Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 49

In Search of a Genuine Web Aesthetic & Designing For High Density Displays

IN A VERY special issue of A List Apart for people who make websites, Paul Robert Lloyd asks us to put the “design” back in “responsive design” and seek out a genuine web aesthetic. And Dave Rupert shares ways to be thoughtful, not knee-jerk, about high-pixel-density displays, in Mo’ Pixels Mo’ Problems.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart

PBS Off Book video: The Art of Web Design

Whitney Hess, Jason Santa Maria, and I discuss the past two decades of design history, framing the web’s emergence and explaining the transition from a print-based world to a digital one.

To Lisbon!

I’M OFF to Lisbon, Portugal, for Refresh LX, “an affordable conference for busy web designers.” See you soon!

Insites: The Book Honors Web Design, Designers

“INSITES: THE BOOK is a beautiful, limited edition, 256-page book presented in a numbered, foil-blocked presentation box. This very special publication features no code snippets and no design tips; instead, 20 deeply personal conversations with the biggest names in the web community.

“Over the course of six months, we travelled the US and the UK to meet with Tina Roth Eisenberg, Jason Santa Maria, Cameron Moll, Ethan Marcotte, Alex Hunter, Brendan Dawes, Simon Collison, Dan Rubin, Andy McGloughlin, Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka, Josh Brewer, Ron Richards, Trent Walton, Ian Coyle, Mandy Brown, Sarah Parmenter, Jim Coudal, Jeffrey Zeldman, Tim Van Damme, and Jon Hicks.

“We delved into their personal journeys, big wins, and lessons learned, along with the kind of tales you’ll never hear on a conference stage. Each and every person we spoke to has an amazing story to tell — a story we can all relate to, because even the biggest successes have the smallest, most humble of beginnings.” — Insites: The Book

I am honored to be among those interviewed in this beautiful publication.

Insites: The Book is published by Viewport Industries in association with MailChimp.

A Parental Dilemma

MY DAUGHTER has been talking about her eighth birthday party since she was seven and a half. It will be a small party, on a Saturday at noon, with just her closest friends. Last night I found out her BFF won’t be there, because the girl attends a class Saturdays at noon, and her mom is unwilling to have her miss class—even just this once.

My daughter will be hurt. I’m powerless over another parent’s decision, and I must be cordial about it to preserve the smooth functioning of the BFF relationship (and also because it’s not my place to judge). My problems now are to find the right time to let my daughter know her friend can’t attend, and to manufacture positive life lessons in how we handle the disappointment.

Photo: Olivier GR

My 9/11

AS I OFTEN do on this day, I here post a link to my story of Sept. 11, 2001 in New York, one of nine million stories from that day:

zeldman.com/glamorous/54.shtml

My story is not heroic. I saved no one on that day. It is not tragic. I lost no one.

The story I published then is incomplete in many ways. When September 11th happened, I was newly in love with a married woman who was leaving her husband. To be with her, I was leaving my girlfriend of six years. See? Not heroic at all.

The relationship with my girlfriend had been unhappy for years, but I still felt guilty leaving her. As partial penance, I let her stay in my apartment (“our” apartment) while I bunked in a tiny dump above a dive bar. The floor was crooked and the air always smelled like pierogies.

On September 11th, my new girlfriend, the soon-to-be-unmarried lady, was standing on Fifth Avenue when she saw smoke from the impact of the second plane. She was a mile north of the World Trade Center but could still see the smoke. Everyone could see it. Everyone but me, freelancing via modem in the pierogi-smelling fuckpad. The door opened, and there was my new girlfriend, looking stunned. “You don’t know,” she said.

I called my old girlfriend to warn her not to go downtown. She asked why I was crying.

I was crying for her, because I’d left her alone in a suddenly frightening world. Crying for the people in the World Trade Center. We didn’t have any details yet, but it was clear that many people had died. Crying, had I known it, for the thousands more who would die in the wars that were born on that day.

There was no TV and no internet. It was days before I could publish the incomplete story I linked to at the beginning of this memoir. Even when there was internet access again, I could not tell the parts of the story I am telling now. I could not tell them for years.

There it is. Like something out of Hollywood. Horrifying historic events as backdrop to a romantic drama. I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Everything changes, but, for the living, life goes on. My then-new-girlfriend, my fellow 9/11 PTS victim, is now the mother of my child, and my ex-wife. This morning I walked my daughter to school, then headed to the gym, where I warmed up on a treadmill. Above the treadmill were TVs, with the sound off. On the TV I watched, the names of the 9/11 dead were being read aloud in alphabetical order. They were still on B when I finished my workout. The other TV was showing ESPN, and the gym member on the treadmill next to me was watching that instead of the ceremony.

Duty Now For Future: A List Apart No. 361

IN ISSUE No. 361 of A List Apart for people who make websites: Envision better business models for digital newspapers and magazines in What Ate the Periodical? A Primer for Web Geeks by David Sleight. Then test your site in game console browsers and prepare for devices that haven’t been invented yet in Anna Debenham’s aptly titled Testing Websites in Game Console Browsers. Happy testing, designing, and strategizing!

Developer versus designer

To a developer, the problem is a clumsy stacking of concurrently loading web views, interfering with the smooth functioning of JavaScript. To a designer, the problem is the idea sucks.

Unsung Heroes of Web and Interaction Design: Derek Powazek

WE TAKE the two-way web for granted today, but it wasn’t always this way, and the democratizing power of HTML wasn’t manifested overnight. Derek Powazek is one of the pioneering designers who helped bring the two-way web into being.

Informed web designers admire Derek’s now-defunct 1996 personal storytelling site {fray} as one of the first (the first?) examples of art direction on the web, and it certainly was that. Each {fray} story or set of stories was different; each had its own design and layout. Often the site made then-cutting-edge technologies part of the story—as in one tale about the theater, which was told via draggable framesets. (At the conclusion of each page, the user dragged on “theater curtains” made of Netscape frames to reveal the next page, or stage, of the story.) {fray} and Derek are justly famous for promoting true storytelling art direction on the web, in an era when most websites followed strict rules about inverted-L layouts and other now-happily-forgotten nonsense.

But while many fondly remember the site for its art directional achievements, what goes unnoticed is that {fray}, in 1996, was a massive leap forward into the two-way web we take for granted today. The democratizing web that makes everyone an author and publisher, whether on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or WordPress, thereby fulfilling Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for HTML; this web we alternately joke about and fiercely defend; this web in which we spend half our lives (whether on desktop or mobile); this global town hall in which we share the most mundane details of our lives, as well as those things about which we are most passionate—this two-way web would not exist today if not for pioneering interaction designs that showed the way. And Derek Powazek’s {fray} was among the first and most important of those pioneering designs.

Now, web design had been “interactive” since Sir Tim invented HTML. Clicking blue underlined links to explore content is by definition interactive. And the first commercial websites, contrary to what the previous decade’s “Web 2.0″ evangelists would have had you believe, were not one-way communications. The Batman Forever site my first web partners and I worked on in 1995 pushed design and content out to the masses, to be sure—but the site also had discussion forums, where individuals could contribute their viewpoints. Sites before ours had sported such discussion forums; sites after ours would, too.

What Derek did with {fray}, though, took the two-way web to a whole new level. Instead of siloing content by producer (“official” web content here, “user” discussion forums there), Derek integrated the reader’s response directly into the content experience.

I don’t know if {fray} was the first site to do this, but it was the first site I saw doing it—the first site I know of that not only made the entire reading community an equal content authoring partner with the site’s own writers, designers, and developers, but also underscored the point by putting the site’s content and the readers’ content in the same place visually (and therefore conceptually). Fray.com wasn’t just about showing off Derek and his talented partners’ brilliance. It was about encouraging you to be brilliant.

Today we take embedded article/blog post comments for granted, but they wouldn’t exist without a memorable precursor like fray.com. Your blog’s comments may not owe their existence to a flash of insight you personally experienced while reading {fray}, but you can bet that the convention was grandfathered by a designer who was influenced by a designer who was influenced by it.

In the nearly two decades since {fray} debuted, Derek has worked on many things, most of them community driven. Cute-Fight is his latest. Here’s to our democratic, personal web, and to one of the champions who helped make it that way.

Lawson on picture element

Those eager to bash Hixie and the WHATWG are using the new spec as if it were a cudgel; “this is how you deal with Hixie and WHATWG” says Marc Drummond. I don’t think that’s productive. What is productive is the debate that this publication will (hopefully) foster.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site: On the publication of Editor’s draft of the
element.