Jeffrey Zeldman
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Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools
Why first impressions are often correct. Today’s jerk is tomorrow’s techno-fascist. The post Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
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Mix
The start of a beautiful weekend. The post Mix appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
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Her Glamorous Life
Snow White—17 years old—didn’t come meowing for food when I entered the kitchen at 6 a.m. An hour later I found her lying motionless on the sofa. I stared until she moved, slightly, nestling her face more deeply between her back paws. The post Her Glamorous Life appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents…
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The Most Important Industrial Designer of All Time
One Frenchman can’t be wrong. Push to the edge of what people will accept. Stop there. Raymond Loewy called it MAYA, and used it to design the modern world. The most important industrial designer you've never heard of. The post The Most Important Industrial Designer of All Time appeared first on Jeffrey…
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Ebb, Meet Flow: Intrinsic Design in a Nutshell
In 2020, the gifted makers of websites at Clearleft shared methods to achieve fluid responsive design. “Utopian” web design was (and still is) their half-kidding name for this approach, which Apple’s Jen Simmons, working indendently, called “intrinsic design.” Instead of chasing an ever-changing number…
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For students who make websites
Meet WordPress.com Education, a new, free product for teachers and students. The post For students who make websites appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
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A Permanent Home
Your writing needs a permanent home—a domain that you own and control. Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived. First, it was social media like Facebook. Then blogging networks like Tumblr. Then it was Medium. More recently, it’s been Substack. Platforms…
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You lost me at “infielder.”
The instant a business guy uses a sports metaphor to make his most important strategic point, I am lost. If you want me to understand your business idea, try wrapping it in Wendy Carlos’s secrets of synthesis or quotations by Orson Welles or the punchline to an old joke. The post You lost me at “infielder…
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The name of this LP is “Side One.”
On Sunday, I published Side One of my album on Bandcamp. The name of the album is also “Side One.” It is instrumental music with roots in Soundtrack, hip-hop, funk, jazz, 19th Century Romantic classical, ambient, electronic, and art rock. You might wonder if those divergent genres belong together, but…
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Stalin decided what was good science. Millions starved.
What happens when leaders choose political expediency over science? The post Stalin decided what was good science. Millions starved. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
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The Secret
If I learned one thing in 25 years of running design and education companies, it’s that idealism isn’t a business strategy. If you wonder why my partners and I had to shut down organizations we and lots of you loved, refer to the previous sentence. The post The Secret appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman…
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Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web
The web is still the best hope we have for a durable, shared memory. But it requires us to be gardeners, not merely tenants. The post Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
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The End
ON THIS DAY in 1971, Pamela Courson found Doors frontman Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub of their Paris apartment. The cause of death was heart failure. No autopsy was performed. Morrison was 27. A year before, a teenaged me had watched the Doors play live at Pittsburgh Civic Arena. Tension at the concert…
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The Human Story of the Open Web
STOP ME if you’ve heard this one: The members of an extended family spend years curating a shared online photo album. Then the website they posted on vanishes, flushing their collective memories away forever. The post The Human Story of the Open Web appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
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Underdubbed
When my brother Pete and I were kids, and our parents were out of town, we ditched school for a week and cut an “album” by recording backing tracks to my dad’s reel-to-reel, then live overdubbing on different instruments and capturing the whole mess on a cassette recorder. We didn’t know what we were…
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Remembrance of zeldman.coms past
Look back in anchor tags: a partial review of my site’s 31-year visual history before diving into the new design. The post Remembrance of zeldman.coms past appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
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She’s the Boss.
She is not here to eat. She is here to ensure my compliance. The post She’s the Boss. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
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Required reading: “The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything”
Cameron Cummins-Smith’s grand unifying theory connects the far right’s seemingly disparate obsessions—from trans panic and great replacement theory to anti-feminism and white birth-rate anxiety—into a single ideological system fueled by pornographic narratives: In physics there is this idea of a theory…
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Lest we forget
“GIs in Paris” by Floyd Davis. Davis served as a Life Magazine artist during WWII, where he was stationed in Paris, France. The post Lest we forget appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
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My UX Superpower: Nothing Works!
Maybe I’m special. Or unlucky. But things that supposedly work intuitively for most users tend to fail spectacularly for me. After stints in academia, journalism, advertising, and music, I poured myself into web design in early 1995. I understood it in a way most designers didn’t, and rose faster than…
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