Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 87

Design Agency of the Year

I TOOK THIS PHOTO TONIGHT in London at the 2010 .net Awards, where Happy Cog took home the award for Design Agency of the Year, besting Centersource and our good friends at Clearleft (who took the prize last year). My partners Greg Hoy and Greg Storey were beside me to accept the award. Fellas, it's all you and your brilliant peeps.

Dan Benjamin and I also won "Video Podcast of the Year" for The Big Web Show—although in my mind, any of Dan's podcasts on his 5by5 network could have won. They are that good, and so is he. Congrats and thanks, Padre.

I also won "Standards Champion" for the third year in a row. Had it been up to me, I would have bestowed the honor on Jeremy Keith for writing HTML5 For Web Designers.

Other prizes went to Smashing Magazine ("Blog of the Year"), Jason Santa Maria ("Web Personality of the Year"), Typekit ("Innovation of the Year"), Modernizr ("Open Source Product of the Year"), Flipboard ("Best API Use of the Year"), and BBC ("Redesign of the Year"). Congratulations, all!

Greg Hoy has posted videos of event highlights on his website, and there are photos in my "London 2010″ set on Flickr.

English Letter

Steaming suit, listening to A Love Supreme, watching birds circle rainy plaza in wet grey morning London. Perfect, perfect.

London Calling

CSS3 & CSS 101 in A List Apart 318

In Issue No. 318 of A List Apart for people who make websites, Noah Stokes (@motherfuton) offers Ye Compleat Refresher Course on CSS Positioning, and we proudly offer an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Dan (@simplebits) Cederholm's CSS3 for Web Designers (A Book Apart, 2010, published today).

A Book Apart No. 2: CSS3 For Web Designers, by Dan Cederholm

DAN CEDERHOLM IS THE FIRST front-end developer I've ever worked with who got everything right. Typically when one person is designing in Photoshop and another is converting that design to code, the coder makes at least one or two decisions that the designer will feel moved to correct. For instance, the designer may have intended a margin of 26px, but the coder writes 25px. Or the designer establishes a certain distance between subhead and paragraph, then accidentally changes that distance in a single instance during a Photoshop copy-and-paste error, and the coder slavishly copies the mistake. No front-end developer, however good, reads minds, right?

Wrong. Dan Cederholm reads minds. When we have hired him to code other people's visual designs, he gets everything right, including the parts the designer got wrong. Maybe that's because Dan is not only a front-end developer, he is also an extremely gifted designer with a strong personal vision and style, which you can see by visiting work.simplebits.com. Not only that, Dan invariably translates a designer's fixed Photoshop dimensions into code that is flexible, accessible, and bulletproof. That's only to be expected, of course, as Dan is a leading and pioneering advocate of accessible, standards-based design and the author who coined the phrase "bulletproof web design."

Designer, coder, pioneer. That would be plenty of achievement for anyone, but it happens that Dan is also a born teacher and a terrifically funny guy, whose deadpan delivery makes Steven Wright look giddy by comparison. Dan speaks all over America and the world, helping web designers improve their craft, and he not only educates, he kills.

And that, my friends, is why we've asked him to be our (and your) guide to CSS3. To be sure, there are (a few) other high-end CSS gurus who write beautifully and wittily, and whom we might have approached. But most are not designers. Dan is, to his core. He dreams design, bleeds design, and even gave the world a new way to share design.

You couldn't ask for a smarter, more design-focused, more detail-obsessed guide to the smoking hot newness and conceptual and browser challenges of CSS3. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the trip:

Read an excerpt from Chapter 2, "Understanding CSS3 Transitions", for free in Issue No. 318 of A List Apart for people who make websites.
Buy the book in print or digital format (or save money and buy print plus digital formats together) from A Book Apart.

Awesome web apps in 10k or less

The 10K Apart Challenge had a simple premise: Could you build a complete web application using less than 10 kilobytes? … A joint effort between An Event Apart and MIX Online, the 10K Apart reaped 367 web applications in 28 days—everything from casual games to RIAs—that demonstrate, even with their tiny footprints, what is truly possible with modern [web] standards.

Read about the winning entries: 10K Apart – IEBlog.

Blue Beanie Day Haiku Contest – Win Prizes from Peachpit and A Book Apart

Attention, web design geeks, contest fans, standards freaks, HTML5ophiles, CSSistas, grammarians, bookworms, UXers, designers, developers, and budding Haikuists. Can you do this?

Do not tell me I

Am source of your browser woes.

Template validates.

Write a web standards haiku (like that one), and post it on Twitter with the hashtag #bbd4 between now and November 30th—which happens to be the fourth international Blue Beanie Day in support of Web Standards.

Winning haikus will receive free books from Peachpit/New Riders ("Voices That Matter") and A Book Apart.

Ethan Marcotte, co-author of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition and I will determine the winners.

Enter as many haikus as you like. Sorry, only one winning entry per person. Now get out there and haiku your heart out!

See you on Blue Beanie Day.

P.S. An ePub version of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition is coming soon to a virtual bookstore near you. Watch this space.

Sound Taste

I ADORE MUSIC, especially rock, electronic, indie, hip-hop, and jazz, including:

MF DOOM, Beck, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, DJ Vadim, The Rolling Stones, Arcade Fire, John Lurie, Beirut, of Montreal, Eels, Madvillain, Nick Lowe, Minutemen, King Crimson, Bob Dylan, Muslimgauze, Elvis Costello, Muse, The Clash, The Beatles, Kid Koala, Sugar Minott, Duke Ellington, Electric Six, Bad Brains, Talking Heads, Woody Guthrie, Björk, Cansei de Ser Sexy, Simone Dinnerstein, Moby, Prince, Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra, John Foxx & Harold Budd, Air, Tom Waits, Thievery Corporation, Robyn Hitchcock, Minor Threat, Manu Chao, OutKast, Boards of Canada, Dean Martin, Freddy Kempf, Laurie Anderson, Philip Selway.

Check it out: www.last.fm/user/zeldman

Episode 27: Andy Clarke – It's Hardboiled

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ANDY CLARKE JOINS Dan Benjamin and me to talk about his new book Hardboiled Web Design, how to handle clients, and a fresh way to design with HTML5 and CSS3 in Episode 27 of The Big Web Show, now playing on 5by5.tv and iTunes.

Andy is the founder of Stuff and Nonsense, a small web design company, and a renowned public speaker who presents at web design conferences worldwide, and teaches web design techniques and technologies through his workshop master classes, For A Beautiful Web.

The Big Web Show ("Everything Web That Matters") is recorded live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes (like this one with Andy) can be watched afterwards via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

Support the families of the fallen, if Facebook lets you.

ONSTAR WILL DONATE up to $250,000 to the families of police officers killed in the line of duty. For every person who fans OnStar, they will donate a dollar to the families. This is a great cause; I encourage you to fan Onstar and help the families of the fallen.

Sadly, I can't do so myself, as Facebook has told me I have too many friends and fan pages.

How many friends is too many? Whom should I remove? Which fan pages should I unlike, if I could manage Facebook likes?

Here's the nuttier part. Although I can't add friends or pages, people can still add me. Every day at least half a dozen people do so. Some of them may have attended An Event Apart. Some may like A List Apart or A Book Apart. Others may have read Designing With Web Standards. Or this website. In some cases I know why people are reaching out to me; in others I don't. This doesn't bother me. I pretty much always say yes to new Facebook friends.

My reward for contributing significantly to Facebook's content and networks is that I can never add another friend or fan another page (although anyone can add me as a friend).

Fanning Onstar to help the families of the fallen is much more important than this silly problem. I don't lose sleep worrying about the friends I can no longer make on Facebook. I'm not complaining for personal reasons. I just wanted to point out—for my friends who work at Facebook and read this site—that Facebook's rules about friends are arbitrary, incomprehensible, and broken. And in this case, this foolishness hurts (however slightly) the families of fallen officers. And that's really not right.