Rated Five Stars at Amazon.com since the day it was published, “Taking Your Talent to the Web” is now a free downloadable book from zeldman.com:

• Download the front cover! (TIFF image, 1.8 MB)
• Download the book! (PDF, book galley, 9.5 MB)

I wrote this book in 2001 for print designers whose clients want websites, print art directors who’d like to move into full–time web and interaction design, homepage creators who are ready to turn pro, and professionals who seek to deepen their web skills and understanding.

Here we are in 2009, and print designers and art directors are scrambling to move into web and interaction design.

The dot-com crash killed this book. Now it lives again. While browser references and modem speeds may reek of 2001, much of the advice about transitioning to the web still holds true.

It’s yours. Enjoy.

Update – now with bookmarks

Attention, K-Mart shoppers. The PDF now includes proper Acrobat bookmarks, courtesy of Robert Black. Thanks, Robert!

Tags: design, webdesign, TYTTTW, takingyourtalenttotheweb, zeldman, jeffreyzeldman, book, instruction, artdirection, printtoweb

Filed under: CSS, Community, Design, Free, HTML, Happy Cog™, Ideas, Information architecture, Layout, Publications, Publishing, State of the Web, The Profession, Tools, Typography, UX, Usability, User Experience, W3C, Web Design, Web Standards, Websites, Working, Zeldman, art direction, books, content, creativity, downloads, industry, jobs, reprints, writing

Sorry I haven’t written much here, lately, but I’ve been working on the third edition of a book you may know.

Questions?

Tags: dwws, designingwithwebstandards, 3rdedition, 3e, DWWS3e, newriders, peachpit, zeldman

Filed under: DWWS, Design, Standards, Web Design, Web Standards, work, writing

Now in the coveted 23 December spot at 24 ways: Recession Tips for Web Designers:

Jeffrey Zeldman rounds off our 2008 season with some hard-earned advice for web designers and developers to take into 2009. As the economic climate gets tougher and budgets get cut, our skills need to extend to staying in work, not just completing work won.

Tags: recession, webdesign, business, survival

Filed under: Career, Web Design, Working, Zeldman, business, work, writing

In Issue No. 274 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: a website without a content strategy is like a speeding vehicle without a driver. Learn why content matters and how to do it right.

Content-tious Strategy

by JEFFREY MACINTYRE

Every website faces two key questions: 1. What content do we have at hand? 2. What content should we produce? Answering those questions is the domain of the content strategist. Alas, real content strategy gets as little respect today as information architecture did in 1995. MacIntyre defines the roles, tools, and value of this emerging user experience specialist.

The Discipline of Content Strategy

by KRISTINA HALVORSON

It’s time to stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. If content strategy is all that stands between us and the next fix-it-later copy draft or beautifully polished but meaningless site launch, it’s time to take up the torch—time to make content matter. Halvorson tells how to understand, learn, practice, and plan for content strategy.

And, in EDITOR’S CHOICE, from July 31, 2007:

Better Writing Through Design

by BRONWYN JONES

How is it that the very foundation of the web, written text, has taken a strategic back seat to design? Bronwyn Jones argues that great web design is not possible without the design of words.

Tags: contentstrategy, content, strategy, content strategy, web, webcontent, webdesign, userexperience, writing, editorial, Kristina Halvorson, Jeffrey Macintyre, Bronwyn Jones, alistapart

Filed under: A List Apart, UX, User Experience, Websites, Working, business, client services, content, work, writing

Almost everyone I know who is serious about the internet and has spent more than a few years working on web stuff has read John R. Sundman’s novel, Acts of the Apostles, your everyday story of bioengineering, Gulf War Syndrome, Trojan Horses, and millennium cultists. (If you haven’t yet read this classic underground thriller cum paranoid fantasy, do yourself a favor; it’s pretty great.)

Now Sundman has come out with a new book, The Pains, with illustrations by Cheeseburger Brown. Sundman’s third novel owes its genesis to a single sentence written in his online diary: “I woke up this morning with a pain in my body that felt like it might be a soul gone bad.” Through a process that makes sense to writers, that sentence turned into this book:

The Pains is a story of faith in a world that appears to be falling apart. It tells the story of Norman Lux, a 24-year-old novitiate in a religious order, who becomes afflicted with something akin to stigmata.

The complete text and illustrations are on wetmachine.com, freely available for download under a creative commons license. Sundman is now taking orders for the soon-to-be-printed book. You can order by PayPal/credit card or by check.

Tags: sundman, johnsundman, thepains, actsoftheapostles, cheapcomplexdevices, publishing, writing

Filed under: books, writing

The fundamental things apply in Issue no. 271 of A List Apart, for people who make websites. Erin Kissane tells how non-writers (i.e. the people who write most of the stuff on the web) can make every word count in “Writing Content that Works for a Living.” And Aaron Gustafson wraps our introductory series on progressive enhancement with a look at the thinking behind (and best practices for executing) “Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript.”

Tags: alistapart, progressiveenhancement, writing, fortheweb

Filed under: A List Apart, Web Design, development, writing

In Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004, Wired, which ceased to be relevant in 1999, says you shouldn’t write a blog because, um, Calacanis and Scoble.

Uh, wait, the problem is that some comments are not thoughtful. And I guess you can’t turn off comments in blogging software (except in all the blogging platforms that are already out there in the marketplace). But all those many long-established blogging platforms aside, I guess, like maybe in some new as-yet unreleased blogging tool, you might not be able to turn comments off. And then you’d have to, like, endure that some comments might not be thoughtful. So clearly you should just use Twitter and not write a blog because people can’t respond to you on Twitter. (What? They can?)

Well maybe the reason you’re not supposed to blog is that you won’t get rich blogging, because Calacanis did, so I guess he used up all the rich. Sorry, no more rich to go around. I mean, what’s the point of expressing yourself if there is no immediate rich to be had?

In conclusion, Twitter, Flickr, Calacanis and Scoble. Which proves you can’t have a blog and also use Twitter. Or maybe you can have a blog and use Twitter but you shouldn’t because comments, Scoble, rich.

Paul Boutin is usually a good writer. I’m not sure what happened here. Paul, when do we stop talking about web content exclusively in terms of narrow platforms and shallow, self-interested goals? When do we stop saying x makes y irrelevant? When do we stop reducing the web to a vulgar and trivial competition between head boys, and start appreciating it as a maturing medium for real thought and expression?

Obviously, not today in Wired.

Tags: journalism, opinion, idiocy, wired, blogs, blogging

Filed under: Advocacy, Blogs and Blogging, Design, writing

A List Apart, for people who make websites, is slowly changing course.

For most of its decade of publication, ALA has been the leading journal of standards-based web design. Initially a lonely voice in the desert, we taught CSS layout before browsers correctly supported it, and helped The WaSP persuade browser makers to do the right thing. Once browsers’ standards support was up to snuff, we educated and excited designers and developers about standards-based design, preaching accessibility, teaching semantic markup, and helping you strategize how to sell this new way of designing websites to your clients, coworkers, and boss.

Most famously, over the years, writers for ALA have presented the design community with one amazing and powerfully useful new CSS technique after another. Initially radically new techniques that are now part of the vocabulary of all web designers include Paul Sowden’s “Alternative Styles,” Mark Newhouse’s list-based navigation, Eric Meyer’s intro to print styles, Douglas Bowman’s “Sliding Doors,” Dave Shea’s “CSS Sprites,” Dan Cederholm’s “Faux Columns,” Patrick Griffiths and Dan Webb’s “Suckerfish Dropdowns,” Drew McLellan’s “Flash Satay,” and so on and so on. There are literally too many great ones to name here. (Newcomers to standards-based design, check Erin Lynch’s “The ALA Primer Part Two: Resources For Beginners“.)

Web standards are in our DNA and will always be a core part of our editorial focus. Standards fans, never fear. We will not abandon our post. But since late 2005, we have consciously begun steering ALA back to its earliest roots as a magazine for all people who make websites—writers, architects, strategists, researchers, and yes, even marketers and clients as well as designers and developers. This means that, along with issues that focus on new methods and subtleties of markup and layout, we will also publish issues that discuss practical and sometimes theoretical aspects of user experience design, from the implications of ubiquitous computing to keeping communities civil.

The trick is to bring our huge group of highly passionate readers along for the ride. My wife likens it to piloting the Queen Mary. (Q. How do you make the Queen Mary turn left? A. Very, very slowly.)

The slow, deliberate, gradual introduction of articles on business and theory has not pleased all of ALA’s readers, some of whom may unrealistically wish that every issue would present them with the equivalent of a new “Sliding Doors.” It is possible, of course, to publish one CSS (or JavaScript or Jquery) article after another, and to do so on an almost daily basis. We could do that. Certainly we get enough submissions. The trouble is that most articles of this kind are either edge cases of limited utility, or derivatives that do not break significant new ground. (Either that, or they are flawed in our estimation, e.g. relying on dozens of non-semantic divs to create a moderately pleasing, minor visual effect.)

We review hundreds of articles and publish dozens. Some web magazines seem to have those proportions reversed, and some readers don’t seem to mind, and that’s fine. But any content you see in ALA has been vetted and deeply massaged by the toughest editorial team in the business. And when you see a new “design tech” article in our pages, you can be sure it has passed muster with our hard-ass technical editors.

Moreover, the fields of meaningful new CSS tricks have mostly yielded their fuels. We’ve done that. We’ve done it together with you. While a few new lodes of value undoubtedly remain to be tapped, we as a community, and as individuals who wish to grow as designers, need to absorb new knowledge. ALA will continue to be a place where you can do that.

When we began focusing on web standards in 1998, we were told we were wasting readers’ time on impractical crap of little value to working designers and developers. But we kept on anyway, and the things we learned and taught are now mainstream and workaday. While we apologize to readers who are again being made irritable by our insistence on occasionally presenting material that does not fall directly within their comfort zone, we hope that this experiment will prove to be of value in the end.

Tags: alistapart, webdesign, magazine, editorial, content, focus, change, publishing, standards, webstandards, css, design, layout, userexperience

Filed under: A List Apart, Accessibility, Design, Standards, Survey, Usability, User Experience, Web Design, Websites, art direction, development, industry, maturity, wisdom, work, writing

In Issue No. 267 of A LIST APART, For People Who make Websites…

Look at it Another Way

by INDI YOUNG

Before you can solve a user’s problems, you must see them as that user sees them. Once you understand what drives people’s behavior, not only do new ideas flow freely, but the ideas that flow are appropriate and useful. Indi Young tells how to get out of your own way and hear what your users are telling you.

and…

Zebra Striping: More Data for the Case

by JESSICA ENDERS

As designers or marketers, we share a desire that our tables and forms be easy to scan, read, and use. Does the widely practiced shading of alternate rows help, hurt, or have no effect? A previous study proving inconclusive, designer and researcher Jessica Enders has tackled the conundrum again, coming up with statistically relevant data and a set of recommendations.

Tags: jessicaenders, indiyoung, mentalmodels, zebrastripe, zebrastriping, alistapart, ALA, happycog, publications

Filed under: A List Apart, Design, Typography, UX, Usability, User Experience, work, writing

Two incidents mark my morning walk to work.

i.

On Second Avenue, a long-legged woman in a short black skirt dashes past, late to an unknown appointment, her movements fluid and beautiful.

With every step, her skirt bounces, flashing legs at the avenue. Her left hand hangs at her hip, trying to keep the skirt down. But she fails at this, and the attempt only makes the male viewer more aware of the rhythmic, teasing visual.

The whole thing is unconscious. It has the visual semantics, but not the intention, of cheesecake. She is simply late, happens to be beautiful, and isn’t dressed like an Anabaptist. Nevertheless, her passage fractures the Matrix.

Even businessmen who dress like they never so much as take a breath without running a spreadsheet first can’t help turning back to get a second look.

She runs fast and is out of sight in minutes, leaving a trail of pheromones in her wake.

I want to thank her, but I would never catch up, and running after her is probably a bad idea.

ii.

Minutes later, approaching Lexington Avenue, I see a mentally ill man hurling racial epithets at the street.

“Fuck you motherfucking niggers,” he shouts.

Did I mention this part? He is black.

In his hand is a beer that a clerk at a nearby convenience store apparently thought was an okay thing to sell him.

He screws up his face into a horror mask and screams nonsense syllables as I pass him.

On the corner with several other people, waiting for the light to change, I feel him sneak up on us, and a moment later he defeats his own sneaking by shouting again.

“Don’t GIVE a fuck!”

A large plastic milk carton sits abandoned on the sidewalk. He grabs it and flings it into the street, just missing us corner-bound pedestrians. The milk carton touches down in a busy lane of traffic. Speeding cars begin changing lanes to avoid smashing into it.

Damn it, I think.

I think this because I know I’m going to get tangentially involved, and past experiences with mentally ill street people have not gone well. There was the guy in DC harassing women on the train. I interceded and he messed with me. DC yuppies, watching the whole thing, moved away rather than help. Then there was the guy— Well, anyway, enough.

I walk into the oncoming traffic, pick up the milk crate, take it back to the sidewalk, and push it down directly in front of the raging drunken mentally ill homeless man.

I look at him, he looks at me.

I don’t know whether my eyes are communicating toughness, compassion, or a kind of inattention—as if, by not focusing on him, he might not focus on me. I have no strategy. I’m moving on instinct and my plan is to disengage.

Whatever happened between us passes. I turn back to the street, the light changes in my favor, I move quickly into the intersection.

Behind me, he throws an abandoned filthy bath rug into the street.

I let him win that one.

Tags: cities, NYC, New York City, urban, living, urban living, street, life, streetlife, myglamorouslife, glamour, zeldman

Filed under: NYC, New York City, cities, glamorous, writing