I saw hundreds of performers, widely separated but somehow acting in unison, performing purely for David Byrne’s pleasure—each in their own ecstatic trance. | Continue reading
I WHEEZED like a busted accordion after carrying a bag of empty bottles down the hall to the recycling room in my apartment building, a journey of no more than 20 paces in each direction. I breathe normally as long as I don’t expend more physical energy than it takes to sit still … | Continue reading
I WHEEZED like a busted accordion after carrying a bag of empty bottles down the hall to the recycling room in my apartment building, a journey of no more than 20 paces in each direction. I breathe normally as long as I don’t expend more physical energy than it takes to sit still … | Continue reading
May 9. Snowing in New York. Wearing face masks, two men stand on a balcony of the Chinese Mission to the UN, photographing the snowfall with their phones. I try to photograph them and the snow, but they are already leaving the balcony, and my phone autofocuses on the window scree … | Continue reading
To rest as soon as I feel badly takes letting go of many responsibilities. There’s comfort in that. | Continue reading
His day was one long lunch hour bookended by naps. | Continue reading
Corona Virus Week 6. Recovering, bit by bit. Still get winded carrying a light package more than a dozen steps. I can sit up in the morning, make breakfast, and listen to music for several hours. Am exhausted and useless by 1:00 PM—but it’s an improvement over the 24/7 exhaustion … | Continue reading
It’s a rotten disease. You’re well enough not to need hospitalization, but too weak to do anything useful. | Continue reading
Finishing Week 4 with Coronavirus, heading into Week 5. I’m home—haven’t needed to go to the hospital, thank God—and my fever petered out last week. So all that’s left are cold and cough symptoms and a totally debilitating complete lack of energy. Oh, and lower back pain: a bad c … | Continue reading
Dino works six days a week as a porter in my apartment building, cleaning walls and floors, removing trash, distributing recyclables. He’s one of those essential workers who are suddenly on the front lines. We’ve always been friendly. I’ve been hibernating in my apartment for day … | Continue reading
At 4:00 PM, I went to bed to rest up from my head cold, and promptly fell asleep. When I awoke, the clock said 7:15. Oh, no! I banged on my daughter’s door. “You’re going to be late to school!” I shouted. She cackled with laughter.“It’s 7:15 AT NIGHT,” she explained. | Continue reading
Like 90s hip-hop, The Web We Lost™ retains a near-mystical hold on the hearts and minds of those who were lucky enough to be part of it. Luke Dorny’s recent, lovingly hand-carved redesign of his personal site encompasses several generations of that pioneering creative web. As suc … | Continue reading
Video: Live UX podcast at An Event Apart with Mina Markham, Farai Madzima, and Derek Featherstone, led by Jason Ogle. | Continue reading
To you, the true believers, whether you knew about/celebrated Blue Beanie Day or not, I give thanks. | Continue reading
Jeffrey Zeldman’s Spotify. Share music tastes with @zeldman. | Continue reading
Expressive Design Systems, the first book by Yesenia Perez-Cruz, is now available from A Book Apart. | Continue reading
Design kickoff meetings are like first dates that prepare you for an exciting relationship with a person who doesn’t exist. | Continue reading
Jen was present for, and actively participated in, the very beginnings of the creative and blogging web, and her famous book, now in its umpteenth edition, is still the best introduction to web design I know—probably the best that will ever be written. | Continue reading
We show our audience Gary Hustwit’s “Rams”—a documentary about product design icon Dieter Rams—during the lunch hour at An Event Apart. We’ve shown Gary’s film in every city of our tour this year, and every time I’ve watched it with our attendees I’ve seen new things in the film, … | Continue reading
I love a good page layout. I’m a chump for a visually well composed series of paragraphs. The proper degree of corner rounding for a given set of photos in relation to a box three columns over sets my little heart aflutter. | Continue reading
At the Automattic Grand Meetup, 2019, @zeldman shares a tale from his childhood. #standup #comedy #zeldman #WordPress #Automattic | Continue reading
DESIGN WAS so much easier before I had clients. I assigned myself projects with no requirements, no schedule, no budget, no constraints. By most definitions, what I did wasn’t even design—except that it ended up creating new things, some of which still exist on the web. Soon I ha … | Continue reading
I’M LEARNING new tech and it’s hard. Maybe you’re in the same boat. Through the rosy lens of memory, learning HTML and Photoshop back in the day was a breeze. It wasn’t, really. And CSS, when it came along in 1996, was even tougher to grasp—in part because it was mostly theoretic … | Continue reading
For the past two years, I’ve been publishing a daily work-and-life diary on Basecamp, sharing it with a few friends. This private writing work supplanted the daily public writing I used to do here. In an experiment, I’m publishing yesterday’s diary entry here today: YESTERDAY, Av … | Continue reading
TEACHING is a great way to find out what you know, and to connect with other human beings around a shared passion. It’s an energy exchange as well as an information one, and the energy and information flow both ways. I’ve been a faculty member in the MFA in Interaction Design pro … | Continue reading
Unintentionally hilarious Style piece on Stoicism as misunderstood and ostentatiously practiced by trend-conforming Silicon Valley billionaires. (Ooh, billionaire walks five miles a day? So does everyone with two legs in New York.) nytimes.com/2019/03/26/style/silicon-valley-stoi … | Continue reading
I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a great doctor and good health insurance. A boring generic healthcare company bought my longterm doctor’s group practice a few months ago. First thing they did was screw up the online patient portal, changing it from the poorly designed, barely u … | Continue reading
Developers, designers, and strategists, here’s something you can do for the health of the web: Test all your sites in Firefox. Yes, we should all design to web standards to the best of our ability. Yes, we should all test our work in *every* browser and device we can. Yes, yes, … | Continue reading
Developers, designers, and strategists, here’s something you can do for the health of the web: Test all your sites in Firefox. Yes, we should all design to web standards to the best of our ability. Yes, we should all test our work in *every* browser and device we can. Yes, yes, … | Continue reading
At the end of therapy this morning, I felt like the lone Samurai at the end of a Japanese movie. His warlord has betrayed him, his fellow Samurai have fallen into dishonor, and the rice crop failed. After a last meditation, he emerges from his tent, sword flashing, to die fightin … | Continue reading
My mom, who hated “women’s work,” would announce that she had done the very minimum—for instance, quickly boiling chicken instead of slowly baking turkey. “Done, enough, finished!” she’d exclaim, as if we were all rooting for her to get out of that sexist kitchen prison. And we w … | Continue reading
More drama at the cab stand. | Continue reading
IN MARCH of this year, I had the honor to serve as a Juror in a civil case in the New York court system. In the months since I served, the city and state have been trying to honor me over and over again. And so, on a hectic Friday where I should have been … | Continue reading
Sometimes, when you need it most, you get a reminder that life is a gift. | Continue reading
Business travel, baby. It’s the life. | Continue reading
Recently I had the privilege of reading a book proposal which the author shared in hopes of being published. It was a beautifully written treatise, well structured, nicely paced, logically argued, and thoroughly researched. The author had clearly poured time, thought, and years o … | Continue reading
“IN AN INDUSTRY that extols innovation over customer satisfaction, and prefers algorithm to human judgement (forgetting that every algorithm has human bias in its DNA), perhaps it should not surprise us that toolchains have replaced know-how.” Our addiction to complicated toolcha … | Continue reading
For your listening pleasure, I have prepared a 15-minute playlist composed of ten short songs. Before I share the URL, here are the requirements: You must have Spotify. (Sorry.) To enjoy, in Spotify Settings: Advanced, you must turn on Crossfade: 12 seconds. Half the trip is list … | Continue reading
The following is a transcript of The Big Web Show Episode № 176: Intrinsic Web Design with Jen Simmons. Jeffrey Zeldman: Hello, and welcome to the Big Web Show, everything web that matters. I’m Jeffrey Zeldman, your host, and my guest today is the amazing, the incredible Jen Sim … | Continue reading
Over the decades I’ve used computers, my drawing skill has all but vanished—along with my ability to do calligraphy or even write legibly. Which is why I’ve started forcing myself to sketch again every day. Practice is the best form of hope. Also published on Medium. | Continue reading
“Are you here with your child?” It’s a Sunday and my daughter is visiting her mom. I’d spent the morning lugging my daughter’s old clothes and toys to a donation bin, where they’ll be given to some of New York’s neediest kids. Now I was on a photo walk, shooting places in my neig … | Continue reading
During a recent conversation with David Sleight, Design Director at ProPublica, I found myself realizing and saying “we need design that is faster and design that is slower.” Who are we and what is this thing called design? When I say “we,” I mean our whole industry, when I say … | Continue reading
The content performance quotient is an index of how quickly you get the right answer to the individual customer, allowing her to act on it or depart and get on with her day. It is a measurement of your value to the customer. | Continue reading