Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 54
May 3, 2012
Big Web Show 69: Chris Cashdollar on fonts.com
HAPPY COG Creative Director Christopher Cashdollar is my guest in Episode No. 69 of The Big Web Show, the weekly podcast on “everything web that matters.”
In 35 lively minutes, Chris and I discuss the joys and challenges of redesigning typography mega-site Fonts.com; nimble versus waterfall; process versus inspiration; running a creative department that is interactive in every sense of the word; the two sides of a design education (learning and teaching); fostering collaboration; and the transition from doodling eight-year-old to graphic design student to interactive creative director.
Chris is a multi-disciplinary graphic designer with twelve years of interaction design experience. He is currently the Creative Director for Happy Cog Philadelphia, and an adjunct instructor for Drexel University’s Westphal College of Media Arts and Design.
Listen to Episode No. 69 of The Big Web Show, featuring Chris Cashdollar.
Links
Fonts.com Beta
@ccashdollar
Christopher Cashdollar
Articles by Chris Cashdollar
Cash on Dribble
Happy Cog
PhilaMade
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Jeffrey Zeldman on tour
SEE ME SPEAK about web design, interaction design, publishing, and the future of web content. In the coming months, I’ll be visiting all sorts of nice cities, the better to meet and greet you:
Go Beyond Pixels St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada
May 25, 2012
Reasons To Be Creative New York
June 14–15, 2012
An Event Apart Boston
June 18–20, 2012
An Event Apart Austin
July 9–11, 2012
An Event Apart DC
August 6–8, 2012
An Event Apart Chicago
August 27–29, 2012
Future of Web and Mobile – London
October 15-17, 2012
An Event Apart San Francisco
November 12–14, 2012
You can keep up with my comings and goings on Lanyrd; follow me on Twitter (@zeldman) and Facebook; and keep watching the skies at An Event Apart, the design conference for people who make websites.
April 26, 2012
Tantek Çelik on Mozilla & Microformats: Big Web Show
TANTEK ÇELIK is my guest on Episode No. 68 of The Big Web Show (“everything web that matters”).
Currently web standards lead at Mozilla, Tantek is one of the founders of both the microformats.org open standards community and the Global Multimedia Protocols Group, and an invited expert to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Cascading Style Sheets working group.
Tantek has played a key role in the development and popularization of practical social network portability technologies such as the hCard and XFN microformats. In 2003, Tantek collaborated with Eric Meyer and Matt Mullenweg in the invention of the XHTML Friends Network (XFN), which has since become the most popular decentralized social relationship format in the history of the Web. In 2004 Tantek proposed hCard for representing people and organizations, which has since similarly become the most popular user profile format on the web.
During his years as Technorati’s Chief Technologist, Tantek played an active role in refining and evangelizing hCard, bringing it from a wiki proposal to one that’s endorsed and supported by individuals, numerous small organizations, major companies ranging from AOL to Yahoo, and implemented for over a hundred million user identities and business listings on the web.
At Microsoft, Tantek led the development of Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh and its Tasman rendering engine, which was the most standards-compliant layout engine of its time. He was also an early member of The Web Standards Project, and is the creator of the Box Model Hack, the first IE hack that let developers work around the incorrect box model in old versions of Internet Explorer.
Listen to Episode 68: Tantek Çelik on Mozilla and Microformats.
Links
“Gangbang Interviews” and “Bikini Shots”: Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem
Restyle W3C: Towards a More Usable Spec Template
hCard 1.0 Specification (rewritten to be human friendly)
The Vendor Prefix Predicament: ALA’s Eric Meyer Interviews Tantek Çelik
Responsive Images: How they Almost Worked and What We Need
Mozilla WIKI
CNET: Mozilla hires open-standards guru Celik
director at Mozilla
Why IE5/Mac Matters
April 24, 2012
Content Strategy Double Header: A List Apart 349
IN ISSUE NO. 349 of A List Apart for people who make websites, savor the content strategy sweetness as you dip into a double dose of Rachel Lovinger, a prime motivator behind the content strategy movement.
Tinker, Tailor, Content Strategist
by RACHEL LOVINGER
What does content strategy mastery look like? As in any field, it comes down to having master skills and knowing when to apply them. While there are different styles of content strategy (from an editorial and messaging focus to a technical and structural focus), the master content strategist must work with content from all angles: messaging architecture and messaging platforms; content missions and content management. Above all, she must advocate for multiple constituents, including end users, business users, stakeholders, and the content vision itself. Rachel Lovinger shares the skills that go into achieving CS mastery.
Content Modelling: A Master Skill
by RACHEL LOVINGER
The content model is one of the most important content strategy tools at your disposal. It allows you to represent content in a way that translates the intention, stakeholder needs, and functional requirements from the user experience design into something that can be built by developers implementing a CMS. A good content model helps ensure that your content vision will become a reality. Lovinger explains how to craft a strong content model and use it to foster communication and align efforts between the UX design, editorial, and technical team members on your project.
Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.
April 18, 2012
Redesigning in Public Again
I FINALLY GOT A COUPLE OF HOURS free, enabling me to do something I’ve been itching to try since I first saw the web on a modern mobile device: redesign this website.
First I cranked up the type size. With glorious web fonts and today’s displays, why not?
Then I ditched the sidebar. Multiple columns are so 1990s.
This site has always been about content first. But the layout was a holdover from the days when inverted L shapes dotted the cyber landscape; when men were men, and all websites bragged two columns, laid out with table cells as the Lord intended.
The previous redesign deliberately hearkened back to the old, old days of this site. It was fun (even if I was the only one who got the joke). But my journey down Retro Lane coincided unfortunately with the first big news in web design since the anchor tag (mobile-first, content-first, responsive, etc). Today’s little design exercise here redresses all that.
This is not a finished work. I may make some things squeeze-y that are now rock-hard. I might lock the viewport and play with padding and things. But the site is now much closer to where I’ve wanted it for the past two years.
Page backward, if you wish, to see how it rolls out so far.
Thanks to Tim Murtaugh, who helped me debug more than one maddening straggler.
April 17, 2012
Designing Apps With Web Standards (HTML is the API)
The Web OS is Already Here… Luke Wroblewski, November 8, 2011
Mobile First Responsive Web Design, Brad Frost, June, 2011
320 and up – prevents mobile devices from downloading desktop assets by using a tiny screen’s stylesheet as its starting point. Andy Clarke and Keith Clark.
Gridless, HTML5/CSS3 boilerplate for mobile-first, responsive designs “with beautiful typography”
HTML5 Boilerplate – 3.02, Feb. 19, 2012, Paul Irish ,Divya Manian, Shichuan, Matthias Bynens, Nicholas Gallagher
HTML5 Reset v 2, Tim Murtaugh, Mike Pick, 2011
CSS Reset, Eric Meyer, v 2.0b1, January 2011
Less Framework 4 – an adaptive CSS grid system, Joni Korpi (@lessframework)
Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte, 2011
Adaptive Web Design by Aaron Gustafson, 2011
Web Standards Curriculum – Opera
Getting Started With Sass by David Demaree, 2011, A List Apart
Dive into Responsive Prototyping with Foundation by Jonathan Smiley, A List Apart, 2012
Future-Ready Content Sara Wachter-Boettcher, February 28, 2012, A List Apart
For a Future Friendly Web Brad Frost, March 13, 2012, A List Apart
Orbital Content Cameron Koczon, April 19, 2011, A List Apart
Web standards win, Windows whimpers in 2012, Neil McAllister, InfoWorld, December 29, 2011
Thoughts on Flash – Steve Jobs, April, 2010
Did We Just Win the Web Standards Battle? ppk, July 2006
The Web Standards Project: FAQ (updated), February 27, 2002
To Hell With Bad Browsers, A List Apart, 2001
The Web Standards Project: FAQ, 1998
The Web Standards Project: Mission, 1998
April 10, 2012
Mike Monteiro’s “Design Is A Job” is finally available to buy or preview.
CO-FOUNDER of Mule Design and raconteur Mike Monteiro wants to help you do your job better. From contracts to selling design, from working with clients to working with each other, his brief book Design Is A Job is packed with knowledge you can’t afford not to know. This is one of the most in-demand titles we at A Book Apart have yet published, and the long, long wait for its release (and yours) is finally over!
—Preview Design Is A Job in Issue No. 348 of A List Apart, for people who make websites.
—Buy Design Is A Job directly from the makers at A Book Apart.
Also of interest:
Watch F*ck you. Pay Me, a presentation by Mike Monteiro to San Francisco Creative Mornings, 25 March 2011. (Video, 38:40.)
Listen to Big Web Show No. 59: Jeffrey Zeldman talks with Mike Monteiro of Mule Design. (Audio, 54 minutes.)
Follow @mike_ftw on Twitter.
Pay attention to Mule Design Studio.
Mike Monteiro's "Design Is A Job" is finally available to buy or preview.
CO-FOUNDER of Mule Design and raconteur Mike Monteiro wants to help you do your job better. From contracts to selling design, from working with clients to working with each other, his brief book Design Is A Job is packed with knowledge you can't afford not to know. This is one of the most in-demand titles we at A Book Apart have yet published, and the long, long wait for its release (and yours) is finally over!
—Preview Design Is A Job in Issue No. 348 of A List Apart, for people who make websites.
—Buy Design Is A Job directly from the makers at A Book Apart.
Also of interest:
Watch F*ck you. Pay Me, a presentation by Mike Monteiro to San Francisco Creative Mornings, 25 March 2011. (Video, 38:40.)
Listen to Big Web Show No. 59: Jeffrey Zeldman talks with Mike Monteiro of Mule Design. (Audio, 54 minutes.)
Follow @mike_ftw on Twitter.
Pay attention to Mule Design Studio.
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Responsive Prototyping with Foundation
IN ISSUE NO. 348 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
Dive into Responsive Prototyping with Foundation
There are hundreds of devices out there right now that can access the full web, as Steve Jobs once put it. They come with different capabilities and constraints, things like input style or screen size, resolution, and form. With all these devices set to overtake traditional desktop computers for web traffic next year, we need tools to help us build responsively. Jonathan Smiley shows how to dive into responsive design using Foundation, a light front-end framework that helps you rapidly build prototypes and production sites.
Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.
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April 4, 2012
Fico by Lensco.be | an icon font for responsive web designs, Retina display
FICO, by Lensco.be, is a font with 52 simple, commonly used icons and glyphs, served on the web via @font-face. Small (under 12K when gripped, in one HTTP request) and color-agnostic (you can even use gradients and shadows), it is perfect for responsive designs with media queries, and for creating a rich visual feel without the bandwidth and production overhead of JPG images in a Retina world.
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