Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 63
October 28, 2011
That's love.
FOR TWO YEARS, our daughter was bullied in school. The school didn't notice and our daughter didn't complain so we didn't know. Finally a mom saw and told us. After that, things happened quickly. One result is that we changed schools.
During those first two years, our daughter shut down emotionally and psychologically from the moment the bell rang in the morning until school let out at night. Maybe this shutting down was a reaction to the bullying. Maybe there were other causes. What's certain is that she didn't learn. She didn't learn the kindergarten stuff. She didn't learn the first grade stuff.
The old school noticed the learning problems and provided support programs that helped, but did not close the gap. The school warned us our daughter would probably flunk kindergarten, but in the end they passed her along to first grade. The first grade teacher worried, but in the end passed her on to second grade.
Now she is in a school where they pay attention, in second grade, lacking skills her peers learned in kindergarten.
Catching her up takes hours of extra homework a week. It takes patience and cunning as we work to cool a fear and dislike of learning that's been baked into her soul for two years. Some days I want to cry. But for her sake I smile.
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October 26, 2011
On An Event Apart DC 2011
Jeremy Keith – An Event Apart: Design Principles (lukew.com) – Luke Wroblewski
Andy Budd – An Event Apart: Persuasive Design (lukew.com) – Luke Wroblewski
Ethan Marcotte – An Event Apart: The Responsive Designer's Workflow (lukew.com) – Luke Wroblewski
Karen McGrane – An Event Apart: Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Web Content (lukew.com) – Luke Wroblewski
Notes from An Event Apart, Washington DC (Global Moxie) (globalmoxie.com) – Josh Clark
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October 18, 2011
A Book Apart: Designing for Emotion & Mobile First
WE ARE THRILLED to present the two newest volumes from A Book Apart ("brief books for people who make websites"):
Make your users fall in love with your site or application via the precepts packed into Aarron Walter's new Designing for Emotion. From classic psychology to case studies, highbrow concepts to common sense, DfE demonstrates accessible strategies and memorable methods to help you make a human connection through design.
Learn data-driven techniques that will make you a master of mobile with Mobile First. Former Yahoo! design architect and co-creator of Bagcheck, Luke Wroblewski knows more about mobile experience than the rest of us, and packs all he knows into this entertaining, to-the-point guidebook.
For a limited time, save 15% when you buy both together!
A Book Apart, Designing for Emotion & Mobile First Bundle.
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ALA: Personality in Design
IN AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT from his new book, Designing For Emotion, Aarron Walter shows how to turn design interactions into conversations, imbue mechanical "interactions" with human elements, and use design and language techniques to craft a living personality for your website or application.
A List Apart: Articles: Personality in Design.
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A List Apart: Organizing Mobile by Luke Wroblewski
THE ORGANIZATION OF MOBILE web experiences must align with how people use their mobile devices and why; emphasize content over navigation; provide relevant options for exploration and pivoting; maintain clarity and focus; and align with mobile behaviors. In this excerpt from his brand new A Book Apart book, Luke Wroblewski explains how.
A List Apart: Articles: Organizing Mobile.
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October 14, 2011
Meet the 10K Apart Winners
ANNOUNCING THE WINNERS of the second annual 10K Apart contest ("Inspire the web with just 10K") presented by MIX Online and An Event Apart.
Responsive apps under 10K
Last year's 10K Apart challenged readers to create the best application they could using no more than 10K of images, scripts, and markup. We wanted to see what you could do with HTML5, CSS3, and web fonts, and you blew us away.
For this year's contest, we asked you to step up your game by not only awing us with brilliant (and brilliantly designed) apps built using less than 10K of web standards and imagery, but we also insisted you make those awesome apps fully responsive.
(If you found this page by accident, responsive design accommodates today's dizzying array of notebooks, tablets, smartphones, laptops, and big-screen desktops—and anticipates tomorrow's—via fluid design experiences that squash and stretch and swell and shrink and always look like ladies. Ethan Marcotte pioneered this design approach, which takes standards-based progressive enhancement to the next level, and which achieves its magic via fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. But I digress.)
We worried. Oh, how we worried.
We worried that demanding responsive design on top of our already tough list of requirements would kill the contest. That it was just too hard. Maybe even impossible. Silly us.
Once again, you overwhelmed us with your out-of-the-box creativity, dazzling technical chops, and inspiring can-do spirit. During the few weeks of our call for entries, people and teams from 36 countries produced 128 astonishingly excellent apps. With that many great entries, judging was a beast! Fortunately we had excellent help. But enough about us. On to the winners!
Grand Prize Winner
The mysteriously named L&L has won the 10K Apart Grand Prize for Bytes Jack, an HTML Blackjack game that is totally fun to play—unless you have a problem with gambling, in which case, try one of the fantastic runners-up: Space Mahjong by Toby Yun and Kyoungwoo Ham (Best Technical Achievement); Sproutable, by Kevin Thompson (Best Design); or PHRASE: Make Lovely Circular Patterns Based on Text Phrases (People's Choice), by Andy Gott.
L&L will receive a paid pass to any An Event Apart conference event, a $3000 Visa Gift Card, and copies of Ethan Marcotte's Responsive Web Design and Aaron Gustafson's Adaptive Web Design.
In addition to these four winners, there are twelve honorable mentions that will delight any visitor—and astonish any web designer-developer who tries to figure out how these wizards worked their magic in under 10K. See all the winners or view the entire gallery and decide whom you would have awarded best in show.
P.S. We love you
An Event Apart thanks our hard-working, insanely inspired friends at Mix Online.
The 10K Apart hearkens back to Stewart Butterfield's 5k Contest of yesteryear. Back then, Stewart challenged web designer-developers to create something magical using less than 5K of code and images—and the community responded with a flowering of creativity and awesome proto-web-apps. Stewart, we salute you!
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October 9, 2011
Help Amit defeat leukemia.
ON THURSDAY, AMIT GUPTA, the kind-hearted and extremely talented creator of Photojojo and the Jelly co-working community, announced that he has leukemia and needs South Asian bone marrow to survive. Finding it will be tough, as South Asians are grossly underrepresented in the national bone marrow registry. Friends of Amit's around the world are working to help him beat the odds. If you are of South Asian ancestry and between the ages of 18 and 60, please register online for a quick and easy test that will determine your ability to donate marrow, or attend a benefit party in New York City this Friday, October 14.
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October 7, 2011
In which I unwittingly befoul an otherwise fitting tribute to the late, great Mr Jobs
"SHARE YOUR MEMORIES of Steve Jobs" read the email from Faith Korpi, producer of the 5by5 network to which I contribute a podcast. I thought she meant memories of actually interacting with the guy. I had one such experience: Steve fired me from a freelance project. That being my only "memory" of Steve Jobs, I responded to the assignment by telling that story.
5by5 created a beautiful audio tribute to Steve Jobs. The other contributors, who understood the assignment correctly, carefully crafted personal tributes to Steve Jobs and his legacy. Listening to this series of heartfelt recollections, you get a sense of the contribution Steve Jobs made to all our lives. The testimonials of my colleagues make me feel awe, wonder, hope, and terrible sadness.
A little over twenty minutes into this love fest for a giant of our time, my little story comes along and quickly sinks like a stone. I didn't write it out in advance (no time, I was chaperoning my daughter's second grade field trip) and I didn't record it in my pristine podcasting studio (same excuse). The gist of it is, Steve Jobs fired me and another guy from a project before we did a lick of work, paid us anyway, and afterwards, for nearly ten years, Apple hardware and software that worked perfectly well for everyone in the world misbehaved for me — as if the aborted project had left me cursed.
Pathetic.
I admire and marvel at Steve Jobs every bit as much as my better spoken, better prepared colleagues. Not only did he understand that computing is about people, not technology; he also had the will to unapologetically demand perfection from the human beings who worked for him. If I live to be one thousandth the creative director he was, I will tell myself, "Well done."
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Facebook: the real semantic web?
Longtime tech pundit and thinker Esther Dyson posted on Twitter today that Facebook was launching the "semantic Web" without calling it that. Good, because hardly anyone ever understood what that meant. But Zuckerberg in effect summarized it in common parlance and defined what the semantic Web is: "Last year we announced the open graph, so you could connect to all the things in the world. This year, we're taking the next step—we're going to make it so that you can connect to anything you want in any way you want." The original idea of the semantic Web, promoted most of all by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, generally omitted people. Perhaps only Facebook, based on genuine identity, could build a real semantic Web that centers around people and what they do.
Facebook's Changes—It's All About the Platform – Forbes.
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