For about a week, now, my bedroom floor has been torn up due to under-floor flooding created by a malfunctioning window air conditioning unit. The A/C unit began leaking during the summer months when I lay in bed with COVID-19, and, in my sickness, I initially did not notice the … | Continue reading
A cheesily animated digital American flag was flying on the Jumbotron overlooking the Bellagio fountains. | Continue reading
WordPress.com is holding its first virtual conference, I’m speaking there, and you’re invited. The WordPress.com Growth Summit is a two-day live event where you can learn to build and grow your site, “from start to scale.” To make it as inclusive as possible, the event will take … | Continue reading
I’m what they call a long-hauler. | Continue reading
Watching Adventure Time again after not having seen it for a year or two, I’m struck by its raw creative exuberance, broad emotional and tonal range, fearless exploration of psychological and political subject matter, brilliant voice acting (including culturally knowing cameos an … | Continue reading
First draft, first chapter, of a children’s book I’m writing. | Continue reading
Your feedback has the power to encourage another person, or shut them down, possibly forever. | Continue reading
The really good designers stand up to the misfortune of a killed idea. | Continue reading
Designer fonts for your iPad (and iPad products). | Continue reading
The upstairs neighbors in my apartment building are having their flat renovated. Cue the daily floor sander (right over my head) and sledgehammer (apparently they have many walls to knock down). It’s loud enough to induce vomiting. It happens every weekday, and has been going on … | Continue reading
Adelle and Adelle Sans have long been two of my favorite fonts—two great tastes that [taste even better together]!—and now there are two more great flavors, with the release of [Irene Vlachou], [Veronika Burian] and [José Scaglione]’s twin-powered new Adelle Mono family. | Continue reading
I don’t miss Flash but I sure miss this level of creativity and experimentation on the web. As today’s “The Web We’ve Lost” exercise for designers, please take a look back at Matt Owens’s historic Volume One project—outstanding design work Matt created in Flash during the 1990s a … | Continue reading
The chiming of my iPhone woke me from an afternoon of profound sleep marked by a long, unsettling dream involving basements. I’d taken to bed out of equal parts respect for my own exhaustion and the desire to escape a particularly pungent headache. Both are symptoms of my endless … | Continue reading
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