Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 8

Fly, my designers, fly!

Designers can either become drivers of business within their organizations, or they can create the businesses they want to drive. We’re entering an era of design entrepreneurship, in which some designers are realizing that they’re not just a designer employed by a business; they’re creative business people whose skill set is design.

—The State of UX in 2024

The quotation above is from a report at trends.uxdesign.cc subtitled “Enter Late-Stage UX.” It is an important thought. And if it seems like a new one to designers in their first decade of work, it will feel quite familiar to to those of us who earned our merit badges during the 1990s and 2000s. See, for instance,

When You Are Your Own Client, Who Are You Going To Make Fun Of At The Bar?

by Jim Coudal (2005),

Starting a Business: Advice from the Trenches

by Kevin Potts (2003), and

THIS WEB BUSINESS, Part One

by Scott Kramer (2000, one of four terrific ALA articles by Scott on that subject).

That widespread, intoxicating entrepreneurial impulse led to a cornucopia of internet content and products (and, eventually, “real-world” products, too). Some flopped. Some flowered for a magical season (or twelve), and then faded as times and the market changed. Some grew and grew, growing communities with them. A few changed the world, for better or worse. (And, occasionally, for both.)

History repeats, but it also changes. If flying from your corporate perch feels like your best response to an industry where the idealism that led you to UX feels somewhat beside the point, go for it! —But first, check your bank balance, and talk with family, friends, and a business advisor, if you have one.

Trusting my ability to use design and words to say something original enabled me to work for myself (and with partners) from 1999–2019, and it was good. Financially, running independent businesses is a perpetual rollercoaster, and it can crush your soul if your beloved creation fails to connect with a community. Some people exit rich. Others just exit. “Don’t burn any bridges” is a cliché that exists for a reason. But I digress.

“Consider entrepreneurship” is but one piece of useful advice in this year’s excellent State of UX report by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, with deeply clever illustrations by Fabio Benê and significant contributions from Emily Curtin (God bless the editors!) and Laura Vandiver.

I invite you to read and bookmark the whole thing. I plan to reread it several times myself over the next weeks. It’s that deep, and that good. Hat tip to my colleague Jill Quek for sharing it.

Read: The State of UX in 2024.

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Algorithm & Blues

Examining last week’s Verge-vs-Sullivan “Google ruined the web” debate, author Elizabeth Tai writes:

I don’t know any class of user more abused by SEO and Google search than the writer. Whether they’re working for their bread [and] butter or are just writing for fun, writers have to write the way Google wants them to just to get seen.

I wrote extensively about this in Google’s Helpful Content Update isn’t kind to nicheless blogs and How I’m Healing from Algorithms where I said: “Algorithms are forcing us to create art that fits into a neat little box — their neat little box.”

So, despite Sullivan’s claims to the contrary, the Internet has sucked for me in the last 10 years. Not only because I was forced to create content in a way that pleases their many rules, but because I have to compete with SEO-optimized garbage fuelled by people with deep pockets and desires for deep pockets.

Is the Internet really broken?

For digital creators who prefer to contain multitudes, Tai finds hope in abandoning the algorithm game, and accepting a loss of clout, followers, and discoverability as the price of remaining true to your actual voice and interests:

However, this year, I regained more joy as a writer when I gave upon SEO and decided to become an imperfect gardener of my digital garden. So there’s hope for us yet.

As for folks who don’t spend their time macro-blogging—“ordinary people” who use rather than spend significant chunks of their day creating web content—Tai points out that this, statistically at least a more important issue than the fate and choices of the artists formerly known as digerati, remains unsolved, but with glimmers of partially solution-shaped indicators in the form of a re-emerging indieweb impulse:

Still, as much as I agree with The Verge’s conclusions, I feel that pointing fingers is useless. The bigger question is, How do we fix the Internet for the ordinary person?

The big wigs don’t seem to want to answer that question thoroughly, perhaps because there’s no big money in this, so people have been trying to find solutions on their own.

We have the Indieweb movement, the Fediverse like Mastodon and Substack rising to fill the gap. It’s a ragtag ecosystem humming beneath Google’s layer on the Internet. And I welcome its growth.

For more depth and fuller flavor, I encourage you to read the entirety of “Is the internet really broken?” on elizabethtai.com. (Then read her other writings, and follow her on our fractured social web.)

“The independent content creator refuses to die.” – this website, ca. 1996, and again in 2001, paraphrasing Frank Zappa paraphrasing Edgar Varese, obviously.

Hat tip: Simon Cox.

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Resistance makes side projects hard

Today marks 15 full months that I’ve been working on a side project called Crafd. It’s a community for people who make things by hand: In that time …

Resistance makes side projects hard

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How Columbia Ignored Women, Undermined Prosecutors and Protected a Predator For More Than 20 Years

For more than two decades, patients of an OB/GYN named Robert Hadden warned Columbia University that he was sexually inappropriate and abusive. One …

How Columbia Ignored Women, Undermined Prosecutors and Protected a Predator For More Than 20 Years

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A faster horse

“The user is never wrong” means, when a user snags on a part of your UX that doesn’t work for her, she’s not making a mistake, she’s doing you a favor.

To benefit from this favor, you must pay vigilant attention, prioritize the discovery, dig deeply enough to understand the problem, and then actually solve it.

In so doing, you will not only be secretly thanking the user who discovered your error, you’ll be aiding all of your users, and ultimately, attracting new ones.

Think about this tomorrow. For today, Happy Labor Day to all who toil.

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Through Your Tears & Sorrow

My daughter Ava has written a new essay about autism, trauma, and the mysteries of socialization.

Shmile

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My Liz Danzico Joke

I used to tell a joke I made up. An American goes to the Vatican on Easter Sunday, joining a huge crowd of worshippers who gaze up in awe at a raised platform. On the platform stands the Pope. Beside him is Liz Danzico.

The American turns to a nearby man and asks, “Excuse me. Who is that with the Holy Father?”

The man answers, “I don’t-a know who’s the guy in the pointy hat, but that’s-a Liz Danzico up there.”

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The Next Generation of Web Layouts

Who will design the next generation of readable, writerly web layouts?

Layouts for sites that are mostly writing. Designed by people who love writing. Where text can be engaging even if it isn’t offset by art or photography. Where text is the point.

With well considered flexible typesetting, modular scaling, and readable measures across a full range of proportions and devices. With optional small details that make reading screens of text a pleasure instead of a chore. With type sizes that are easy to read without needing to zoom in. And with a range of interesting sans and serif fonts (including variable fonts) that support reading and encourage creative exploration where headlines are concerned.

Well? How did we get here?

The web has come along way since design meant crafting UIs in Photoshop and exporting them as sliced GIFs. Flash. SiFR. Table layout. Rebellion and rethinking. Liquid layout. Semantic HTML and CSS layout. Adaptive layout. Responsive layout. Intrinsic layout. Web fonts. Big type and super lightweight UX emphasizing readability was new (and controversial!) in 2012. We’ve long since accepted and improved upon it. Today’s news, magazine, and blog pages are more flexible, readable, and refined than ever before.

So what comes next? For writers, one hopes that what’s next is a fresh crop of small, innovative advancements. Improvements that are felt by readers, even when they aren’t always consciously noticed. Layouts that are not merely legible, but actually feel inevitable, at all sizes and in all contexts.

Beyond outside the box

Services like Typetura may point the way. A marriage of type and tech, Typetura is different from other typesetting methods. An intrinsic typography technology, it “enables you to design with more flexibility, while dramatically reducing code.” Disclaimer: I’m friends with, and have long admired the work of, Typetura founder Scott Kellum. Designing With Web Standards readers will recognize his name from the Kellum Image Replacement days of the early 2000s, but that ain’t the half of what he has done for web design, e.g. inventing dynamic typographic systems, high impact ad formats, new parallax techniques, and fluid typesetting technology. Scott was also the coder, along with Filipe Fortes, of Roger Black’s late, lamented Treesaver technology. But I digress.

The tech is not the point—except in so far as it improves our ability to think beyond our current understanding of what design and layout means. Just as Gutenberg’s printing press was not the point, but it was the point of departure. Initially, the invention of movable type reproduced the writing we already knew (i.e. the King James Bible). But ultimately, by freeing writing and reading from narrow elite circles and bringing it to more (and more diverse) minds, Gutenberg’s invention transformed what writing was and could be—from the invention of newspapers to the fiction of Virginia Woolf to multimedia experiences, and perhaps even to the web.

Let us all to play with Jen Simmons’s intrinsic web layout ideas and Scott Kellum and partners’s Typetura. While we also sketch in pencil and spend time looking at well designed books —printed, bound ones as well as digital publications in various devices. And specifically, not just fabulous coffee table books, but books that you’ve reread over and over, to understand what, beyond the text itself, encourages that reading response. So that, together, we may take the experiences of both reading and writing to the next level.

Appendix: Resources

If you’re new to the interplay between design and code on the open web, or if you just want a refresher, here are some evergreen links for your further learning and pleasure:

Getting Started with CSS Layout—Rachel Andrew, Smashing MagazineLearn CSS Grid—Jen SimmonsCSS Grid Layout—MDN web docsGrid by Example—Rachel AndrewA Complete Guide to Grid—Chris House, CSS-TricksPractical CSS Grid: Adding Grid to an Existing Design—Eric Meyer, A List ApartJen Simmons LabsLayout Land—YouTubeA Book Apart: The New CSS Layout, by Rachel AndrewThe Story of CSS Grid, from its Creators—Aaron Gustafson, A List ApartTranscript: Intrinsic Web Design with Jen Simmons (The Big Web Show)CSS Grid Layout with Rachel Andrew (The Big Web Show)My Poynter Style GuideAuthoritative, Readable, Branded: Report from Poynter Design Challenge, Part 2

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ARG for thee and me

When I joined a tech company after working for myself for 20 years, the corporate world seemed to have changed. My old jobs had existed in environments so laddish and rowdy that even I, a guy, felt uncomfortable in them.

So I got out. For 20 years, I ran my own businesses differently, prizing impact over profit, and adherence to a set of beliefs over survival. If marketplace disruptions made pivoting to an ugly business model the only way to keep my company going, I shut the company down—even when I wasn’t sure what I would do next.

After shutting down enough of my companies to convince me that maybe “business” wasn’t my strength, what I did next, in 2019, was to join Automattic, Inc.—the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, Tumblr, and other web-based empowerment tools.

They believe in Open Source. They follow a Creed. Instead of laddishness, they support difference.

One way that support flows is through Employee Resource Groups, which we at Automattic call Automattician Resource Groups.

ARGs are communities where colleagues connect with and support each other, and work together toward common goals. Identity and/or situation often spark the formation of these communities.

At Automattic, we have several of these ARG communities. Eventually, as the lead of Automattic’s Employer Brand activity, I plan to join them all. Initially, I joined two: Neurodiverseomattic and Queeromattic. I saw myself as an ally. In joining these two ARGs, I hoped to become wiser and kinder; to increase my ability to support, live, and work with family, friends, and colleagues; to deepen my interpersonal skills; and to grow in compassion and understanding. 

I accomplished those goals, but I also gained something I hadn’t expected.

It started with Neurodiverseomattic, a group that provides support and resources for neurodivergent Automatticians (including but not limited to autism, ADHD, dyslexia) and their allies.

As the dad of an autistic daughter (who also suffers from an alphabet soup of additional diagnoses), I have the joy of loving, living with, and learning from one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever encountered. But I also have the challenge of supporting someone whose life, through no fault of her own, is often painfully difficult.

I must listen when she needs an ear. Advise when she seeks help—and occasionally when she doesn’t. If you know, you know.

Autism, in my daughter’s case, simultaneously includes remarkable, magical, wondrous capabilities, along with painful, mostly social, disabilities. 

Some Neurodiverseomattic members are neurodiverse themselves; some are neurotypical but support neurodiverse family members; many, maybe most, are neurodiverse themselves and also support neurodiverse family members.

Over months, the more I shared experiences with members of my ARG, the better I became at meeting the challenges of parenting an autistic, depressed, anxious, dyslexic, artistic, gifted, emotionally intense, profoundly insightful teenager. And the more I came to realize that other members of my family had also been on the spectrum. Like my late father. And maybe my late brother. And, in a different way, my mom. And…

And the more Ava shared her past experiences of being bullied, misunderstood, abandoned, and confused, the more I realized that I myself had had many of the same feelings and experiences growing up that she was having.

Like her, I had gone through a period of crying every day at the thought of going to school. The terror of brutal bullying. The shock of friends laughing at me or pretending not to know me.

Like her, I’d entertained ridiculous fantasies to try to understand why these things happened to me. Had I committed some terrible crime? Was I a mistake? Had my parents been bribing my school friends to pretend to like me, and then run out of money?

So much of what Ava experienced, I had experienced. And so had my neurodiverse colleagues who courageously shared their stories.

And, finally, it sank in: I’m not just the president of hair club for men, I’m also a customer.

I’m on the spectrum. Always have been. 

Once I saw it, I was amazed that I’d never realized it or even wondered about it. 

Once I saw it, I was grateful to work at a place where we’re afforded this kind of support that can not only make us better at working with people, but can also introduce us, on a deep level, to ourselves.

 

And meanwhile, as an ally, I also joined Queeromattic. Need I say more?

Okay, I will.

The world I grew up in was so homophobic, and the romantic films I grew up watching were so prescriptive, that I got in touch with my heterosexuality long before I reached puberty … and didn’t recognize my queer side for decades. Not even when I made out with a boy. (Hey, I was drunk.) Or years later, when I made out with another boy. (Hey, I was drunk, and, anyway, he looked like a girl.)

After two divorces, my new self-knowledge is mostly academic. Parenting keeps me plenty busy and fulfilled, and singlehood may be unexciting, but I’ve had enough excitement for multiple lifetimes.

Romantic love is for those still willing to risk everything. I prefer to hold onto what I have left. Because I know it’s a hell of a lot.

Thanks to the wisdom, vulnerability, truthfulness, and compassion of the friends I’ve made through my company’s ARGs, I have come to better know myself. It gives me pride, no pun intended. It even grants me serenity. And for that, I am grateful.

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My father’s story

When he was eight years old, my dad taught himself to take apart watches and put them back together. He supported his mother by doing watch repairs at that age out of her little jewelry stand, and a few years later by delivering clothes for a Chinese laundry.

As a laundry delivery boy, he earned no salary—he lived off tips. Emanuel Romano, a starving modern painter and customer of the laundry service, could not afford to tip Murray, but in lieu of cash, he offered to teach the boy how to paint. My father accepted the lessons and painted for most of the rest of his life. (Our home in Pittsburgh would one day be filled with Murray’s paintings. All would be lost in the flood that later destroyed his home.)

In his early years, Murray couldn’t read. He was probably autistic and dyslexic, but nobody back then knew from that. And a public school in Queens in the 1930s was certainly not going to have the resources to help a child with those issues. When beating him didn’t improve his skills, the school labeled him “sub-normal” and stuck him in Special Ed. He would likely have remained there and become a janitor, or a grifter like his father (my grandfather). But one remarkable public school teacher spotted Murray’s gifts. “This boy is brilliant,” he said. 

That changed everything.

(Everything except my grandfather, from whom my dad got nothing but violence and psychological cruelty. When Murray was one of two kids from his neighborhood to be accepted into Bronx Science—a rigorously academic public high school specializing in engineering, mathematics, and the sciences—his father said simply, “They’ve made a mistake.”)

Murray enlisted in the Navy at 17 to fight the Nazis, but they surrendered before he reached Germany. The navy then shipped him off to Japan, but the atomic bomb got there first.

On returning after the war, he attended CUNY on the G.I. Bill, studying electrical engineering. He eventually took his Masters—not bad for a slum kid from a poor family. He would go on to work in robotics, fluid hydraulics, and even early typesetting computers. He came the director of a Research & Development laboratory in Pittsburgh, and afterwards, spent 25 years working for himself as an author, consultant, and lecturer.

Below is his biography from twenty years ago. At the time, he was still vigorous, still flying all over the world as a consultant and lecturer. If you wish, you may skip down to the bottom, where I tell what became of him.

Maurice Zeldman, President

A world authority in the field of project management, Mr. Zeldman has consulted and led seminars for over 180 client organizations. His in-company and public seminars have been presented around the world. Advanced project managers use his special techniques to create realistic estimates, time frames, and implementations which enable the completion of these development projects on schedule and within budgets.

Before launching his EMZEE Associates consultancy, Mr. Zeldman served with Rockwell International as the Corporate Director of Technical Development for the Industrial & Marine Divisions. Responsible for all of the division’s new product and process development projects, he designed, built, and staffed an Engineering Development Center for the corporation.

Previously Mr. Zeldman served with Perkin Elmer in the development of an Atomic Absorption Spectrometer, and with American Machine & Foundry as Chief Engineer of the Versatran Robot business venture.

He is the author of “Keeping Technical Projects on Target” and “Robotics: What Every Engineer Should Know.” (Book links at Amazon.)

My mother died in 2000 after seven years with Alzheimer’s.

My father remarried the next year.

His second wife divorced him when he came down with dementia at age 91.

He was also experiencing seizures. While he was hospitalized for one of them, his house flooded, and everything he owned was destroyed.

My brother Pete found our father a clean, decent nursing home to live in.

There, his dementia progressed quickly.

The last time he saw me with my daughter, he mistook her for my wife and asked how we two had met.

He accused the nursing home staff of soiling his underwear while he slept.

He often sneaked out of the facility to buy scissors, which he smuggled back into the home. (Scissors were contraband because the home feared that their demented patients would use the blades to harm themselves. He had no practical use for the scissors, but was incensed at being told he could not have them.)

During the first year of the Covid pandemic, he contracted pneumonia.

He died at age 93 while in palliative care. He was alone.

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