I am a creative.
Don’t ask about process. I am a creative.
Author
Jeffrey Zeldman
Also from this author
Nothing Fails Like Success
Money and tech have a complicated relationship. We trained our users to expect things for free. Quickly we realized that wasn't a sustainable business model, so we sold their data and served ads, which invites its own problems.
Now, we're trying to undo this tangled web. How do we get back to a democratized web? Our own Jeffrey Zeldman invites us to discuss how and to #LetsFixThis.
The Cult of the Complex
’Tis a gift to be simple. ALA’s Zeldman bemoans our industry’s current fetish for the needlessly complicated over the straightforward. Escape the cult of the complex! Get back to improving lives, one interaction at a time.
We’re Looking for People Who Love to Write
Publishing on A List Apart isn’t as easy-peasy as dashing off a post on your blog, but the results—and the audience—are worth it. And when you write for A List Apart, you never write alone: our industry-leading editors, technical editors, and copy editors are ready to help you polish your best idea from good to great. Come share with us!
A List Apart volunteer update
A few days ago, we announced a reimagined A List Apart, with you, our faithful readers of nearly 20 years, contributing your talents. The response from this community was humbling, thrilling, and, frankly, a bit overwhelming. If you volunteered to help A List Apart and haven’t heard back from us yet, here’s what’s up.
New A List Apart wants you!
As A List Apart approaches its 20th anniversary—a milestone in independent, web-based publishing—we’re once again reimagining the magazine. We want your feedback. And most of all, we want you. We’re getting rid of advertisers and digging back to our roots: community-based, community-built, and determinedly non-commercial. Find out how you can help!
Another 10k Apart: Create a Website in 10 KB, Win Prizes!
In 2000, Stewart Butterfield launched the original 5k competition to celebrate the merits of simplicity and brevity in web design. Ten years later, An Event Apart joined forces with Microsoft to launch the first 10k Apart, adding progressive enhancement, accessibility, and responsive design to the mix. Now, An Event Apart and Microsoft Edge are back with an even tougher challenge: design a compelling experience that can be delivered in 10 KB or less and works without JavaScript.
Looking for Love: Standing Out from the Crowd of Web Job Seekers
You have a solid resume, but can’t seem to connect with the right job. Maybe it's not you. Jeffrey Zeldman suggests reconsidering your career niche or refocusing your work persona. It could open fresh hiring tracks just waiting for the right candidate—you.
If Ever I Should Leave You: Job Hunting For Web Designers and Developers
At the start of your career, you’re excited to have any job—but at some point you wonder if there’s a better job out there for you. Is it youthful restlessness, or are you learning to recognize the warning signs of career stagnation? There’s no sure-fire way to tell—but if you’ve stopped growing or feeling any passion for the work, it’s probably time to let go. So how do you find a better job without making it worse with your current colleagues and in your bank account? Jeffrey Zeldman has some tried-and-true tips to make your transitions smoother.
No Good Can Come of Bad Code
More than a decade after we won the battle for web standards, too much code is still crap. Dr. Web is back to answer your career and industry questions. This time out, the good doctor considers what you can do when your boss is satisfied with third-party code that would make Stalin yak.
15 Years Ago in ALA: Much Ado About 5K
15 years ago this month, a plucky ALA staffer wrote “Much Ado About 5K,” an article on a contest created by Stewart Butterfield that challenged web designers and developers to build a complete website using less than 5K of images and code. As one group of modern web makers embraces mobile-first design and performance budgets, while another (the majority) worships at the altar of bigger, fatter, and slower, the 5K contest reminds us that a byte saved is a follower earned.
The Love You Make
What's the best way to present your work on the web? It's not just about your portfolio pieces—it's also about cultivating your voice. Jeffrey Zeldman explains the importance of speaking and writing publicly as you build your online presence.
Help! My Portfolio Sucks
What if a lot of your past work reflects times when you satisfied the client, but couldn’t sell them on your best ideas? How do you build a portfolio out of choices you wouldn’t have made? Our very own Jeffrey Zeldman answers your toughest career questions.
Valediction
When I first met Kevin Cornell in the early 2000s, he was employing his illustration talent mainly to draw caricatures of his fellow designers at a small Philadelphia design studio. Even in that rough, dashed-off state, his work floored me. It was as if Charles Addams and my favorite Mad Magazine illustrators from the 1960s had blended their DNA to spawn the perfect artist.
The Doctor Is In
Where should new web designers go to get started? Find out in this first edition of Ask Dr. Web, where A List Apart’s founder and publisher, Jeffrey Zeldman, answers your questions about web design.
“Dear FCC,”
Every voice counts! Please share your thoughts with the FCC before they vote later today to destroy net neutrality. This is an issue of justice and access. Save our shared web and help ensure that others can access it.
Global Accessibility Day
Today, 15 May, is Global Accessibility Awareness day. Please see if there is a live accessibility event near you. And take an hour of your day to experience accessibility online.
Responsive Design: The Picture Element Comes of Age
Big news! The Filament Group has released a new version of Picturefill that will make the real
picture element work in existing browsers, which means you can start using picture today. The Death of the Web Design Agency?
In The Pastry Box Project today, Greg Hoy of Happy Cog talks honestly about why the first quarter of this year sucked for most web design agencies (including ours), assesses the new and growing long-term threats to the agency business model, and shares his thinking on what we in the client services design business can do to survive, and maybe even thrive.
Style Guides On Parade
If you loved this week’s “Creating Style Guides” piece by Susan Robertson, you’ll thrill to Susan’s follow-up posting, on her personal site, of style guide links galore!
Ten Years Ago in A List Apart: CSS Sprites – Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death
Rereading this seminal 2004 article from the comfort of today’s privileged position, it’s easy to miss how new and revolutionary Dave Shea's thinking was. Today we take sophisticated CSS for granted, and we expect our markup to be just that—clean and semantic, not oozing behavior and leaking layout. But in 2004, removing all that cruft from HTML took courage. And it was an act of absolute wizardry to conceive that a grid of images in a single master GIF or JPEG could replace all those http calls and subfolders full of tiny images thanks to CSS’s hover property and cropping ability.
We’re Nothing Without You: The Web at 25
The World Wide Web celebrates its 25th birthday with a newly launched website commissioned by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and designed and developed by A List Apart’s own creative director/designer Mike Pick and technical director Tim Murtaugh.
CSS Regions Considered
Håkon Wium Lie’s A List Apart blog post “CSS Regions Considered Harmful” certainly stirred the pot. In the week since it came out, ALA reader Sara Soueidan posted a strong counterpoint article, while Google announced that they will drop support for CSS Regions in Chrome, potentially effectively killing the spec. Everything you need to know
To Sass or Not to Sass? The Two Tims on The East Wing
ALA acquisitions scout Tim Smith grills ALA technical director Tim Murtaugh about how he got his start, keeping up with technology in a fast-paced industry, the dangers and opportunities of our advanced new web tools, and the joy of working on projects that scare you. The Two Tims also discuss secrets of the A List
Bring Me The Head Of Tim Berners-Lee
Concerned about the MPAA getting a seat at the web standards table? Robin Berjon of the W3C and A List Apart’s Jeffrey Zeldman hold a rational conversation about EME, DRM, the MPAA, and the W3C in Episode № 109 of The Big Web Show on Mule Radio.
Act Now! Fight to Restore Net Neutrality.
On Jan. 14, a federal appeals court decided Verizon vs. FCC in favor of Verizon—not because Verizon was right, but because the FCC chose the wrong legal framework to use back in 2010. Nothing you can do today will be more important for the health of the web than letting the FCC hear from you
Get Started With GitHub Pages
Anna Debenham explains the basics of using GitHub Pages with Jekyll to create simple, template-based collaborative websites.
An Event Apart 2013 (San Francisco) Links
Alan W. Smith has compiled and summarized some of the most important links in modern web design, as referenced by speakers at An Event Apart San Francisco 2013. Bookmark this page!
Testing the Open Web Platform
“W3C is launching an unprecedented effort to scale up its test offering. And the good news is this effort is backed up by significant financial and human contributions from the W3C Membership.” W3C testing lead Tobie Langel gets granular about Test The Web Forward.
Blue Beanie Day Comes But Once A Year
On Saturday, November 30, web designers around the world will once again don a blue beanie (toque, cap) to show their support for web standards. Join us!
MailChimp Pattern Library
“The MailChimp Pattern Library is a byproduct of our move to a responsive, nimble, and intuitive app. Constant iteration requires both an efficient workflow and a well defined collection of atomic elements that can assemble new UIs quickly without accruing new technical or design debt.”
Offline First!
We can’t keep building apps with the desktop mindset of permanent, fast connectivity, where a temporary disconnection or slow service is regarded as a problem and communicated as an error. With Hoodie, we’ve created an architecture that allows you to build offline apps with relative ease.
Web Type, Meet Size Calculator
It is trivial for a designer to set type (or any artwork) to appear at a specific size in centimeters or inches on the printed page. But it is impossible to do so when designing for screens. At Ampersand New York, Nick Sherman demonstrated a tool designed to change that.
How many people are missing out on JavaScript enhancement?
UK Government Digital Service wanted to know how many people use their web services without the enhancement of JavaScript. Follow their quest, and learn what they discovered.
Google Hides Layout, JavaScript from Game Console Browsers
Anna Debenham updates her 2012 A List Apart article on testing websites in game console browsers and discovers that Google serves dumbed-down versions of the web to folks using the 3DS browser.
“Designers Shouldn’t Code” is the Wrong Answer to the Right Question
Why some professionals fear that too much knowledge of code will lead to designs being based around implementation models instead of a user's mental model; why that concern is overblown; and why having HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the design workflow can make for a much better end-product.
Progressive Reduction: Modify Your UI Over Time
The idea behind Progressive Reduction is simple: Usability is a moving target. A user’s understanding of your application improves over time and your application’s interface should adapt to your user.
Marketers, reach designers and developers!
The Deck advertising network, which helps us bring you A List Apart, is now booking ad schedules for the remainder of 2013, and has a few slots open in August. Act fast to get a great price.
Stop writing code. Start drawing it.
“Macaw provides the same flexibility as your favorite image editor but also writes semantic HTML and remarkably succinct CSS,” claim the soon-to-be-released software’s creators. We’re a mite skeptical but very, very curious.
Hot in Web Standards: Lea Verou on the latest developments at the W3C
Fast vs complete selector profiles, SVG text wrapping, hgroup is dead, and more.
The Origin of Tweet
Twitterific co-creator Craig Hockenberry tells how and when a bird became synonymous with Twitter, and reveals the secret history of “tweet” as a noun and verb for Twitter messages and the act of publishing them.
Content Choreography
Old Gold: The concept of permanently placing content on a web page for a single browsing width or resolution is becoming a thing of the past. Content choreography rearranges content as appropriate for different viewports and devices. Trent Walton thoughtfully explores ways and means.
“The first thing she wrote was a story about a squirrel.”
“I remember teaching my daughter to code HTML when she was 8. The first thing she wrote was a story about a squirrel. She wasn’t ‘writing HTML’; she was sharing something with the world.”
Maps Should Be Crafted, Not “Plugged In”
Web designers: erase the line between “the map” and “the content“ by harnessing the power of open-source Leaflet and your own fresh creative thinking. In the tradition of ALA’s recent “Hack Your Maps,” Happy Cog’s Brandon Rosage shares how to make location a central aspect of the content experience—not just a visual aid.
Responsive Web Design Easter Egg
Celebrate the third anniversary of Ethan Marcotte’s seminal “Responsive Web Design” article with a nifty Easter Egg from the pen of Kevin Cornell and the minds of Pick and Murtaugh.
Matt Mullenweg on Yahoo-Tumblr
“We’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain.”–Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.
Research Tips For Designers and Developers
How is the waterfall web design process like the childhood game of “Telephone,” and how can we fix it? Bringing designers and developers into the discovery and research phase is a good start, says Happy Cog creative director Chris Cashdollar, who shares stakeholder interviewing tips in this helpful Cognition post.
Breakpoint: Really Simple, Organized, Media Queries with Sass
Breakpoint is a Compass extension designed to simplify the creation and management of media queries.
Bearskin Rug Reawakens
After months of hibernation, the personal site of ALA's brilliant illustrator Kevin Cornell has come roaring back to life. Narrow fixed-width text column with responsive nav? We love it.
Four Surprising App Design Principles, From The Instagram Of Quick Quizzes
Mobile First author Luke Wroblewski shares the clever (and often counterintuitive) tactics he used in designing Polar, an addictive web-based mobile app.
The Virtues of Vertical Media Queries
Devices come in all shapes and sizes, and pivot between portrait and landscape orientation. Desktop and laptop browsers can also be contorted into all sorts of shapes. It’s time to stop ignoring short (and tall!) viewports and start using them to creative and user-pleasing effect. Anthony Colangelo shares why and how.
Adobe Closes BrowserLab, Blames Mobile Platform Rise
On March 13, Adobe unexpectedly added a chapter to the story of the fading of the PC, when it announced that it would be closing down its BrowserLab service effective… March 13.
Track the Carbon Footprint of a Hashtag
The energy it takes to send a tweet generates .02 grams of CO2.1 With 500 million tweets sent daily, a total of 10 metric tons of CO2 are emitted per day. Track the carbon footprint of a hashtag on Tweet Farts, a serious site with a silly name, launched today by David Bellona and Tash
Responsible Responsive Design: Scott Jehl on Big Web Show No. 83
In this 60-minute Big Web Show design podcast, Scott Jehl (jQuery Mobile, Filament Group, Designing With Progressive Enhancement) and Jeffrey Zeldman (A List Apart, Designing With Web Standards) discuss emerging best practices and contentious memes in our increasingly complex, multi-device design world.
One Size Fits None
Finally, somebody says what all thinking designers have been thinking. Rather than embrace this week’s one-size-fits-all technique, framework, or methodology, keep a range of processes at your disposal, and choose the right ones for each job.
Smells Like Design Sales
A multi-blog discussion challenges the secrecy design studios maintain around their sales processes and pitch success ratios.
Outside the Box
Yes, the clipped logotype at the top of the page is intentional.
Accessible HTML5 Media Players and More
A list of accessible HTML5 Media Players, some articles on how to build one yourself, and a request for more information.
Much Ado About the Main Element
Jeremy Keith discusses the introduction of a main element in HTML, and laments that it can only be used once per document.
On Alt Text
Any web designer or developer with her heart in the right place knows that, to be accessible, every image requires an alt text. Except when it doesn’t.
Defeating Busy
10 habits of highly effective web folks–from starting the day with your to-do list instead of e-mail, to learning to say no.
HTML is the new Flash
Form Follows Function (FFF) is an experimental visual showcase by Jongmin Kim. Helvetica fans will enjoy the latest entry, Wiper Typography. Hat tip: Susie Hall.
Mobile Shopping on Native & Web
Almost 80% of smartphone owners in the US have used their phones for shopping-related tasks. But while the web was a key driver of mobile commerce before, native apps may be catching up.
I Vant To Be Alone
Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk?
From humble beginnings
Ten years ago: the blog comment that gave birth to WordPress.
Tastes like chicken.
Fancy transformations at CodePen.
A List Apart 5.0
A design that departs from our past and a platform on which to build the future. Welcome to the relaunch of A List Apart, for people who make websites.
Why are Links Blue?
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, is credited with making hyperlinks blue, a decision he appears to have reached at random. But although accessibility may not have been on Sir Tim's mind at the time, the color choice was a happy one, according to Joe Clark.
Karen McGrane: Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content (video)
Why are we still letting authors plan for where their content will “live” on a page? Karen McGrane explains how to take an adaptive approach in this full-length talk from An Event Apart.
Big Web Show Episode 79: Eric A. Meyer
In this 60 minute podcast, host Jeffrey Zeldman interviews CSS guru Eric A. Meyer about upcoming CSS modules including grid layout, flexbox, and regions.
The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck
Science confirms it: comment trolls change perception of content, leading readers to think irrationally.
Say No to SOPA
A List Apart strongly opposes United States H.R.3261 AKA the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation that is technically impossible to enforce, cripplingly burdensome to support, and would, without hyperbole, destroy the internet as we know it. SOPA approaches the problem of content piracy with a broad brush, lights that brush on fire, and soaks the whole web in gasoline. If passed, SOPA will allow corporations to block the domains of websites that are “capable of” or “seem to encourage” copyright infringement. Once a domain is blocked, nobody can access it, unless they’ve memorized the I.P. address. Under SOPA, everything from your grandma’s knitting blog to mighty Google is guilty until proven innocent. Learn why SOPA must not pass, and find out what you can do to help stop it.
Real Fonts on the Web: An Interview with The Font Bureau’s David Berlow
Is there life after Georgia? We ask David Berlow, co-founder of The Font Bureau, Inc, and the first TrueType type designer, how type designers and web designers can work together to resolve licensing and technology issues that stand between us and real fonts on the web.
Ten Years
When Google was little more than a napkin sketch and the first dot-com boom was not even a blip, we started a magazine for people who make websites. Celebrate A List Apart's first decade. Join Zeldman for a look back at the way we were—and why we were that way. Find out what we've done and who did it with us, peek into our process, and get a clue about what's next.
Version Targeting: Threat or Menace?
Version targeting shakes our browser-agnostic faith. Its default behavior runs counter to our expectations, and seems wrong. Yet to offer true DOM support without bringing JScript-authored sites to their knees, version targeting must work the way Microsoft proposes, argues Jeffrey Zeldman.
Understanding Web Design
We'll have better web design when we stop asking it to be something it's not, and start appreciating it for what it is. It's not print, not video, not a poster—and that's not a problem. Find out why cultural and business leaders misunderstand web design, and learn which other forms it most usefully resembles.
Web 3.0
Web 2.0 is a fresh-faced starlet on the intertwingled longtail to the disruptive experience of tomorrow. Web 3.0 thinks you are so 2005.
A List Apart 4.0
From the crown of its cranium to the tips of its Ruby-slippered toes, A List Apart 4.0 is both old and new.
Tackling Usability Gotchas in Large-scale Site Redesigns
Redesigns can solve old usability problems while creating new ones that must be solved in turn. From the lessons of the ALA 3.0 redesign comes this quick study in remapping content without frustrating readers.
A Standards-Compliant Publishing Tool for the Rest of Us?
Publishing with web standards is not for experts alone. A new tool hopes to make it easier for anyone. ALA interviews Six Apart’s Anil Dash about his company’s easy-to-use, standards-compliant publishing tool, TypePad.
Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!
You’ve done everything right, but your site is breaking in the latest browsers. A faulty DOCTYPE is likely to blame. This essential ALA article will provide you with DOCTYPEs that work, enabling you to fix your site with just one tag.
Better Living Through XHTML
Everything you wanted to know about converting from HTML to XHTML, including why you’d want to, tools that help, changes in the way browsers display XHTML pages, shortcuts, bugs, workarounds, and other tips you won’t find elsewhere.
Getting Paid
As businesses struggle to stay in business, many are short–changing vendors or woefully delaying payment. Zeldman laments the difficulties of getting paid.
Mac Browser Roundup (with Håkon Lie and Tantek Çelik)
We test drove and reviewed the new Mac browsers, then asked browser makers Håkon Lie of Opera and Tantek Çelik of Microsoft to respond to our comments.
Why Don’t You Code for Netscape?
Long considered the Holy Grail of web design, “backward compatibility” has its place; but at this point in web development history, shouldn’t we be more concerned about forward compatibility? ALA makes the case for authoring to web standards instead of browser quirks.
Patents, Royalties, and Web Standards
This week there is only one web story that matters. The W3C has written a patent policy that opens the door to royalty payments on web standards.
Circle Jerks & Web Elitists
The web design community goes through this kind of self-examination every three months. Under the banner of honest criticism, names are named, guesses about motivation are sketched, and sometimes entire bodies of work are dismissed.
SMIL When You Play That
A gentle introduction to the SVG and SMIL standards for programmable vector graphics and accessible rich media.
To Hell With Bad Browsers
In a year or two, all sites will be designed with standards that separate structure from presentation (or they will be built with Flash 7). We can watch our skills grow obsolete, or start learning standards-based techniques. In fact, since the latest versions of IE, Navigator, and Opera already support many web standards, if we are willing to let go of the notion that backward compatibility is a virtue, we can stop making excuses and start using these standards now. At ALA, beginning with Issue No. 99, we've done just that. Join us.
From Table Hacks to CSS Layout: A Web Designer’s Journey
Redesigning A List Apart using CSS should have been easy. It wasn’t. The first problem was understanding how CSS actually works. The second was getting it to work in standards-compliant browsers. A journey of discovery.
Survivor! (How Your Peers are Coping With the Dotcom Crisis)
It’s ugly out there, but how bad is it, really? We asked 40 colleagues to share how they were coping (or not) with the layoffs and business failures plaguing our industry.
Much Ado About 5K
A full-fledged website under 5K? Some of the brightest people in the industry swore it could not be done. Yet hundreds of developers not only came in under the 5K budget, they built great sites in the process. Zeldman explores how the 5K Awards rocked the web.
Why IE5/Mac Matters
It complies with two key web standards. And leaves out two others. It's IE5 Macintosh Edition, the first browser on any platform to truly support HTML 4 and CSS-1. Its accessibility enhancements put the user in charge, and its clever new features solve long-standing cross-platform and usability problems. All this ... but still no XML or DOM. Zeldman explains what IE5/Mac means to the web.
Why Gecko Matters: What Netscape’s Upcoming Browser Will Mean to the Web
Netscape is about to unleash its new browser, built around the Gecko rendering engine. Theoretically the first completely standards-compliant web browser, Gecko enters a world where most people use IE5 (which is not completely standards-compliant). Is Netscape’s effort too little, too late? Or is it the beginning of a new and better way to create websites? Zeldman articulates The Web Standards Project’s position and explains what Netscape’s browser will mean to the web.
Netscape Bites Bullet
Netscape’s bold move to fully support the W3C DOM and sacrifice backward compatibility raises a few concerns and much hope.
Fear of Style Sheets
“No-fault CSS” can help you work around frightened clients, buggy software, and readers who still love last year’s browser. In Part One of a series, Zeldman walks you through the fear.
Writing for the Web
When Brian and I launched the original LIST APART in January '98, we had two goals: to create a noise-free, high-level discussion list for the web; and to cover all the bases of webmaking—from pixels to prose, coding to content. Posts in the digest have begun that work. It continues with this article, the first in a series. The scarcity of online writing about online writing is baffling when you consider that most websites consist of words.