Category: war, peace, and justice

Tanks

During his time in the military, a man I know served in Psychological Operations, or as it is better known, PSYOPS. Psychological Operations are designed to attack the enemy’s morale, undermining confidence and introducing fear.

Stationed at South Korea’s border with the North, my friend’s job was to create soundscapes. By mixing sound effects loops, he created the audio illusion of an apparently endless procession of armored vehicles. To the North Koreans, who could not see what was on the other side, it sounded like an immense army was mobilizing at their border.

My wife recalled this story during a dinner last night at an elegant restaurant. At least, it was elegant until we showed up. Our two-year-old daughter had missed her nap and was conducting a series of terror attacks on the linen, cutlery, and staff.

In an effort to save the restaurant from destruction and our family from shame, we tried bribing, coddling, and various distractions. When nothing else worked, we resorted to an escalating series of empty threats. Eventually, if only for a moment, we prevailed.

Gently removing sauce from her delicate blouse, my clever wife observed that parenting is like PSYOPS. You want them to think you have the tanks.

Accessibility books Design industry links Publishing Six Apart Tools war, peace, and justice Zeldman

Inflamed linkazoidal tissues

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 5 December 2006
No Comments on Inflamed linkazoidal tissues

The Economist profiles Mena Trott

Of late, The Economist has been paying greater attention to the web, undoubtedly because investors are doing likewise. The magazine even gets some things right. It’s great to see a hard-working innovator like Six Apart‘s Mena Trott get profiled in the magazine’s business section. I only wish the journalist who profiled Ms Trott could have laid off the condescending sexism. (“Girly whim?”) Why don’t they tell us what she was wearing?

Jubilee Center

This free after-school program for kids from kindergarten to sixth grade is “the only after-school and summer safe haven for children in Hoboken’s public housing neighborhood—a neighborhood with a history of violent crime and drug-related arrests.” ’Tis the season for giving (not that poverty ever goes out of season); support the Center!

simplebits redesign

Gorgeous.

Ten Worst Internet Acquisitions Ever

Amusing.

IconBuilder 8.1 (free update)

The Photoshop plug-in for favicon makers and icon bakers. Released 16.Nov.06. Free upgrade for registered users.

Things Designers Want for Christmas

Greg Storey of Airbag Industries builds hisself a Christmas store using Amazon’s new “astore” technology. I’ve been longing to do the same thing.

Judge: Make Bills Recognizable to Blind

“The [U.S.] government discriminates against blind people by printing money that all looks and feels the same, a federal judge said Tuesday in a ruling that could change the face of American currency.” Hat tip: Sean Jordan.

Slashdot reviews DWWS2e

Trent Lucier writes:

If you’ve browsed the web design section of any bookstore lately, you’ve seen him staring at you. The blue hat. The mustache. The blinding neon background. He’s Jeffrey Zeldman, publisher of the influential web development magazine, ‘A List Apart’ and author of the book Designing With Web Standards (DWWS). The first edition of the DWWS was published in 2003, and now 2006 brings us an updated 2nd edition. In a market flooded with XHTML, CSS, and web standards books, is DWWS 2nd Ed. still relevant?

I love it that they think I have a moustache.

[tags]links, sixapart, menatrott, hoboken, afterschool, simplebits, dancederholm, design, web2.0, accessibility, airbag[/tags]

Tags dwws2e

37signals Design industry Standards war, peace, and justice Zeldman

Crash Boom Bop

The path the plane took: Interactive graphic shows path taken by single-engine plane registered to New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle that crashed into a residential high-rise on East 72nd Street, yesterday, killing Lidle and his flight instructor. It’s amazing how disasters lend themselves to the creation of cool infographics.
Subtraction + Zeldman: Khoi Vinh (AIGA/New York board of directors, design director for nytimes.com) should interview himself, but instead he interviews me on the cusp of my AIGA New York talk next week. As previewed in the interview, my talk will focus on how to build relationships that let you sell clients good work.
Web 2.0 Validator: Hilarious. (The score for 37signals.com is 7 out of 52.)
Meyerweb: W3C Change: The third (and most radical) of Eric Meyer’s proposals to save the W3C from irrelevance: “Transform the W3C from a member-funded organization to a financially independent entity.”
Fireside Chat: Cederholm, Sims, Santa Maria, and Storey tell 37signals what they think of the state of web design. (Things I did not know before: no boxes, grids, or columns were used in web design until web standards came along to ruin everything.)
Daring Fireball: Qualcomm ends Eudora development: I’ll stop using Eudora when they pry it from my cold, dead, one-button-mouse-clutching fingers. Oops, maybe sooner than that.
UsedWigs Radio Podcast 18: He could have been a radio star: Greg Hoy of Happy Cog Philadelphia is interviewed.
0sil8: Jason Kottke’s first website. Take that, Ze Frank!
Class Critique: Jason Santa Maria takes it on the chin.

[tags]design, AIGA, webstandards, happycog, jasons[/tags]

Design glamorous war, peace, and justice Zeldman

Five years

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 6 September 2006

I’ve dug up some things I wrote from New York City and posted here on September 11th 2001 and in the first days following:

9 1 1: “My part of New York City is not burning.” Written 11, 12, and 13 September 2001. Posted about a week later, when telephone and internet service were restored.
Day four: “Tonight, for the first time since Tuesday, we were permitted to cross 14th Street.” 14 September 2001
The angry flag vendor: “The peaceful vigil at Union Square has turned into a carnival of sorts.” 23 September 2001

These mini-essays are not art. They are not reportage, either (but what is?), and may not even be accurate. We were all a bit dazed—although not so dulled as now. The shock and sorrow were fresh. The events of September 11th had not yet been branded, nor turned into tools of partisan rancor, nor made into a mini-series, nor used to justify atrocity.

Tags NYC

family war, peace, and justice

Photos from Paradise

Settling in to the vacation. Found some unfettered bandwidth floating about; used it to upload these shots from the island.

Applications cities Community Design links Publishing Tools war, peace, and justice writing

Inspiration and perspiration

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 16 August 2006
No Comments on Inspiration and perspiration

AIGA | Aquent Salary Survey Calculator: Are you getting paid what you should? Find out with this free online calculator, created by AIGA and Aquent after surveying nearly 6,500 design professionals.
Pantone’s Fall Fashion Color Report: The fashion forecast is for cool, calm colors from the earth. Wear them tomorrow, see them on your website the day after.
Magic 8_Ball on ‘Zune’: Daring Fireball has fun kicking Microsoft’s me-tooism.
CreativeIQ: Create Letterhead Templates in MS Word: Creating letterhead templates in Microsoft Word that don’t suck.
Most Inspired: Design inspiration aggregation.
Netdiver: Outstanding: Design inspiration, collected by Netdiver. Sharp concepts and fresh perspectives.
“People nearby started to panic”: A mobile phone rings on a London-to-New-York flight.
Time Capsules: Douglas Coupland: September 11: From the vantage point of a 52-day book tour that began on September 11, 2001, the author recalls the surreal first days of post-9/11 America.
Congress: Hall Pass Revoked: If Net Neutrality didn’t do enough to get you squirming HR5319 AKA Deleting Online Predators Act AKA DOPA should serve as proof that Congress should no longer be allowed to vote on any laws governing the internet. In case you missed the news, DOPA basically will require all public schools and libraries to block access to social networking sites and chat rooms.
The Agency Model is Dead – Blue Flavor: Brian Fling of new agency Blue Flavor lists “signs of the decline in the traditional agency” and discusses his agency’s nontraditional approach.
AppZapper – Making uninstalls easy: AppZapper for Mac OS X lets you confidently try new apps while knowing you can uninstall them easily. Drag one or more unwanted apps onto AppZapper and watch as it finds all the extra files and lets you delete them with a single click.
Bokardo: Why Netscape Will Succeed: Bokardo, a blog about social web design, says Netscape’s reinvention of itself as a mass-market version of Digg will succeed.
Zach Klein: Connected Ventures + IAC: The guys behind collegehumor.com sell to Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp.

[tags]design, business, inspiration, fashion, color, AIGA, salaries, links, digg, netscape, blue flavor, bbc, douglas coupland, 9/11, 911, writers, book tour, publishing, memoirs, mac os x, macosx, software, net neutrality, online predator, london, new york, nyc[/tags]

Tags AIGA, Apple, NYC

An Event Apart cities Design events Ideas people war, peace, and justice writing

We hold most of these truths

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 6 July 2006
No Comments on We hold most of these truths

A copy of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand is on public view at The New York Public Library. Accompanying it are several of the very first printed versions known to have survived.

Standing in the presence of these yellowing pages is like glimpsing the face of God, for they are the foundation of American democracy, and their core idea underlies all human rights struggles, liberation movements, and emergent democracies around the world.

The version in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand is fascinating not only because it’s in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand, but also because it contains passages that would have ended slavery at the birth of the American nation. But those passages had to be deleted before the Declaration could be signed by representatives of states where slavery was practiced.

Put another way, the client bought a document intended to liberate all humanity, but demanded changes that kept part of humanity in chains. It would take another 100 years and hundreds of thousands of deaths before slavery ended, and the tragic legacy of African enslavement plagues the U.S. to this day. (At The New York Times: a slide show of Freedom Rider portraits, a work in progress by my friend Eric Etheridge.)

So the next time a client requests changes that make your work less beautiful, less usable, or less smart, remember that greater people than you have lost bigger battles over far more important matters.

The Declaration of Independence is on view at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue now through 5 August and admission to the Library is of course free. If you’re in New York City this summer, the exhibit is worth a look. (Plug: And if you’re in town next week for An Event Apart, the Library is just a few blocks away from the Scandinavia House venue.)

Tags essentials, NYC

cities glamorous war, peace, and justice

Baggage

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 5 June 2006

Eight hours after leaving Laguardia Airport, I must go back.

I’ve got the underwear and striped shirts of a Mr Mbutu Alibekoglu (not his real name) from Fort Wayne Indiana (not his real location) in a suitcase that looked just like ours when I grabbed it off the American Airlines luggage carousel at Laguardia late last night.

I’ll return Mr Alibekoglu’s suitcase; hopefully ours will still be there. American Airlines Lost Luggage couldn’t tell me, mainly because they never answer their phone.

In other news, my office phone was out all weekend, but Verizon seems to be fixing the problem remotely this morning. Already, the phone works again in a buzzy, clicky, clacky, poppy way.

Not that I’ll need an office phone where I’m going.

I’m going to Laguardia, lugging a stranger’s suitcase I picked up by mistake at the end of a weary day. It’s the kind of error you make when tired and travelling with a toddler. You beat yourself up for it, blowing the whole thing out of proportion. But it’s a mistake, not a moral failing; a three-hour chore, not a descent into hell.

Mr Mbutu Alibekoglu’s suitcase contains underwear and socks, not anthrax and grenade launchers. The FBI won’t pounce on you and whisk you to Gitmo when you drag his suitcase into the airport.

Probably.

Design Happy Cog™ links people Redesigns war, peace, and justice work

May Day, May Day

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 1 May 2006

Every year or two a fresh crop of internet blowhards decides design doesn’t matter. Indeed, they proclaim that bad design is good. Not merely is it good, it is the secret to internet wealth and success, they tell us. Whereas, they assure us, user-friendly, brand-appropriate, professional graphic design — or even mere competence — is the royal road to Failureville.

I don’t understand the siren song of this demonstrably idiotic claim. I don’t know why it seduces a new crop of assh*les each year. I only know it does. And then, just as predictably, all the year’s hot young new media designers get in a huff defending design against the fools who attacked it.

Seems to me it might be better to let the anti-design dummies rant themselves out and roll along their happy ignorant path in search of new things to attack. Such as air. Or babies.

Maybe I am jaded. Or maybe it’s hard to get exercised over inanity you’ve seen recur so many times. The assertion that “bad design is good internet” has been made by one set of dorks after another since at least 1995. One prominent consultant aside, nobody can remember who these blowhards were. They charged full bore into obscurity, as dolts generally do.

So to this year’s hot (under the collar) web designers, remember: next year, you will still be designing beautiful websites. And the people who claim that bad design is good? If they’re lucky, they will be selling apples on the street corner.

In other news

It’s May Day. Immigrants protest, and rightfully so.
It’s May Day. And that means a reboot.
It’s May Day. And that means a reboot.
It’s May Day. A day that honors worker’s rights. So it is only fitting that May Day was also the day of the Canadian Union of Public Employees website reboot. Happy May Day! Happy workers! Happy Canadians! Happy Cog redesigned this site.

In other, other news

Registration is now open for An Event Apart NYC.

In other, other, other news

An Event Apart Chicago has sold out. Whee.

cities people war, peace, and justice

Kashmir, Kashmir

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 4 November 2005

The unshaken world looked on in horror as school buildings collapsed on children during the Kashmir earthquake. Carrie and I watched a man clawing at rubble because his little girl or boy was somewhere under there. A television journalist, reporting from the scene, said every child in that village had died.

Television journalists report on all kinds of awful events from all kinds of places, and it is part of their job to calmly relate even the most terrible facts. Yet this particular television journalist, standing just a few feet away from the grief-maddened parent, looked as if he, too, had been crying.

Then the 24-hour news cycle turned its attention to the next scandal, the next storm, the next talking point.

But the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India who survived the earthquake don’t have the option to change the channel. Three million are homeless and a harsh mountain winter is setting in. Three million who survived will die in the coming weeks if not enough is done to help them.

It will take money and effort. And both are wanting.

You would think the governments of rich western nations would consider saving three million lives a no-brainer. For one thing, they are human lives, and from our pulpits and benches we constantly and truthfully proclaim that human life is an absolute value.

There are humanitarian reasons to make every effort to save these lives. There are ethical reasons, spiritual reasons, and even (though it is horrible to say so) political reasons, given that most victims are Muslim and the west has, to say the least, not done the best job of winning Muslim friends lately. But that is just logic and ethics and the religious duty of one human being to another, and thus not enough is being done.

So it is up to us, the people, to reach into our pockets and give whatever we can to aid agencies working to save lives in South and Central Asia.