Clusterfuck, despite its saucy name, does not refer to a pleasurable group activity. Its origins are military, its antecedents bloody. The Urban Dictionary offers ten pages of definitions. Our favorite is a double entendre on “cluster bomb” and the oak leaf or star cluster insignia worn by incompetent military brass whose bad decisions result in a needless bloodbath—a “clusterfuck.”

Most web design and development projects turn into clusterfucks. The problem is not unique to web-based client services. Advertising projects, graphic design jobs, architecture assignments, filmmaking, and pretty much every other professional creative service usually begins with smart, talented people shaking hands across a table, and ends in finger-pointing and regret—like a Country & Western love song.

Great work cannot emerge from such environments. Not even good work can crawl from that wreckage. If a fine portfolio, a delightful career, and the satisfaction of earning your bread by providing a genuine service are to be had, you must first learn to manage your clients and colleagues.

Managing your way out of a paper bag

Although I teach this skill, I confess I am not nearly as good at it as I should be. The trick to great projects, I have found, is (a.) landing clients with whom you are sympatico, and who understand language, time, and money the same way you do, and (b.) assembling teams you don’t have to manage, because everyone instinctively knows what to do. I have been lucky at those two things, and thus poor at coping when a design job very occasionally lights its own genitals on fire and leaps into a bucket of oil.

For those who have no control over which clients and projects come to them, there is still hope, because everyone on the web (not just professional designers and developers) has the ability to produce meaningful content, and every designer and developer additionally has the power to create products and services. As your own client, working alone, or with a carefully hand-picked team, you can produce great things. If you suck at management, you’ll have problems, but not the kind of problems that create mediocre websites while emptying your company’s bank account and draining all the joy and color out of life.

Producing a well-edited zine or a useful and skillfully designed web application may produce income. It will almost certainly generate job satisfaction. And once it finds the right audience, it should yield more sympathetic clients, resulting in fewer clusterfucks, and a greater ability to get on the phone and straighten out a mess if you still occasionally fumble as a manager.

Tags: business, webdesign, project management

Filed under: Design, project management, work

The zeldman.com redesign is up. You’re soaking in it. It’s old school. It’s brand heritage, baby. It’s retro 90s web. It’s so retro it’s nowtro. Because old is the new new.

Mainly, the redesign is content focused. After so many years as a web designer, and after creative directing so many influential projects, I naturally considered doing a wide, three-column, ultra-modern design—something cool, detached, polished, and glowing with rich media and fancy-pants sliding-drawer JavaScript effects. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things. In the right circumstances, those things can rock hard. But this site is mainly about my writing. So I crafted a simple look that encourages reading and hearkens back to this site’s early years.

Read more about it here, here, there, and elsewhere. (Don’t freak out; these old posts are now in the new layout, adding a layer of surrealism to the experience, since you’re looking at a blog post in the finished new look that links to and talks about cruddy early versions of that same look.)

If orange hurts you, there’s a style switcher in the footer that will remember your preference for an off-white background. You’re welcome.

WordPress implementation by Noel Jackson.

Rotation script by Mark Huot.

Thanks, fellas! And thanks to all readers who critiqued the public beta.

Tags: zeldman, zeldman.com, redesign, redesigns, webdesign, design

Filed under: Web Design, Web Standards, Zeldman, wordpress, work, zeldman.com

• Blog post template final (with rotation in footer)
• About page template final (with rotation in footer)
• Contact page template final (with yadda, yadda)
• 404 page – my favorite!
• New! 21 May Subscribe page
• New! 21 May Style switcher in footer
• New! 22 May WordPress tout page
• New! 22 May (mt) Media Temple tout page

Note: Top left and top right footer elements rotate. ALA element (top middle) changes every two weeks, upon publication. Bottom three elements are static, at least for now.

Thanks to Mark Huot for the rotation script (same one we use on Happy Cog) and Noel Jackson, Daniel Mall, and Media Temple for the love and support.

A couple more templates to go, and then we can build this thing. Can’t wait.

Tags: zeldman, zeldman.com, design, redesign, designingfromthecontentout

Filed under: Design, Redesigns, Web Design, Working, Zeldman, development, work, zeldman.com

Working on the footer of zeldman.com redesign. Once footer is done, going to adjust header and Twitter sidebar blip.

Tags: zeldman, zeldman.com, design, redesign, css

Filed under: CSS, Design, HTML, Happy Cog™, Web Design, Web Standards, Working, XHTML, Zeldman, development, wordpress, work, zeldman.com

Although the WayBack machine did not preserve any of this website’s first year, it did capture quite a lot of our second year, 1996. Behold the splendor of the early web:

• Zeldman.com Table of Contents page
• Alternate TOC page
• GIFPLEX
• Ask Dr Web
• Steal These Graphics: Disturbing Patterns
• The Ad Graveyard

And much more. Enjoy!

Filed under: Design, DigitalUnderground, Publications, State of the Web, Web Design, Zeldman, development, work, zeldman.com

Here’s a little something for a Wednesday evening. (Or wherever day and time it is in your part of the world.)

The body and bottom of the next zeldman.com design are now finished. Tomorrow I start working on the top.

Have a look.

Looks extra sweet in iPhone.

I’m designing from the content out. Meaning that I designed the middle of the page (the part you read) first. Because that’s what this site is about.

When I was satisfied that it was not only readable but actually encouraged reading, I brought in colors and started working on the footer. (The colors, I need not point out to longtime visitors, hearken back to the zeldman.com brand as it was in the 1990s.)

The footer, I reckoned, was the right place for my literary and software products.

I designed the grid in my head, verified it on sketch paper, and laid out the footer bits in Photoshop just to make sure they fit and looked right. Essentially, though, this is a design process that takes place outside Photoshop. That is, it starts in my head, gets interpreted via CSS, viewed in a browser, and tweaked.

Do not interpret this as me dumping on Photoshop. I love Photoshop and could not live or work without it. But especially for a simple site focused on reading, I find it quicker and easier to tweak font settings in code than to laboriously render pages in Photoshop.

If you view source, I haven’t optimized the CSS. (There’s no sense in doing so yet, as I still have to design the top of the page.)

I thought about waiting till I was finished before showing anything. That, after all, is what any sensible designer would do. But this site has a long history of redesigning in public, and the current design has been with us at least four years too long. Since I can’t snap my fingers and change it, sharing is the next best thing.

A work in progress. Like ourselves.

Tags: zeldman, zeldman.com, redesign, webdesign, css, code

Filed under: Appearances, Browsers, CSS, Design, Fonts, HTML, Layout, Web Design, Web Standards, Websites, Working, XHTML, Zeldman, content, creativity, wordpress, work, zeldman.com

If you enjoy A List Apart and zeldman.com, please doff your chapeau in the direction of our sponsor, the 37signals Job Board.

Everyone knows 37signals, inventors of Ruby on Rails and creators of Basecamp, Highrise, and other great productivity apps. We studied the leading web design and development job boards before signing on with theirs. Each job board we looked at had something great going for it.

We chose 37signals’s board because it appeals to the hybrid designer/ developer who cares as much about great user experience as clean code—the kind of web professional who believes great content and great design are inseparable. This new kind of designer, forged in the fires of the web, reads ALA and this site, and the 37signals Job Board is where you are most likely to find him or her when you need to hire skilled professionals with vision.

Income from the board helps defray the cost of producing our sites and paying our staff. But more importantly, running it alongside our articles provides a service to our readers, whether they seek a job or a great employee.

Filed under: 37signals, Advertising, Coudal Partners, Deck, the, industry, jobs, work

Favorites of the afternoon of April 10, 2009. Part of this complete breakfast.

Tags: flickr, favorites, art, photography, images, image, collections

Filed under: Design, Ideas, Images, Layout, art, arts, creativity, flickr, links, photography, work

What are web standards? And why should I care? A fun new clip from the BigThink marathon Zeldman interview. See also this and that. Or just click the “CHANNELS” button in the video above.

Tags: zeldman, webstandards, bigthink, interview

Filed under: Design, Interviews, Press, Web Design, Web Standards, Websites, Zeldman, industry, work

The annual A List Apart survey for people who make websites is the only public source of data on the shifting salaries, titles, job skills, and work satisfactions of full- and part-time, staff and freelance web professionals.

This year’s survey findings, culled from answers provided by over 30,000 ALA readers, are now up for your pleasure on a specially designed website. We’ve sliced and diced the data, making sense of complex interrelationships, and displaying the results in miniature CSS masterworks by Mr Eric Meyer. (More about the CSS.)

This year’s findings paint a clearer picture of the distinctions between full-time and freelance web professionals: how you work, what you earn, and what you love about the job. Interestingly, too, despite the brutality of a global recession that was already in full swing when we offered the survey, most respondents revealed a surprisingly high level of job security, satisfaction, and confidence in the future.

See for yourself. Read the findings.

Comments off. Please comment on ALA.

Tags: alistapart, aneventapart, webdesignsurvey, survey, forpeoplewhomakewebsites, surveyfindings, findings, meyerweb, css, jobskills, titles, webdesign, webdesigners, webdevelopment, webdevelopers, IA, UX, editors, writers, webmasters

Comments off.

Filed under: A List Apart, Advocacy, An Event Apart, Design, Survey, Working, business, jobs, work