Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 91

Blood and Bone

MY EX-WIFE is one of my heroes. Six years ago today, during 33 hours of labor in a stiflingly hot room, she brought forth our daughter. When my body rebels in the gym, I think of her courage and push out another rep. When a lift or stretch hurts, I remember what she did and breathe through the pain. From her and those long moments, I learned mind over matter. From witnessing and helping during those 33 hours, I learned that life is blood and bone, and that we can achieve anything if we push hard enough.

Thank you, Carrie, for that lesson and for this girl. Happy sixth birthday, dearest Ava. And, by wonderful coincidence and similar courage and marvels, joyous first day on earth, Nash Thomas Hoy. Fill your lungs and holler, boy!

Designer Flow Chart Picks Typefaces For Your Projects

Tired of staring at your font collection, wondering what a trained graphic designer would do with all those typefaces? Unsure whether Times or Miller is the more appropriate choice for that vaguely left-leaning newspaper you have to design? Want to make sure that info-graphic you're designing looks hot? Then, friend, you need So You Need a Typeface, a large, hot-looking info-graphic suitable for printing and framing (or at least taping to the wall of your cubicle).

From the good folks at Inspiration Lab.

The future of web standards

"Cheap, complex devices such as the iPhone and the Droid have come along at precisely the moment when HTML5, CSS3 and web fonts are ready for action; when standards-based web development is no longer relegated to the fringe; and when web designers, no longer content to merely decorate screens, are crafting provocative, multi-platform experiences. Is this the dawn of a newer, more mature, more ubiquitous web?"

—The Future of Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman

Originally written...

HTML5 For Web Designers is a hit in the US iTunes store.

Jeremy Keith's excellent HTML5 For Web Designers, the first publication from A Book Apart, is a hit in the American iTunes store.

Comments, if you wish, may be left at Flickr.

960 Pixel Grids Made Easy

Listen up, web designers. From Stuntbox with love comes Gridulator, a dandy free web application that calculates multi-column grids for all your pixel-based web layout needs. Creator David Sleight explains how it works:

Tell Gridulator your layout width and the number of columns you want, and it'll spit back all the possible grids that have nice, round integers. Just the thing for pixel-based designfolk. There are inline previews, courtesy of the canvas element, and when...

Animated Me

Awesome Internet Design

Attending the SXSW Interactive festival in 2011? Be sure to see Jeffrey Zeldman's Awesome Internet Design Panel.

He brought us The Web Standards Project, A List Apart, Designing With Web Standards, A Book Apart, and so much more. Now legendary blogger, designer, and creative gadfly Jeffrey Zeldman brings us a SXSW panel.

You, the people, have spoken. We will not let you down.

Scientific American redesign

Happy Cog's redesign of the Scientific American website, featuring wicked web fonts Prelude and Brunel, is alive!

UX design: Whitney Hess
Graphic design: Mike Pick
Front-end code: Tim Murtaugh

Roger Black Studio did the print redesign (launch date TBA); Font Bureau created the web fonts.

Episode 20: Designing Web Applications, Managing Teams, and Creating Readability

Rich Ziade, creator of the popular reading tool Readability, guests on Thursday's episode of The Big Web Show, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and taped before a live internet audience.

Richard Ziade is the founding partner of Arc90, a consulting firm, product shop, and idea incubator based in New York City. Arc90 has a reputation as one of the best web application design shops around. Alas, nearly all their web application design work is for private corporate clients. Thus most of u...

ALA 314: Web Forms Magic

Issue No. 314 of A List Apart For People Who Make Websites is all about your form.

Ryan Seddon shows how to reduce errors and guide users to success via new methods made possible by HTML5 and CSS3. Harness HTML5 form input types and attributes to set validation constraints to check user input, and use CSS3's new UI pseudo-classes to style validation states, making form completion quick and effortless.

And Luke Wroblewski explains how accordion forms increase completion rates