slow
Web Platform Daily
Feedly RSS Reader
Daily Nerd
jQuery requstAnimationFrame
Navigation Controller (Github)
Application Cache is a Douchebag (A List Apart)
Note
The Big Web Show will be on hiatus during August. See you in September!
July 11, 2013
Lea Verou on Big Web Show
LEA VEROU and I discuss the creative process behind her “CSS Secrets” series and the book of the same name she is writing for O’Reilly; loving JavaScript and math; her professional path, beginning with coding Visual Basic at age twelve; using CSS to lay out a print book about CSS; creating Open Source projects like Dabblet, Prism, and CSS3 Test; the case for progressive enhancement; earning a living doing your own thing; and leaving her job at the W3C (announced today).
All that and much more is now available for your listening pleasure in today’s Big Web Show Episode No. 94.
More Lea Goodness
Lea Verou’s website
Prism.js
Dabblet
CSS3 Test
Articles by Lea
Lea’s Github
Lea’s Dribbble
@leaverou
Lea on Facebook
Every Time You Call a Proprietary Feature CSS3 A Kitten Dies
Leaving The W3C
ALA Summer Reading
AS PUBLISHER of A List Apart for people who make websites, I’m delighted to present our second annual ALA Summer Reading Issue—a deep pool of editor’s picks from the recent archives of A List Apart, sprinkled with some of our favorite outside links.
If you’re designing, developing, strategizing, or creating content for today’s multi-device web, these are the articles you need to read.
Same as last year, this issue is also available as a Readlist, suitable for beach reading on Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Readmill, or other ebook reader. So what are you waiting for? Dive in!
Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart
June 25, 2013
Think Outside The Silo
IN TODAY’S A List Apart for people who make websites, we are pleased to present…
Designing for Services Beyond the Screen
by ANDY POLAINE
You redesign the website for an airline, but who is designing the check-in machines, the CRM systems used by call center staff, the print materials, or the policies the cabin crew must adhere to? Like it or not, these channels are part of the overall user experience. Your website or mobile app might be great on its own, but customers experience services in totality, and base their judgments on how well everything works together. Learn to design beyond the screen. By creating visual and tangible artifacts that can be experienced and tested, you can build a bridge between business and design.
Don’t Poke the Bear: Creating Content for Sensitive Situations
by KATE KIEFER LEE
Delivering bad news is hard, but it’s part of life and business. We notify customers when we’re out of a product they want to buy, and we send warnings when people violate our companies’ terms of service. God forbid we have to send a system alert because our database was hacked, affecting every one of our users. But these things happen to the best of us. Can you be the bearer of bad news in a way that respects your customers? Learn how to create empathetic content for tricky situations, and shape your internal culture to foster human values of support, respect, and empathy.
Illustration: Kevin Cornell
June 23, 2013
Dog Day Morning
THE DOGS leave today.
While my ex has been away this month, I’ve watched her two small dogs. And so have my two cats—especially the black alpha. Add an active eight year old girl to that menagerie and you have 34 busy but blissful days.
That time ends now.
This morning my daughter and the dogs shuffle off to her mother’s apartment, where her grandparents will take loving care of them all.
I mark the occasion by packing my bag for Boston and clearing away a last wet wee wee pad.
Funny the things you can get sentimental over.
