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Advocacy automattic Blogs and Blogging Brands Community Design industry Own your content software Standards Web Design Web Standards wordpress

Enabling Folks to Express Themselves on the Web: State of the Word 2021

Screenshot of slide highlighting the four phases of WordPress Gutenberg.

Not only are we enabling folks to express themselves uniquely on the web, unlike the cookie cutter looks that all the social sites try to put you into. We’re doing it in a way which is standards-based, interoperable, based on open source, and increases the amount of freedom on the web.

—Matt Mullenweg, State of the Word 

In a live address, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg

  • Introduces Openverse (an opt-in content commons);
  • Announces that WordPress’s beginner-friendly Learn.Wordpress.org is now available in 21 languages;
  • Philosophizes about Web3 and the “decentralized web” —which, despite big company colonization attempts, is really what the web has always been;
  • Extols the virtues of Open Source;
  • And more. 

Watch the 2021 #StateoftheWord annual keynote address on YouTube. It’s two hours long, so bring popcorn.

Selected Additional Reactions & Commentary

Hat tips to Chenda Ngak, Reyes Martínez, and Josepha Haden.

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Best practices Blogs and Blogging business Design wordpress

See me speak: WordPress.com Growth Summit

WordPress.com is holding its first virtual conference, I’m speaking there, and you’re invited. The WordPress.com Growth Summit is a two-day live event where you can learn to build and grow your site, “from start to scale.” To make it as inclusive as possible, the event will take place twice, with live sessions accessible to all Earth’s time zones:

  • In the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, the conference is August 11-12 from 11:00am–4:00pm EDT (15:00–20:00 UTC).
  • For attendees in the Asia Pacific region, the event is August 12-13 from 11:00am–4:00pm JST (02:00–07:00 UTC).
  • Can’t attend all of the sessions you’re interested in? No problem. The WordPress.com events team will record them all and make them available to you after the event.

diverse group of speakers will share tips on creating your site, aligning it to your business goals, finding an audience, building and nurturing an organic fan community, and more. 

As for me, I’ll co-host “Blogging and Podcasting: Defining Success” with the amazing Jason Snell. Here’s how we describe our panel:

There are almost as many ways to succeed at blogging and podcasting as there are bloggers and podcasters. In a lively discussion full of plentiful tips and takeaways, industry veterans Jason Snell (The Incomparable, Six Colors) and Jeffrey Zeldman (A List Apart, WordPress.com) will teach you how to:

  • Define your mission;
  • Craft and govern content;
  • Understand and cultivate your audience;
  • Maintain authenticity;
  • React to change.

You’ll also learn when and how to diversify, and how to make money with paywalls, stores, advertising, and more.

Explore the entire schedule of breakout sessions, demos, keynotes, panels, and talks.

It’s only $79 to attend if you order your ticket by Friday, July 31. On top of which, zeldman.com fans get an additional 20% discount with code Jeffrey20

After July 31, the ticket price will be $99. So register today.

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blogger Blogroll Blogs and Blogging Design Designers glamorous

My Brunch with Jen

Today my daughter Ava and I had brunch with my old friend Jen Robbins at P.S. Kitchen, a vegan restaurant in the Theater District/Hell’s Kitchen. Jen was present for, and actively participated in, the very beginnings of the creative and blogging web, and her famous book, now in its umpteenth edition, is still the best introduction to web design I know—probably the best that will ever be written.

One of Jen’s early sites, “Cooking With Rock Stars,” consisted of short video interviews she made with the likes of Jack Black, Rufus Wainwright, and others. Her show predated YouTube by five to ten years and podcasts by fifteen. It was way ahead of its time while also being a great reminder of what the web, in its infancy, was like. The rock star interviews are also fun and fascinating and deserve to be seen again.

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Advocacy Announcements Authoring Blogs and Blogging creativity Design Gifts glamorous

Grateful X 2

Illustration by Justin Dauer. Pixel portrait of JZ in blue beanie.

NONE of us knows what today will bring. And for many of us, these are fearful times. So I wanted to take a breath, pause a moment, and share two small gifts I received this morning at the start of my workday:

You know, for kids

First, Rob Ford wrote to my daughter and me to tell us that Macaw Books will be at Frankfurt Book Fair next week to promote The Little Trailblazers, a children’s book of illustrated stories to which we contributed.

It’s been more than two years since a younger Ava and I co-wrote a rhyming story for this collection of tales written by “Internet pioneers” and illuminated by brilliant illustrators from around the world—50 contributors from over 25 countries, 50/50 female/male ratio.

Book cover: The Little Trailblazers, designed by MENDO books.

When the book’s original publisher withdrew their support due to its lack of mass commercial potential, Rob could easily have given up. Instead, for over two years, he fought to find the right publisher and charity organization to align with the project.

Today word came that The Little Trailblazers will be in aid of Unicef’s work for children. I can’t think of a better fit. Rob’s vision and perseverance have been something to behold, and I am grateful to have had the chance to collaborate with my kid on what will be her first published story.

Art & copy

Next, Dougal MacPherson presented a trio of narratively related illustrations for an important upcoming A List Apart series directed by Aaron Gustafson. I’m thrilled that Aaron conceived the series, found the authors, chose ALA to publish it, and is shepherding the entire project. I can’t wait for you to read it.

And, although I should be used to it by now, I’m still gratefully astonished by Dougal’s ability to take complex, technical topics, find their common truth, and create a unifying visual narrative tying them together for A List Apart’s readers. Oh, and he draws great, too.

Breathe

There is much that can go wrong in our lives, most of it beyond our control. Sometimes how the afternoon sunlight looks as it warms the tops of trees is what you get that day to remind you that life is a gift. Or, hey, don’t knock a good sandwich.

But sometimes—especially if your line of work can at least partly be described as “creative”—sometimes you are reminded just how incredibly lucky you are to know and work with passionate, talented people. And that is fuel, not only for continued effort, but for gratitude.

Also published on Medium.
Illustration: Justin Dauer

Categories
Archiving blogger Blogs and Blogging Web Design Web Design History work writing Zeldman zeldman.com

Look back in anchor tags

NEW YEARS bring thoughts of old years, and, to a designer and veteran “blogger,” thoughts of old work. My personal site, begun in 1994, was many things: an interview zine (my first web client, Donald Buckley, named it: 15 Minutes), a newfangled GIF animation playground, a freeware icon factory, an Advertising Graveyard, and more. But eventually, before it was forgotten entirely, it became best known as a blog.

Inspired by Dori Smith’s recent Facebook post about old-school blogging and the possibility of a “20th Anniversary of Blogging” unconference/relaxacon, I thought it might be fun to poke through the old blog a bit with you, gentle reader. My blog began in 1995, but, for now, you can only page through the entries as far back as August, 1997, as I seem to have neglected to build “previous” page links before that, and may also have overwritten my earliest entries (not realizing, at the time, that you and I might ever want to look back at any of this).

Below, I begin the retrospective in 2004 and work backwards to 1997. (After 2004, I stopped hand-coding each entry and began using WordPress, resulting in this sort of thing. Also after 2004, I stopped redesigning the site every few months, partly, but not exclusively, because I got busier designing other people’s sites. I also stopped redesigning the site every few months because I had become more strategic about design—more interested in design as problem solving, less as making pretty pages. Say, remember when we designed “pages”? But I digress.)

Here, for your pleasure, are some pages from the past:

 

Silence and Noise?—?“Now that some of us have helped bring standards into the mainstream, wouldn’t it be best to keep them there?”?—?12 August 2004 (the iconic green design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0804b.shtml

Typical blog entries?—?on web performance and “the new Samaritans” (designers who recode other people’s sites to be standards-compliant)?—?28 July 2004 (the iconic green design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0704e.shtml

CSS Validator is Broken?—?5 February 2004 (the creme design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0204b.shtml

Don’t Design on Spec?—?26 January 2004 (the creme design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0104h.shtml

Chip Kidd & Alfred Hitchcock?—?20 January 2004 (the creme design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0104f.shtml

Tears for Istanbul?—?26 November 2003 (rooster design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/1103a.shtml

Ladies and gentlemen, A List Apart 3.0–22 October 2003 (rooster design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/1003a.shtml

“Jeffrey Zeldman is good enough for me.” 2 November 2002 (teal swap design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/1002d.shtml

Typical blog entries?—?16 October2002 (the iconic red design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/1002a.html

Typical blog entries?—?super secret Charlotte Gray style guide (now offline)?—?26 August 2002 (HTML fist, red design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0802c.html

Typical blog entries?—?in the middle of writing Designing With Web Standards, then titled Forward Compatibility?—?30 July 2002 (the iconic red design) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0802a.html

“The heartbreak of sizing small text with ems”?—?21 May 2002 http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0502c.html

Typical blog entries, 25 January 2002 (the iconic red design?—?liquid variant) http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0102d.html

Daily Report 31 August 1999, liquid orange design (unfinished) http://www.zeldman.com/com0899.html

Daily Report 14 October 1998, liquid orange design (unfinished) with Web Standards Project banner ad at the top of the page http://www.zeldman.com/com1098.html

“Previous Reports” 31 August 1997, ugly yellow bacon strip style, http://www.zeldman.com/came2.html

 

Also published in Medium.

studio.zeldman is open for business. Follow me @zeldman.

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Best practices Blogs and Blogging business client services clients Design The Big Web Show User Experience UX

Big Web Show ? 159: If You Can’t Stand the Heatmaps, Stay Out of the Conversion, with @nickd

Nick Disabato AKA @nickd

NICK Disabato (@nickd) and I discuss heat maps, conversion rates, design specialization, writing for the web, Jakob Nielsen, and the early days of blogging in Episode ? 159 of The Big Web Show – “everything web that matters.” Listen and enjoy.

Sponsored by ZipRecruiter, Blue Apron, User Interviews, and Hotjar.

URLS

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A Book Apart A List Apart Advertising Advocacy An Event Apart architecture automattic Blogs and Blogging business Career client services clients climate change Code Community conferences content Coudal Partners creativity CSS Design Designers development DWWS engagement eric meyer Future-Friendly glamorous HTML Ideas industry Jason Santa Maria launches Ma.gnolia My Back Pages Off My Lawn! parenting peachpit Publications Publisher's Note Publishing Redesigns Self-Employment software Standards Startups State of the Web Stories studio.zeldman The Essentials The Profession Usability User Experience UX Web Design Web Design History Web Standards Websites wordpress Working writing Zeldman zeldman.com

Ten Years Ago on the Web

2006 DOESN’T seem forever ago until I remember that we were tracking IE7 bugsworrying about the RSS feed validator, and viewing Drupal as an accessibility-and-web-standards-positive platform, at the time. Pundits were claiming bad design was good for the web (just as some still do). Joe Clark was critiquing WCAG 2. “An Inconvenient Truth” was playing in theaters, and many folks were surprised to learn that climate change was a thing.

I was writing the second edition of Designing With Web Standards. My daughter, who is about to turn twelve, was about to turn two. My dad suffered a heart attack. (Relax! Ten years later, he is still around and healthy.) A List Apart had just added a job board. “The revolution will be salaried,” we trumpeted.

Preparing for An Event Apart Atlanta, An Event Apart NYC, and An Event Apart Chicago (sponsored by Jewelboxing! RIP) consumed much of my time and energy. Attendees told us these were good shows, and they were, but you would not recognize them as AEA events today—they were much more homespun. “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” we used to joke. “My mom will sew the costumes and my dad will build the sets.” (It’s a quotation from a 1940s Andy Hardy movie, not a reflection of our personal views about gender roles.)

Jim Coudal, Jason Fried and I had just launched The Deck, an experiment in unobtrusive, discreet web advertising. Over the next ten years, the ad industry pointedly ignored our experiment, in favor of user tracking, popups, and other anti-patterns. Not entirely coincidentally, my studio had just redesigned the website of Advertising Age, the leading journal of the advertising profession.

Other sites we designed that year included Dictionary.com and Gnu Foods. We also worked on Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking tool with well-thought-out features like Saved Copies (so you never lost a web page, even if it moved or went offline), Bookmark Ratings, Bookmark Privacy, and Groups. We designed the product for our client and developed many of its features. Rest in peace.

I was reading Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, a delightfully written text that anticipated and suggested design rules and thinking for our present Internet of Things. It’s a fine book, and one I helped Adam bring to a good publisher. (Clearly, I was itching to break into publishing myself, which I would do with two partners a year or two afterwards.)

In short, it was a year like any other on this wonderful web of ours—full of sound and fury, true, but also rife with innovation and delight.


As part of An Event Apart’s A Decade Apart celebration—commemorating our first ten years as a design and development conference—we asked people we know and love what they were doing professionally ten years ago, in 2006. If you missed parts onetwothree, or four, have a look back.

 

 

Categories
Blogs and Blogging Design Web Design Web Design History Zeldman zeldman.com

The Way We Were: zeldman.com 10 Years Ago Today

zeldman.com 10 years ago today

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Big Web Show Blogs and Blogging Culture HTML industry Microblogging Six Apart social networking software Startups State of the Web SXSW The Big Web Show The Profession Web Design History

Achieving Empathy for Institutions with Anil Dash

Anil Dash

IN BIG WEB SHOW ? 115 on Mule Radio, I talk with Anil Dash, a hugely influential entrepreneur, blogger, and web geek living in NYC.

Things we discuss include:

How government, media, and tech shape the world, and how we can influence them in turn. Our first meeting at SXSW in 2002. How selling CMS systems teaches you the dysfunction at media companies and organizations. Working for the music industry at the dawn of Napster. RFP-EZ. The early days of blogging.

Designing websites for the government—the procurement problem. If we’re pouring all this time into social media, what do we want to get out of it? How big institutions work and how to have an impact on them. Living in “Joe’s Apartment.”

Why, until recently, federal agencies that wanted a blog couldn’t use WordPress or Tumblr and how the State Dept got on Tumblr. Achieving empathy for institutions. Being more thoughtful about what I share and who I amplify on social media. The launch of Thinkup, and a special offer exclusively for Big Web Show listeners.

Enjoy Big Web Show ? 115.


Sponsored by An Event Apart, the design conference for people who make websites. Save $100 off any 2- or 3-day AEA event with discount code AEABWS.


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Best practices Blogs and Blogging Community Design engagement Responsibility State of the Web twitter writing

140 Characters is a Joke

THERE IS ALWAYS more to the story than what we are told. I am not omniscient. It is better to light a single candle than to join a lynch mob. Other people’s behavior is not my business. Truth is hard, epigrams are easy. Anything worth saying takes more than 140 characters. Blogging’s not dead. F____ the 140 character morality police.

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art direction Best practices Blogs and Blogging Compatibility Content First content strategy Content-First creativity Design Ideas Layout Redesigns Site Optimization Standards State of the Web The Essentials The Profession Typekit Typography Usability User Experience UX Web Design Web Design History webfonts Websites webtype Zeldman zeldman.com

Web Design Manifesto 2012

THANK YOU for the screen shot. I was actually already aware that the type on my site is big. I designed it that way. And while I’m grateful for your kind desire to help me, I actually do know how the site looks in a browser with default settings on a desktop computer. I am fortunate enough to own a desktop computer. Moreover, I work in a design studio where we have several of them.

This is my personal site. There are many like it, but this one is mine. Designers with personal sites should experiment with new layout models when they can. Before I got busy with one thing and another, I used to redesign this site practically every other week. Sometimes the designs experimented with pitifully low contrast. Other times the type was absurdly small. I experimented with the technology that’s used to create web layouts, and with various notions of web “page” design and content presentation. I’m still doing that, I just don’t get to do it as often.

Many people who’ve visited this site since the redesign have commented on the big type. It’s hard to miss. After all, words are practically the only feature I haven’t removed. Some of the people say they love it. Others are undecided. Many are still processing. A few say they hate it and suggest I’ve lost my mind—although nobody until you has suggested I simply didn’t have access to a computer and therefore didn’t know what I was designing. This design may be good, bad, or indifferent but it is not accidental.

A few people who hate this design have asked if I’ve heard of responsive web design. I have indeed. I was there when Ethan Marcotte invented it, I published his ground-breaking article (and, later, his book, which I read in draft half a dozen times and which I still turn to for reference and pleasure), and I’ve had the privilege of seeing Ethan lecture and lead workshops on the topic about 40 times over the past three years. We’ve incorporated responsive design in our studio’s practice, and I’ve talked about it myself on various stages in three countries. I’m even using elements of it in this design, although you’d have to view source and think hard to understand how, and I don’t feel like explaining that part yet.

This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers might soon not be designing for anyone.)

This redesign is deliberately over the top, but new ideas often exaggerate to make a point. It’s over the top but not unusable nor, in my opinion, unbeautiful. How can passages set in Georgia and headlines in Franklin be anything but beautiful? I love seeing my words this big. It encourages me to write better and more often.

If this were a client site, I wouldn’t push the boundaries this far. If this were a client site, I’d worry that maybe a third of the initial responses to the redesign were negative. Hell, let’s get real: if this were a client site, I wouldn’t have removed as much secondary functionality and I certainly wouldn’t have set the type this big. But this is my personal site. There are many like it, but this one is mine. And on this one, I get to try designs that are idea-driven and make statements. On this one, I get to flounder and occasionally flop. If this design turns out to be a hideous mistake, I’ll probably eventually realize that and change it. (It’s going to change eventually, anyway. This is the web. No design is for the ages, not even Douglas Bowman’s great Minima.)

But for right now, I don’t think this design is a mistake. I think it is a harbinger. We can’t keep designing as we used to if we want people to engage with our content. We can’t keep charging for ads that our layouts train readers to ignore. We can’t focus so much on technology that we forget the web is often, and quite gloriously, a transaction between reader and writer.

Most of you reading this already know these things and already think about them each time you’re asked to create a new digital experience. But even our best clients can sometimes push back, and even our most thrilling projects typically contain some element of compromise. A personal site is where you don’t have to compromise. Even if you lose some readers. Even if some people hate what you’ve done. Even if others wonder why you aren’t doing what everyone else who knows what’s what is doing.

I don’t think you will see much type quite this big but I do think you will see more single-column sites with bigger type coming soon to a desktop and device near you. For a certain kind of content, bigger type and a simpler layout just make sense, regardless of screen size. You don’t even have to use Typekit or its brothers to experiment with big type (awesome as those services are). In today’s monitors and operating systems, yesterday’s classic web fonts—the ones that come with most everyone’s computer—can look pretty danged gorgeous at large sizes. Try tired old Times New Roman. You might be surprised.

The present day designer refuses to die.


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art direction Blogs and Blogging Brands

Dr. Seuss does Star Wars

Enjoy!

Hat tip: Erika Hall

Categories
blogger Blogs and Blogging Community content content strategy Happy Cog™ Ideas

Cognition: Behind the Music

Happy Cog president Greg Storey describes the thinking behind our latest little experiment in online publishing and community:

Last week we launched Cognition, a studio blog, that replaced the traditional open-mic text area commenting system with two options: Either post a response via your own Twitter account or link to a post on your own blog.

As the primary instigator, Mr. Storey explains his and the agency’s rationale for doing away with traditional comments:

The problem with most comment threads is that they can reach that useless tipping point very quickly. Without having an active moderator to keep up with all of the various threads it’s practically impossible to provide any sort of conversational value.

Meanwhile we have also informally noticed a decline in blog usage since the wider adoption of Twitter within our community. … Happy Cog loves blogs. … What if we could help bring some life back into the old network by encouraging people to write blog posts when they have more to say than what can fit into one-hundred-and-forty characters?

Read more and comment if you wish: Airbag: Babylon.

Categories
Blogs and Blogging Design Happy Cog™ launches

Cog blog offloads comments.

The agency launched by a blog finally has a proper one of its own. Happy Cog gently introduces Cognition.

Speaking of experiments, there’s our comments section. [W]e’ve collocated our comments on Twitter. Share a tweet-length response here, and, with your permission, it will go there. If you are moved to respond with more than 140 characters, post the response on your website, and it will show up here.

Is This Thing On? – Cognition

Categories
A Book Apart A List Apart Accessibility Best practices Blogs and Blogging books Design Ideas The Essentials Usability User Experience UX Web Design Web Design History Web Standards

Responsive design is the new black

Collylogic.com, retooled as responsive design. The wide version.

The blog of Mr Simon Collison, retooled as responsive web design. The wide version.

Collylogic.com, retooled as responsive design. The narrow version.

The blog of Mr Simon Collison, retooled as responsive web design. The narrow version.

See more versions in Mr Collison’s “Media Query Layouts” set on Flickr.

Read the article that started it all. Coming soon as a book by Mr Ethan Marcotte from A Book Apart. (The current A Book Apart book, Mr Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers, ships Friday. Mr Ethan Marcotte will be our guest this Thursday, June 24, on The Big Web Show. Synchronicity. It’s not just an LP by The Police. Kids, ask your parents.)

The beauty of responsive web design becomes obvious when you see your site in smart phones, tablets, and widescreen desktop browsers. It’s as if your site was redesigned to perfectly fit that specific environment. And yet there is but one actual design—a somewhat plastic design, if you will. An extensible design, if you prefer. It’s what some of us were going for with “liquid” web design back in the 1990s, only it doesn’t suck. Powered by CSS media queries, it’s the resurrection of a Dao of Web Design and a spiffy new best practice. All the kids are doing it.

Well, anyway, some of the cool ones are. See also the newly retooled-per-responsive-design Journal by Mr Hicks. Hat tip: Mr Stocks. I obviously have some work to do on this site. And you may on yours.

Seen any good responsive redesigns lately?


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