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:

• Mandy Brown, creative director, Etsy; former creative director (web and print), W.W. Norton, the oldest and largest publishing traditional house owned wholly by its employees; contributing editor, A List Apart Magazine; publisher, A Working Library; and co-director (with Jason Santa Maria and me), A Book Apart, a new publisher of mid-length books “for people who make websites.” (We’re talking book-books, made of paper, printed, bound, and distributed—not PDFs.)
• Paul Ford, critically respected novelist (Gary Benchley, Rock Star) and short fiction writer; blogger since practically the Civil War, most famously of Ftrain.com, where he has penned such classic posts as “Learning to Fear the Semantic Web;” print and web editor, Harper’s, the very definition of a traditional printed magazine of quality—also web developer, designer, and webmaster of Harper’s website since forever; and frequent contributor to The Morning News and to NPR’s “All Things Considered,” where he once offered a dissenting view on “web standards”—not that I’m bitter.
• Lisa Holton, Founder and CEO, Fourth Story Media (“a fresh perspective in storytelling”). The company “develop[s] compelling intellectual property and distribute[s] it across traditional and nontraditional channels including books, collaborative web fiction, and social media.” Previously, Lisa was President of Scholastic Trade Publishing and Book Fairs, where she managed the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and initiated and oversaw development of The 39 Clues, a widely heralded book- and web-based venture. Prior to that, she was SVP and Publisher, Disney Global Children’s Books, running all aspects of the domestic and international children’s book business at the Walt Disney Company. Before that, Lisa was Vice President, Associate Publisher and Editor-in Chief of HarperCollins Children’s Books. She serves on the Board of Directors of the New York Women’s Foundation and the Board of Trustees of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.
• Erin Kissane, publisher, Incisive.nu, a website about strong language, writing tools, and other aspects of content strategy; content strategist and editorial strategist, Happy Cog Studios; former editor-in-chief (for ten years), A List Apart Magazine; author of numerous articles on web writing, editing, and content strategy, including “Attack of the Zombie Copy,” “Your About Page is a Robot,” and “Content Templates to the Rescue;” founding strategist, A Book Apart; and author of an upcoming book on content strategy for content strategists.

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.)

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.

Jeffrey Zeldman onstage at Galapagos Art Space, Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Onno de Jong from last night’s AIGA/NY talk and birthday celebration, curated by Jason Santa Maria.

My friend, the content strategist Kristina Halvorson, likes to call content “the elephant in the room” of web design. She means it’s the huge problem that no one on the web development team or client side is willing to acknowledge, face squarely, and plan for….

Without discounting the primacy of the content problem, we web design folk have now birthed ourselves a second lumbering mammoth, thanks to our interest in “real fonts on the web“ (the unfortunate name we’ve chosen for the recent practice of serving web-licensed fonts via CSS’s decade-old @font-face declaration—as if Georgia, Verdana, and Times were somehow unreal).…

Put simply, even fonts optimized for web use (which is a whole thing: ask a type designer) will not look good in every browser and OS.

Jeffrey Zeldman, Real Fonts and Rendering: The New Elephant in the Room
22 December, 2009
24 ways: The Advent Calendar for Web Developers

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3319

Fred Blasdel said:

You’ll always draw ire for having stumbled into being the Chief of the cargo-cult side of Web Standards, with so-called ‘XHTML’ as the false idol. You did a lot of good, but not without ambiguating the nomenclature with a lot of feel-good bullshit.

You often find yourself as a mediator between designery folks (who you have a strong grasp over) and technical implementors (who will always hold a grudge against you for muddying the discourse). Asking people to wear blue toques does not particularly affect this balance.

“Cargo cult.” I love that phrase. But I’m not sure I agree with your assessment.

XHTML, with its clearer and stricter rules, came out just as many of us were rediscovering semantic markup and learning of its rich value in promoting content. It wasn’t a coincidence that we took this W3C specification seriously and helped promote it to our readers, colleagues, etc. The stricter, clearer rules of XHTML 1.0 helped enforce a new mindset among web designers and developers, who had previously viewed HTML as an “anything goes” medium (because browsers treated it that way, still do, and quite probably always will; indeed HTML5 codifies this, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing).

Future versions of XHTML became a dead-end not because there was no value in strict, semantic, structural markup, but because the people charged with moving XHTML forward lost touch with reality and with developers. This is why HTML5 was born.

That’s history and it’s human behavior. But those subsequent twists and turns in the story don’t mean that standardistas who supported XHTML 1.0 (or still do) and who used it as a teaching tool when explaining semantic markup to their colleagues were wrong or misguided to do so.

That some technical people in the standards community think we were wrong is known, but their belief does not make it so.

That a handful of those technical people express their belief loudly, rudely, and with belligerent and unconcealed schadenfreude does not make their point of view true or persuasive to the rest of us. It just makes them look like the close-minded, socially maladroit, too-early-toilet-trained, tiny-all-male-world-inhabiting pinheads they are.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3108

“Content informs design; design without content is decoration. Content has the same relationship to design that product has to advertising. Good ads are based on the product; good designs come from and facilitate the content. This is one reason we bring content strategy to every design assignment, and one reason we insist on working with real content, not lorem ipsum (placeholder) content. Nothing is sadder than a beautiful design that works great with lorem ipsum but doesn’t actually support the real content.”

A Design Apart: Q&A with Jeffrey Zeldman | Sparksheet

Ellen Lupton and Jeffrey Zeldman talk about web fonts, part 2. That is all.

This has been a belated part of Web Type Day.

The third edition of Designing With Web Standards has hit the shelves; excerpts and interviews are hitting digital airwaves everywhere. Among the latest:

• Creative Expert interviews Zeldman and Marcotte about DWWS3e, live, with call-in questions. Very nice. Broadcast 30 October, 2009; podcast published 31 October 2009.
• Author Talk: Jeffrey Zeldman Interview, an audio podcast at Peachpit. “Author and co-founder of The Web Standards Project Jeffrey Zeldman talks to publisher Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel about the 3rd Edition of his book Designing with Web Standards. He also reveals why writers ‘can’t edit themselves.’” Published 11 November 2009.
• The Future of Web Standards is a free sample chapter for your reading pleasure. Published 12 November 2009.
• Jeffrey Zeldman On The Setup, a Waferbaby joint, takes a break from the DWWS3e fever to talk hardware and software. Published 13 November 2009.

Coming soon:

• Video interview with Michael Nolan
• Typography Q&A with Ellen Lupton in Print Magazine
• And more!

Watch for major announcements Monday Tuesday.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2902

Join Ethan Marcotte and me tonight at 8:00 PM EDT on the CreativeXpert Live Show, an interview and podcast with live listener call-in via Skype and Twitter.

We’ll discuss the newly released third edition of Designing with Web Standards and such topics from its pages as selling standards to reluctant clients and bosses, changing what support for IE6 means, understanding and transitioning to HTML5, neato CSS3-based design techniques you can use right now, and more.

Tune in, call in, rock on.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2810

Our classic orange avatar has turned blue to celebrate the release of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition by Jeffrey Zeldman with Ethan Marcotte. This substantial revision to the foundational web standards text will be in bookstores across the U.S. on October 19, 2009, with international stores to follow. Save 37% off the list price when you buy it from Amazon.com.

• What’s new in the 3rd Edition
• Mini-site

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2730

An Event Apart Chicago has sold out. If you wanted to join us in Chicago on October 12–13 for two days of design, code, and content, we’re sorry to announce that the show has completely sold out. There’s not a spare seat to be had.

That means, if you don’t already have a ticket, you won’t be able to watch Jason Santa Maria, Kristina Halvorson, Dan Brown, Whitney Hess, Andy Clarke, Aaron Gustafson, Simon Willison, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Rubin, Dan Cederholm, and your hosts Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman share the latest ideas in design, development, usability, and content strategy.

We’re sorry about that.

But, hey. If you can’t be with us in Chicago next week, please join us in San Francisco later this year. Or come see us in 2010 at any of these fine cities:

• Seattle (April 5–7, 2010)
• Boston (May 24–25, 2010)
• Minneapolis (August 2–3, 2010)
• Washington DC (Sept. 16–17, 2010)
• San Diego (Nov. 1–2, 2010)

Tickets for all our 2010 shows go on sale November 2nd, 2009, and are first-come, first served.

To keep up with the latest AEA doings, become a fan on Facebook, join our Ning social network, or subscribe to our mailing list.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2651

The new mini-site for the 3rd Edition of Designing With Web Standards has been updated, with additional information about the substantially revised web standards guidebook, and with tweaks to the CSS which, one hopes, now bring embedded web font goodness to Internet Explorer users, as well as our friends on Safari, Firefox, and Opera. We love the smell of Franklin in the morning.

Short URL: zeldman.com/x/60

The 3rd Edition of Designing With Web Standards is coming soon to a bookstore near you. Abetted mightily by our secret cabal of interns, co-author Ethan Marcotte, technical editor Aaron Gustafson, copyeditor Rose Weisburd, editor Erin Kissane and I have worked hard to create what we hope is not merely an update, but a significant revision to the foundational web standards text.

Packed with new ideas

After years of stasis, the world of standards-based design is exploding with new ideas and possibilities. Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition captures this moment, makes sense of it, and keeps you smartly ahead of the pack.

From HTML 5 to web fonts, CSS3 to WCAG2, the latest technologies, claims and counter-claims get broken down in classic DWWS style into their easy-to-understand component ideas, helping you pick the course of action that works best for your projects. As always, the core ideas of standards-based design (which never change) get presented with clear insights and up-to-date examples. You’ll find strategies for persuading even the most stubborn boss or client to support accessibility or reconsider what “IE6 support” means—and for handling the other problems we face when trying to bring rational design and development to the unruly web.

Now with more “how”

While this 3rd Edition, like its predecessors, spends a great deal of time on “why,” it also features a lot more “how” than past editions. If you loved the ideas in DWWS, but wished the book was a bit more hands-on, this is the edition you’ve waited for.

Oh, and the color this time? It’s blue, like l’amour.

Pre-order and save

A few chapters remain to be written, but the goal is in sight, and the book will be out this Fall. To celebrate, you can now save 37% when you pre-order Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition from Amazon.com.

There’s a new book mini-site as well, with more content and features to come. The sharp-eyed will notice that the mini-site is set in Franklin Gothic. A web-licensed version of ITC Franklin Pro Medium from Font Bureau has been embedded via standard CSS. It works everywhere, even in IE. (View Source if curious.)

ShortURL: zeldman.com/x/57

Among the pleasures of running an independent personal site is the accidental discovery of an ancient page, such as the version of this site’s contact page from the 1990s that I stumbled onto this morning.

“We’ve got mail!” the old site cheerfully announces, complete with a meaningless header image. The image, like the header and navigation typography, is pixellated to convey “webbiness”—in case you forgot that you were looking at a website in a browser, I guess. “Got mail” is a play on America On-line (kids, ask your parents). “We” is the royal first person plural with which I used to write this site, despite being its sole author. I’d gotten into the habit of “we” from writing copy on entertainment sites for clients like Warner Bros. It made their sites, and mine, seem bigger. It was also an ongoing, self-deprecating joke, although not everyone got it.

As I look at this old page, the copy still feels like me, and it also, if I may say so, anticipates the playful directional body copy of Web 2.0 sites like Flickr by about a decade. (Could be coincidence. Derek Powazek and Heather Champ also wrote jovial instructional copy at the time. Others may have done so as well.)

I’m a lot more ashamed of the design. I’m particularly abashed at:

• My abysmally stupid effort to straddle the “liquid layout” and “fixed width layout” genres by designing a page that doesn’t work as liquid or fixed. Possibly the only web design ever to put peanut butter and bicycle chains together and call it a sandwich. It should have stayed fixed, and the text and input fields should have matched the width of the illustration and header.
• Alignment, alignment, alignment.
• Tiny type with seemingly random hierarchy. In my defense, remember that in those days all type was pixellated. I picked 11px Georgia and 9px Verdana because those sizes looked great in that pixellated world. Still. Feh.

If your old work doesn’t shame you, you’re not growing.

It’s nice to look back and feel that you’ve made progress. When you look at old work, it should suck glaringly and you should cringe painfully. But there should also be some germ within it that you’re not ashamed of—some spark of talent or inspiration that connects to what you do now.