23 Feb 2010 9 am eastern

Books Not Dead

Headed to SXSW Interactive? Concerned about the future of books, magazines, and websites? Attend “New Publishing and Web Content,” a panel I’m hosting on the creative, strategic, and marketing challenges of traditional and new (internet hybrid) book publishing and online magazine publishing, and how these fields intersect with content strategy and client services.

Joining me in a thoughtful exploration of new and old business models and creative challenges will be people who’ve spent a decade or two butting up against and reinventing these boundaries:

As moderator, my job will be to let these geniuses speak, to occasionally lob the right question to the right genius, and to help field your questions from the audience.

If you work in web or print publishing, or just care about the written word, please join us at 5:00 PM Central Time in Ballroom A.

(What else am I doing at SXSW Interactive? Here’s my schedule so far. I also hope to see some of you at OK Cog’aoke II, SXSW Interactive’s premiere karaoke event and best party, hosted by your friends at Happy Cog.)

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Filed under: Micropublishing, Press, Publications, Publishing, SXSW, The Profession, Zeldman, business, client services, conferences, content, content strategy, editorial, events, speaking

11 Feb 2010 4 pm eastern

Wish I’d invented it

Arc90 Lab’s Readability is a simple and essential tool that “makes reading on the web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.”

Just choose your settings, install the bookmarklet in your browser’s toolbar, and enjoy content on even the busiest, most poorly-designed sites.

In the past, I’ve cited Readability as a signpost for designers struggling with IE6.

It’s also an invaluable aid to readers who use smart phones.

For instance, here is Roger Ebert’s review of Fellini’s 8 1/2.

On a desktop browser, although it’s not an aesthetically pleasant experience, you can probably read it. On a small iPhone screen, you can’t. It’s a nightmare. It’s everything designers shouldn’t do when they have text by a good writer with an audience of eager readers.

So what’s a reader to do?

Without Readability, there’s nothing you can do, but sigh and close the browser window. With Readability, you can read and actually enjoy what Roger Ebert has to say.

Invaluable.


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Filed under: Accessibility, Design, The Profession, Tools, content

2 Feb 2010 8 am eastern

Laying Pipe

The Pipeline inaugural podcast

Dan Benjamin and yours truly discuss the secret history of blogging, transitioning from freelance to agency, the story behind the web standards movement, the launch of A Book Apart and its first title, HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith, the trajectory of content management systems, managing the growth of a design business, and more in the inaugural episode of the Pipeline.


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Filed under: Acclaim, Advocacy, Appearances, CSS, Design, HTML, Interviews, The Profession, User Experience, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, Zeldman, better-know-a-speaker, content, creativity, speaking

21 Jan 2010 10 am eastern

Posthumous Hosting and Digital Culture

The deaths of Leslie Harpold and Brad Graham, in addition to being tragic and horrible and sad, have highlighted the questionable long-term viability of blogs, personal sites, and web magazines as legitimate artistic and literary expressions. (Read this, by Rogers Cadenhead.)

Cool URIs don’t change, they just fade away. When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

Now, not every blog post or “Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet” piece deserves to live forever. But there’s gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes. We are not clairvoyants, so we cannot say which fledgling, presently little-read web publications will matter to future historians. Thus logic and the cultural imperative urge us to preserve them all. But how?

The death of the good in the jaws of time is not limited to internet publications, of course. Film decays, books (even really good ones) constantly go out of print, digital formats perish. Recorded music that does not immediately find an audience disappears from the earth.

Digital subscriptions were supposed to replace microfilm, but American libraries, which knew we were racing toward recession years before the actual global crisis came, stopped being able to pay for digital newspaper and magazine descriptions nearly a decade ago. Many also (even fancy, famous ones) can no longer collect—or can only collect in a limited fashion. Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

Thanks to budget shortfalls and format wars, our traditional media, literature, and arts are perishing faster than ever before. Nothing conceived by the human mind, except Heaven and nuclear winter, is eternal.

Still, when it comes to instant disposability, web stuff is in a category all its own.

Unlike with other digital expressions, format is not the problem: HTML, CSS, and backward-compatible web browsers will be with us forever. The problem is, authors pay for their own hosting.

(There are other problems: the total creative output of someone I follow is likely distributed across multiple social networks as well as a personal site and Twitter feed. How to connect those dots when the person has passed on? But let’s leave that to the side for the moment.)

A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting.

A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.


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Filed under: Accessibility, Advocacy, Blogs and Blogging, Community, Formats, HTML, Ideas, Publications, Publishing, Respect, State of the Web, The Profession, W3C, business, content strategy, data, glamorous, industry, work, writing

15 Dec 2009 9 am eastern

Take our survey. Please.

The 2009 survey for people who make websites.

Each year since 2007, we’ve asked you, the members of the web design community, a few dozen questions about your professional life, and compared your answers to those of your colleagues. The data you provide and we analyze is the only significant information about our profession as a profession to be published anywhere, by anyone. So please take the survey for people who make websites. The job you save could be your own.

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Filed under: Design, State of the Web, Survey, The Profession, Web Design, Web Standards

7 Dec 2009 9 am eastern

A Feed Apart

Live from San Francisco, it’s An Event Apart, for people who make websites. If you can’t join us here today and tomorrow, enjoy the live feed, designed and coded by Nick Sergeant and Pete Karl.

Also:


Composed at The Palace Hotel. Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3208.

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Filed under: An Event Apart, CSS, Community, Design, Happy Cog™, San Francisco, Standards, State of the Web, The Profession, UX, User Experience, Web Design, Web Standards, conferences, industry

5 Dec 2009 12 pm eastern

Someone could write a study on how moving and changes in marital status can cause a domain to lapse, and that someone could be me.


Sent from: The Palace Hotel. Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3178. Tweet reference: 6372740541. Why are you reading this?

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Filed under: An Event Apart, San Francisco, The Profession, business, glamorous

1 Sep 2009 9 am eastern

MFA Interaction Design, Day 1

Qing Qing greets the students at Day 1 of the MFA in Interaction Design program.

On the last night of August, 2009, the MFA in Interaction Design at School of Visual Arts opened its doors to eighteen gifted students. The intense program will be like Project Runway, except that it lasts two years, and nobody will be “out.”

Created and chaired by Liz Danzico and Steven Heller, SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design is one of the only graduate-level degrees dedicated to interaction design in the U.S. Over two years of night classes, the program teaches students from diverse backgrounds (including design, computer programming, architecture, and even majors in English literature) to envision and create experiences across all manner of media, including the real world.

Students in this program will not merely become better web or interaction designers. They will develop user experience conventions in media where no such conventions exist.

In a beautiful post at Bobulate, Liz places the opening of the new program in the context of SVA’s history.

As a faculty member, I attended the opening orientation and have the crummy iPhone pictures to prove it.

It was a thrill to meet these talented students, who will spend the next two years haunting the program’s beautiful new design space at night (most of them after working at their day jobs, an SVA tradition).

To attend the program’s many free events, or simply to enjoy it vicariously, follow twitter.com/svaixd. And keep watching the skies.

ShortURL: zeldman.com/?P=2439

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Filed under: Design, Education, IXD, SVA, The Profession

24 Jun 2009 6 pm eastern

Sour Outlook

It’s outrageous that the CSS standard created in 1996 is not properly supported in Outlook 2010. Let’s do something about it.

Hundreds of millions use Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the web, and Microsoft Outlook to send and receive email. As everyone reading this knows, the good news is that in IE8, Microsoft has released a browser that supports web standards at a high level. The shockingly bad news is that Microsoft is still using the Word rendering engine to display HTML email in Outlook 2010.

What does this mean for web designers, developers, and users? In the words of the “Let’s Fix It” project created by the Email Standards Project, Campaign Monitor, and Newism, it means exactly this:

[F]or the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here’s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.

It’s difficult to believe that in 2009, after diligently improving standards support in IE7 and now IE8, Microsoft would force email designers to use nonsemantic table layout techniques that fractured the web, squandered bandwidth, and made a joke of accessibility back in the 1990s.

Accounting for stupidity

For a company that claims to believe in innovation and standards, and has spent five years redeeming itself in the web standards community, the decision to use the non-standards-compliant, decades-old Word rendering engine in the mail program that accompanies its shiny standards-compliant browser makes no sense from any angle. It’s not good for users, not good for business, not good for designers. It’s not logical, not on-brand, and the very opposite of a PR win.

Rumor has it that Microsoft chose the Word rendering engine because its Outlook division “couldn’t afford” to pay its browser division for IE8. And by “couldn’t afford” I don’t mean Microsoft has no money; I mean someone at this fabulously wealthy corporation must have neglected to budget for an internal cost. Big companies love these fictions where one part of the company “pays” another, and accountants love this stuff as well, for reasons that make Jesus cry out anew.

But if the rumor’s right, and if the Outlook division couldn’t afford to license the IE8 rendering engine, there are two very simple solutions: use Webkit or Gecko. They’re both free, and they both kick ass.

Why it matters

You may hope that this bone-headed decision will push millions of people into the warm embrace of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but it probably won’t. Most people, especially most working people, don’t have a choice about their operating system or browser. Ditto their corporate email platform.

Likewise, most web designers, whether in-house, agency, or freelance, are perpetually called upon to create HTML emails for opt-in customers. As Outlook’s Word rendering engine doesn’t support the most basic CSS layout tools such as float, designers cannot use our hard-won standards-based layout tools in the creation of these mails—unless they and their employers are willing to send broken messages to tens millions of Outlook users. No employer, of course, would sanction such a strategy. And this is precisely how self-serving decisions by Microsoft profoundly retard the adoption of standards on the web. Even when one Microsoft division has embraced standards, actions by another division ensure that millions of customers will have substandard experiences and hundreds of thousands of developers still won’t get the message that our medium has standards which can be used today.

So it’s up to us, the community, to let Microsoft know how we feel.

Participate in the Outlook’s Broken project. All it takes is a tweet.

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Filed under: Browsers, CSS, Compatibility, Design, Marketing, Markup, Microsoft, Standards, State of the Web, The Profession, Tools, W3C, Web Standards, Working, XHTML, software, spec, style

7 May 2009 10 am eastern

AEA Seattle after-report

Armed with nothing more than a keen eye, a good seat, a fine camera, and the ability to use it, An Event Apart Seattle attendee Warren Parsons captured the entire two-day show in crisp and loving detail. Presenting, for your viewing pleasure, An Event Apart Seattle 2009 – a set on Flickr.

When you’ve paged your way through those, have a gander at Think Brownstone’s extraordinary sketches of AEA Seattle.

Still can’t get enough of that AEA stuff? Check out the official AEA Seattle photo pool on Flickr.

Wonder what people said about the event? Check these Twitter streams: AEA and AEA09.

And here are Luke W’s notes on the show.

Our thanks to the photographers, sketchers, speakers, and all who attended.

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Filed under: An Event Apart, Appearances, Browsers, CSS, Career, Code, Community, Design, HTML, HTML5, Happy Cog™, Ideas, Images, Information architecture, Redesigns, Seattle, Standards, State of the Web, Surviving, The Profession, Working, Zeldman, client services, content, creativity, eric meyer, events, industry, jobs, speaking, tweets, twitter