NEW YEARS bring thoughts of old years, and, to a designer and veteran “blogger,” thoughts of old work. My personal site, begun in 1994, was many things: an interview zine (my first web client, Donald Buckley, named it: 15 Minutes), a newfangled GIF animation playground, a freeware icon factory, an Advertising Graveyard, and more. But eventually, before it was forgotten entirely, it became best known as a blog.
Inspired by Dori Smith’s recent Facebook post about old-school blogging and the possibility of a “20th Anniversary of Blogging” unconference/relaxacon, I thought it might be fun to poke through the old blog a bit with you, gentle reader. My blog began in 1995, but, for now, you can only page through the entries as far back as August, 1997, as I seem to have neglected to build “previous” page links before that, and may also have overwritten my earliest entries (not realizing, at the time, that you and I might ever want to look back at any of this).
Below, I begin the retrospective in 2004 and work backwards to 1997. (After 2004, I stopped hand-coding each entry and began using WordPress, resulting in this sort of thing. Also after 2004, I stopped redesigning the site every few months, partly, but not exclusively, because I got busier designing other people’s sites. I also stopped redesigning the site every few months because I had become more strategic about design—more interested in design as problem solving, less as making pretty pages. Say, remember when we designed “pages”? But I digress.)
Here, for your pleasure, are some pages from the past:
Silence and Noise?—?“Now that some of us have helped bring standards into the mainstream, wouldn’t it be best to keep them there?”?—?12 August 2004 (the iconic green design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0804b.shtml
Typical blog entries?—?on web performance and “the new Samaritans” (designers who recode other people’s sites to be standards-compliant)?—?28 July 2004 (the iconic green design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0704e.shtml
CSS Validator is Broken?—?5 February 2004 (the creme design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0204b.shtml
Don’t Design on Spec?—?26 January 2004 (the creme design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0104h.shtml
Chip Kidd & Alfred Hitchcock?—?20 January 2004 (the creme design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0104f.shtml
Tears for Istanbul?—?26 November 2003 (rooster design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/1103a.shtml
Ladies and gentlemen, A List Apart 3.0–22 October 2003 (rooster design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/1003a.shtml
“Jeffrey Zeldman is good enough for me.” 2 November 2002 (teal swap design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/1002d.shtml
Typical blog entries?—?16 October2002 (the iconic red design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/1002a.html
Typical blog entries?—?super secret Charlotte Gray style guide (now offline)?—?26 August 2002 (HTML fist, red design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0802c.html
Typical blog entries?—?in the middle of writing Designing With Web Standards, then titled Forward Compatibility?—?30 July 2002 (the iconic red design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0802a.html
“The heartbreak of sizing small text with ems”?—?21 May 2002 http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0502c.html
Typical blog entries, 25 January 2002 (the iconic red design?—?liquid variant) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0102d.html
Daily Report 31 August 1999, liquid orange design (unfinished) http://www.zeldman.com/com0899.html
Daily Report 14 October 1998, liquid orange design (unfinished) with Web Standards Project banner ad at the top of the page http://www.zeldman.com/com1098.html
“Previous Reports” 31 August 1997, ugly yellow bacon strip style, http://www.zeldman.com/came2.html
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