Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 59

The Big Web Show No. 61: Khoi Vinh of Mixel and NYTimes.com

NOW ONLINE for your pleasure! In Episode No. 61 of The Big Web Show ("everything web that matters"), I interview Khoi Vinh, co-creator of Mixel, former NYTimes.com Design Director, co-founder of NYC design studio Behavior, and more.

In this episode we discuss Khoi's career, including his fine-art background, art school, and design classes, his time at AIGA, how he came to love the grid, why he joined the NYTimes.com and why he left, and more. We also explore the inspiration that led Khoi to combine social with collage, and talk about the choice every design studio faces as it begins to succeed: get bigger, or get more selective? Don't miss this free-ranging exchange of ideas with one of webdom's nicest and most influential designers.

5by5 | The Big Web Show No. 61: Khoi Vinh
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The Big Web Show features special guests and topics like web publishing, art direction, content strategy, typography, web technology, and more. This episode is sponsored by Happy Cog Hosting, TinyLetter, and Uncle Slam.

Other recent Big Web Show episodes:

Episode 60: Josh Williams of Gowalla
Episode 59: Mike Monteiro of Mule Design








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My glamorous life: some holiday!

THIS WEEK I will finally sign my divorce papers. It's like that old Woody Allen joke, "The food here is terrible – and such small portions." I didn't want to get divorced, and I've been waiting two years to do it. It's a friendly little divorce that started out as a simple mediated settlement, but we made the mistake of hiring lawyers. The legal bloodletting around the Beatles' breakup took less time and surely cost less. But here we finally are, about to sign papers that enshrine our daughters' rights and our rights as parents and put into stark English the courtesies my ex and I would naturally extend each other anyway.

That's Wednesday, unless it's Tuesday (my lawyer can't seem to keep track of which day we're meeting), and Wednesday also there is a school field trip I chaperone to I don't remember where, and somehow between the field trip and the review and signing of the divorce papers I hire a team to gut and rewire our new A Space Apart office on Madison Avenue, arrange for two internet services to wire our 19th century building, and order the furniture.

Today I take the kid to school, meet about wireframes for the A List Apart redesign, interview Khoi Vinh The Big Web Show, meet about a Happy Cog redesign, and run back to school for the kid. Somewhere in there I get a meal. Thursday, blessed relief, I'm in Philadelphia for a holiday party (yay!), and Friday my Dad and his bride arrive.

In short, it is a week like any other.

Since I started my first business with two nickels and a Power Computing Mac clone, I have not had a week that would pass for normal, if normal means manageable. The last predictable week I had was my first week in AA in May of 1993, although that certainly wasn't usual in that sweating and shivering and coming to God (in other words, quitting drinking) isn't a normal or even expected event in an alcoholic's life. But that week did find me in the same room in the same city doing the same thing for five days straight — surely the last time that happened, if you don't count those four days in Disney World.

I'm a boring guy, but my life has conspired to be interesting. Members of my inner circle who have access to my calendar get ulcers just from looking. And for all that constant change and growth, although somewhat stressed, I am most grateful.







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Mobile App Usage: the data will surprise you

AS THE NUMBER of native mobile applications keeps growing, it's worth looking at how they get used. To that end, here's a few stats about people downloading apps and what what they do with them afterward.

via LukeW | Data Monday: Mobile App Usage.

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MSIE auto-updates: a holiday gift to web developers everywhere.

THE STATE OF THE WEB is about to get a whole lot better, as the living dead release their stranglehold on the Windows desktop and a new generation of beautifully standards-compliant IE browsers rolls out automatically to tens of millions of computer users:

Today we are sharing our plan to automatically upgrade Windows customers to the latest version of Internet Explorer available for their PC. This is an important step in helping to move the Web forward. We will start in January for customers in Australia and Brazil who have turned on automatic updating via Windows Update. Similar to our release of IE9 earlier this year, we will take a measured approach, scaling up over time.

via IE to Start Automatic Upgrades across Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.







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Required Reading. Multi-Device Web Design: An Evolution

LUKE WROBLEWSKI: As mobile devices have continued to evolve and spread, so has the process of designing and developing Web sites and services that work across a diverse range of devices. From responsive Web design to future friendly thinking, here's how I've seen things evolve over the past year and a half: LukeW | Multi-Device Web Design: An Evolution.

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Why Mobile?

FROM A LUKE Wroblewski-led mobile workshop currently in progress at An Event Apart San Francisco:

There are more mobile devices than there are people in the world.

1.3 billion mobile page views a year.
Facebook says a few years form now "almost everyone at Facebook will focus exclusively on mobile."
1 in 10 mobile smartphones are iPhones. But one iPhone is responsible for twice the traffic of an Android phone (its nearest competitor).
27% of all Yelp usage currently comes from mobile.
Web vs. Native: Facebook has 350 Million mobile users. 50% of that access is via the web. The other 50% is native (all platforms). All native apps put together equal the same usage as web.
"People will do stuff on the closest screen near them that is good enough."
50% of Africa and Asia only access the internet on mobile.
"Clinging to desktop experience and ignoring mobile is like a record company clinging to CDs while digital passes them by." Luke W.
An entire generation of people starting to use the internet on mobile in Asia, Africa, etc. Kenya 20% of GDP happens on mobile devices. Mobile phones will overtake desktops as the most common web access devices worldwide by 2013.

And why mobile web (vs. native)?

Rapidly growing "real" businesses.
Access across multiple platforms and without apps.
Instant updates, fixes, and testing.
No plying in anyone else's backyard.
Great way to get started with mobile.








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What I Learned About the Web in 2011

AS THE YEAR draws to a close, we asked some A List Apart readers to tell us what they learned about the web in 2011. Together their responses summarize the joys and challenges of this magical place we call the internet.

A List Apart: What I Learned About the Web in 2011.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.







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Take two minutes to stop SOPA before it passes this week

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING you can do today: help STOP SOPA once and for all.

The Stop Online Piracy Act could pass this week. U.S. friends reading this, call your Representatives now to be heard before the bill is finalized and voted on. Fightforthefuture.org makes it easy. Go there and do this.

We thank you.







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Live Blogging An Event Apart San Francisco

RIGHT HERE I'll be sharing links, write-ups, and ideas from An Event Apart San Francisco – three days of design, code, and content for people who make websites. Keep watching this space!

A Feed Apart – live tweeting
by – live blogging
AEA SF 2011: The Responsive Designer's Workflow: Luke Wroblewski's notes on the presentation by Ethan Marcotte AKA @beep

An Event Apart: Content First – Luke Wroblewski's notes on my opening keynote
An Event Apart: Great Responsibility. In his With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility at An Event Apart in San Francisco, CA 2011 Elliot Jay Stocks talked about what matters in effective Web design (hint not new technologies). Notes by Luke Wroblewski
Design Principles – Jeremy Keith
Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid by Wilson Miner
Content page design best practices by Luke Wroblewski
Typograph – Scale & Rhythm This page falls somewhere between a tool and an essay. It sets out to explore how the intertwined typographic concepts of scale and rhythm can be encouraged to shake a leg on web pages.
Now in private beta – Typecast: Design with web fonts, in the browser.
Tim Brown – More Perfect Typography – video
Robustness Principle (Postel's Law): Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept.

"Software, like all technologies, is inherently political. Code inevitably reflects the choices, biases and desires of its creators." @adactio

"Solve real problems" is a design principle of the HTML5. You'd be surprised at the number of W3C working groups working on largely theoretical problems.
Metcalfe's Law: So many people are on Facebook because so many people are on Facebook.
An Event Apart: Design Principles – December 12, 2011 by Luke Wroblewski: In his Design Principles presentation at An Event Apart in San Francisco CA 2011 Jeremy Keith outlined the design principles behind the World Wide Web and how they continue to shape its future.
Respond.js by Scott Jehl on Github. A fast, lightweight (3kb minified / 1kb gzipped) script to enable responsive web designs in browsers that don't support CSS3 Media Queries – in particular, Internet Explorer 8 and under.
An Event Apart: Dimensions of Good Experience: "at An Event Apart in San Francisco, CA 2011 Alexa Andrezejewski shared ten principles from urban design that provided unique lenses for evaluating and thinking about mobile and web user experience designs." Luke Wroblewski's notes on the session.

AEA Playlist on Last.fm
AEA Playlist on Rdio
Stay in the loop! Follow An Event Apart on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook, or subscribe to our mailing list.
CSS: Our Best Practices Are Killing Us – Luke Wroblewski reviews Nicole Sullivan's presentation
Bootstrap – toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. Includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.
An Event Apart: A Content Strategy Roadmap: In her presentation at An Event Apart in San Francisco, CA 2011 Kristina Halvorson talked about how to integrate content strategy into a typical web design workflow. Notes by @lukew.
Watch the Madmanimation CSS3 animation demo. (Requires Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or IE10.)

Invision: "UX prototyping made beautiful" via @aarron
Mad Men animated GIFs via @malarkey
An Event Apart: From Idea to Interface: @lukew captures highlights from Aarron Walters's inspiring presentation.
An Event Apart: A Content Strategy Roadmap: In her presentation at An Event Apart in San Francisco, CA 2011 Kristina Halvorson talked about how to integrate content strategy into a typical web design workflow. Notes by @lukew.
Foundation: rapid prototyping tool (via @aarron)
Design Personas measured in aarron's talk
FREE YOUR DATA! The Exporter frees liberates your content from Twitter, Gowalla, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+.
"Content isn't copy. 'Content first' isn't 'copy first.'" @halvorson #contentfirst #cs #aea
AEA CONTENT STRATEGY RESOURCES from Kristina Halvorson
Back button predicts failure: clickstreams with one back button. @jmspool
Pro tip: Your Search logs contain the trigger words your pages are missing. Plug the trigger word from your referrer log onto the page it led the user to, and your users will stop using Search. @jmspool








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Live blogging An Event Apart San Francisco #aea

KEEP WATCHING this space!

A Feed Apart – live tweeting
by – live blogging
An Event Apart: Content First – Luke Wroblewski's notes on my opening keynote
An Event Apart: Great Responsibility. In his With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility at An Event Apart in San Francisco, CA 2011 Elliot Jay Stocks talked about what matters in effective Web design (hint not new technologies). Notes by Luke Wroblewski
Design Principles – Jeremy Keith
Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid by Wilson Miner
Content page design best practices by Luke Wroblewski
Typograph – Scale & Rhythm This page falls somewhere between a tool and an essay. It sets out to explore how the intertwined typographic concepts of scale and rhythm can be encouraged to shake a leg on web pages.
Now in private beta – Typecast: Design with web fonts, in the browser.
Tim Brown – More Perfect Typography – video
Robustness Principle (Postel's Law): Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept.

"Software, like all technologies, is inherently political. Code inevitably reflects the choices, biases and desires of its creators." @adactio

"Solve real problems" is a design principle of the HTML5. You'd be surprised at the number of W3C working groups working on largely theoretical problems.
Metcalfe's Law: So many people are on Facebook because so many people are on Facebook.
An Event Apart: Design Principles – December 12, 2011 by Luke Wroblewski: In his Design Principles presentation at An Event Apart in San Francisco CA 2011 Jeremy Keith outlined the design principles behind the World Wide Web and how they continue to shape its future.
Respond.js by Scott Jehl on Github. A fast, lightweight (3kb minified / 1kb gzipped) script to enable responsive web designs in browsers that don't support CSS3 Media Queries – in particular, Internet Explorer 8 and under.








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