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Announcements business CSS3 Design Designers studio.zeldman

Introducing studio.zeldman

STUDIO.ZELDMAN is open for business. It’s a vision I’ve been cooking up, a new studio supported by some of the most talented people in our industry and everything I’ve learned in two-plus decades of web and interaction design. And now it’s here. studio.zeldman designs digital experiences and provides strategic consulting. We don’t have a portfolio yet, but we landed our first client before we launched. Come on down!

The Design

Heading in this direction meant leaving the studio I founded in 1999 (we’re on the best of terms, and it’s an excellent company in great hands). My rise to an almost purely strategic position there taught me a lot about my business—but it also kept me from designing new projects. And I’ve been itching to get back to my roots. Three factors shaped my design for the new studio’s website:

  1. I wanted to try something different: something that was conceptual and art directional. Jen Simmons’s An Event Apart presentations (like this one from last year) inspired me to break out of the columnar rut of current design and create something that didn’t look like it came pre-baked in a framework.
  2. Because I am contrary, I thought it might be fun to allude to an outdated design approach (like, say, skeuomorphism) in a responsive web layout—if the content supported such a gambit.
  3. Most of all, my design had to come out of content.

Let’s unpack that third point a bit more. Normally, design studio websites discuss the customer’s business problems and posit design (and their particular skills) as the solution. It’s a strategy David Ogilvy pioneered for print advertising in the 1950s (“problem/solution”).

Every mention of an achievement or capability exists to show how it solved a client’s business problem: “our redesign increased conversion by 20%” or “our testing and iterative process reduced shopping cart abandonment by 37%,” and so on. Such sites talk about the company’s expertise, positioning it within a framework of client needs. Almost every design studio says the same two or three things at the top of their home page, leaving the real selling to their site’s case studies section. But studio.zeldman is new. No portfolio yet; no company history.

But first, a little something about me

With no portfolio, our strategy—at least for the launch—couldn’t be about our body of work. At least for now, it had to be about me: what I believe, what I’ve done. I came to that realization very reluctantly: I wanted to create a studio that was bigger than any one person. (My original name for the company was simply “studio,” and my plan for the design was that it should be as clean and basic as water.)

But Jason Fried of Basecamp, who is one of my smartest friends, persuaded me that what was unique about this new studio was me, and that I shouldn’t be afraid to say so. Jason convinced me to write simply and directly, in my own voice, about what I believe design is and does—and to support that message by showing some of the things I’ve done that reach beyond my portfolio.

As if I were sitting down to send you a personal note about this new company I’m starting, the best way to express those thoughts on the site was in a letter. That was the strategy. The letter was the idea. And the idea shaped the design.

A new angle on an old design idea

In 2007, if I were designing a site that began with a letter to the reader, I would have used drop shadows and paper textures to suggest that context. Back in 1995, I’d have made an image of a letter on a table or desk top, and the letter would have been at a slight angle, as if the writer had just left it there. Could I allude to these old-fashioned ideas in a way that was subtle and modern?

The 1995 technique of a photorealistic letter was out. But a slightly angled “paper” was feasible; Jen Simmons had shown me and hundreds of other people how this kind of thing could be achieved in modern CSS.

Of course, whether something is possible in modern browsers and whether it actually reads well can be two different things. So while I was comping in pen and paper and in Photoshop, we also ran tests. My collaborator Roland Dubois set up a CSS3 font-smoothing test for angled text in JSFiddle, while my friend Tim Murtaugh of MonkeyDo put together a quick prototype of the top portion of my initial design. Everything checked out.

Once I knew an angled letter could work, I made the angled placement and angular cropping of images a guiding principle and unifying idea for the rest of the design. On the calendar, it took me from January through April of this year to land on a design idea I liked. But once I had it, the site seemed to design itself in just days.

I confess: yes, I designed in Photoshop. (Don’t tell anyone, but I even started with a grid.) And, yes, to your horror, on this project I designed for big screens first, because that’s where these particular design ideas could be most impactful. I knew we could make the design sing on any size screen, but designing for big-screen-first brought this particular project’s biggest coding challenges to the fore and provided the excitement I needed to get to the finish line. Nothing brings a smile to a designer’s lips like seeing your web idea completely fill a 27-inch screen (and do it responsibly, even).

The best part

The best part of the page is the part I didn’t design. Roland did. It’s that magical form. I could play with that thing forever, and I hope potential clients feel the same.

Some folks who checked out the beta asked why we didn’t focus on specific capabilities or budget ranges. Fair question. We certainly could have launched as, say, a redesign shop, or a web-only studio, or a content-focused studio. Any of those would have been credible, coming from me, and differentiating ourselves right out of the gate would not have been a stupid move. We really thought about it.

But we decided it would be more interesting to be less specific and find out what our potential clients are actually looking for. Consider it research that might sometimes lead to a gig.

studio.zeldman thanks you

Mica McPheeters and Jason Fried checked out my copy and kept me honest. Tim Murtaugh coded an early prototype of the site. Roland Dubois coded the final from scratch. Noël Jackson set up the repository and CDN, and ran sophisticated tests that uncovered everything from bugs to performance issues, rebuilding and re-coding with Roland to squeeze every byte of performance we could out of a site with full-screen Retina images. An article by Roland and Noël on the experiments and techniques they used to code this site would be infinitely more interesting than what you’ve just read.

Hoefler & Co. designed the reliable letter font which you will all recognize as Sentinel; DJR created Forma, which I think of as sexy Helvetica, and let us use it even though it is still in beta. Before launch, to save bandwidth, we tried recreating the site design using system fonts. Wasn’t the same. (And with WOFF and CDNs and subsetting, we were able to deliver these wonderful faces without choking your pipes.)

Our thanks to the beta testers: Andrew Kirkpatrick (above and beyond the call of duty on matters of web accessibility), Rachel Andrew, Jen Simmons again, Anna Debenham, Jeremy Seitz, and Nicholas Frota. And to Anil Dash, Jessica Hische, Jessica Helfand, and Khoi Vinh, who gave us design feedback prior to launch.

Most of all, thanks to the “Royal Advisors” who put up with my endless changes of mind, and who always acted as if they were pleased to check out my newest brainstorm, or listen to my latest circular argument: Sarah Parmenter, Jason Fried, Fred Gates, Jen Simmons, and Mike Pick.

Categories
Code CSS CSS3 Design Layout

Grid Layout & Flexbox City

CSS GRID LAYOUT is nearly finalized. Which means it’s time for designers and front-end developers to set the flags enabling their browsers to support the new specification, put CSS Flexbox through its paces by using it to create layouts, and see if anything breaks. This way, if anything does break, we’ll have time to tell the framers of CSS Grid Layout what happened, and get the spec (and browser support) fixed before it is released. Once Grid is finalized, it will be too late to fix oversights.

The links below can help you (and me) get up to speed with the new tech:

CSS Grid Layout and CSS Flexbox Links

Thank You

Additional link curation by Rachel Andrew, author of Get Ready for CSS Grid Layout from A Book Apart, and speaker extraordinaire at An Event Apart Nashville, a three-day conference that wrapped yesterday. For a ton of great web resources, see AEA Resources: Articles, Links, and Tools From An Event Apart Nashville 2016.

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A Book Apart A List Apart Advocacy An Event Apart Best practices Big Web Show Browsers chrome Code CSS CSS Grid Layout CSS3 Design HTML Layout Standards State of the Web The Big Web Show Web Design Web Design History Web Standards

CSS Grid Layout with Rachel Andrew: Big Web Show

Rachel Andrew

RACHEL ANDREW—longtime web developer and web standards champion, co-founder of the Perch CMS, and author of Get Ready For CSS Grid Layout—is my guest on today’s Big Web Show. We discuss working with CSS Grid Layout, how Grid enables designers to “do something different” with web layout, why designers need to start experimenting with Grid Layout now, how front-end design has morphed into an engineering discipline, learning HTML and CSS versus learning frameworks, and the magic of David Bowie, RIP.

Enjoy Episode ? 141 of The Big Web Show.

Sponsored by A List Apart and An Event Apart.

URLs

rachelandrew.co.uk
Get Ready for CSS Grid Layout
Perch CMS
Writing by Rachel Andrew
Books by Rachel Andrew
@rachelandrew

Categories
A Book Apart Announcements business CSS CSS3 Design Designers

A Book Apart Briefs!

Introducing A Book Apart Briefs–even briefer books for people who make websites.

FROM THOSE WONDERFUL people who brought you Responsive Web Design, Design Is A Job, Mobile First, plus thirteen additional instant classics of web design and development, here come A Book Apart Briefs: even briefer books for people who make websites. Starting with the immediately useful and illuminating Get Ready For CSS Grid Layout by Rachel Andrew (foreword by Eric Meyer), and Pricing Design by Dan Mall (foreword by Mike Monteiro).

Web design is about multi-disciplinary mastery and laser focus, so we created A Book Apart to cover the emerging and essential topics in web design and development with style, clarity, and, above all, brevity. Every title in our catalog sheds clear light on a tricky subject, and fast, so you can get back to work.

With sixteen classics under our belt, and buoyed by your support over the years, today we take that mission one step further with our new, ebook-only guides to essential fundamentals, of-the-moment techniques, and deep nerdery.

As A Book Apart co-founder and publisher, it actually thrills me to bring you the pricing guide our business has needed since forever, by Superfriends founder Dan Mall; and the easily understandable guide to the next generation of CSS layout, by the super-talented and incredibly brilliant Perch co-founder Rachel Andrew.

There are no better writer/designers to present these topics. And there are no needless words to waste your time, because these are A Book Apart Briefs: same great writing, even more brief.

Dig in!

Categories
Authoring Best practices Compatibility Content First Content-First CSS CSS3 Design Ethan Marcotte HTML HTML5 Jeremy Keith links Standards State of the Web Told you so Web Design Web Design History Web Standards

Of Patterns and Power: Web Standards Then & Now

IN “CONTENT Display Patterns” (which all front-end folk should read), Dan Mall points to a truth not unlike the one Ethan Marcotte shared last month on 24 ways. It is a truth as old as standards-based design: Construct your markup to properly support your content (not your design).

Modular/atomic design doesn’t change this truth, it just reinforces its wisdom. Flexbox and grid layout don’t change this truth, they just make it easier to do it better. HTML5 doesn’t change this truth, it just reminds us that the separation of structure from style came into existence for a reason. A reason that hasn’t changed. A reason that cannot change, because it is the core truth of the web, and is inextricably bound up with the promise of this medium.

Separating structure from style and behavior was the web standards movement’s prime revelation, and each generation of web designers discovers it anew. This separation is what makes our content as backward-compatible as it is forward-compatible (or “future-friendly,” if you prefer). It’s the key to re-use. The key to accessibility. The key to the new kinds of CMS systems we’re just beginning to dream up. It’s what makes our content as accessible to an ancient device as it will be to an unimagined future one.

Every time a leader in our field discovers, as if for the first time, the genius of this separation between style, presentation, and behavior, she is validating the brilliance of web forbears like Tim Berners-Lee, Håkon Wium Lie, and Bert Bos.

Every time a Dan or an Ethan (or a Sara or a Lea) writes a beautiful and insightful article like the two cited above, they are telling new web designers, and reminding experienced ones, that this separation of powers matters.

And they are plunging a stake into the increasingly slippery ground beneath us.

Why is it slippery? Because too many developers and designers in our amnesiac community have begun to believe and share bad ideas—ideas, like CSS isn’t needed, HTML isn’t needed, progressive enhancement is old-fashioned and unnecessary, and so on. Ideas that, if followed, will turn the web back what it was becoming in the late 1990s: a wasteland of walled gardens that said no to more people than they welcomed. Let that never be so. We have the power.

As Maimonides, were he alive today, would tell us: he who excludes a single user destroys a universe. Web standards now and forever.

Categories
A List Apart art direction Bandwidth Best practices creativity CSS CSS3 Design

CSS & Design: Blending Modes Demystified

A List Apart: Blending Modes Demystified. Illustration by Brad Colbow.

IN AN IDEAL world, we’d be able to modify a design or graphic for the web while keeping the original intact, all without opening an image editor. We’d save tons of time by not having to manually reprocess graphics whenever we changed stuff. Graphics could be neatly specified, maintained, and manipulated with just a few licks of CSS. Oh. Wait. We can do that! Justin McDowell gives us the lowdown: read Blending Modes Demystified in today’s A List Apart.


Illustration by Brad Colbow

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art direction Bandwidth Best practices Brands CSS CSS3 Design Designers development Fonts Real type on the web software State of the Web Typekit Typography Web Design Web Standards webfonts Websites

A Helvetica For Readers

A Helvetica for readers–introducing Acumin.

ACUMIN by Robert Slimbach is a new type family from Adobe that does for book (and ebook) designers what Helvetica has always done for graphic designers. Namely, it provides a robust yet water-neutral sans-serif, in a full suite of weights and widths. And unlike the classic pressing of Helvetica that comes on everyone’s computers—but like Helvetica Neue—Acumin contains real italics for every weight and width.

Reading about the design challenges Slimbach set himself (and met) helps you appreciate this new type system, whose virtues are initially all too easy to overlook, because Acumin so successfully avoids bringing a personality to the table. Enjoying Acumin is like developing a taste for exceptionally good water.

Nick Sherman designed the website for Adobe, and its subtly brilliant features are as easy to miss at first look as Acumin’s. For starters, the style grid on the intro page dynamically chooses words to fit the column based on the viewport size. Resize your browser and you’ll see how the words change to fill the space.

Heaps of behind-the-scenes calculation allow the page to load all 90 (!) fonts without breaking your pipes or the internet. Developer Bram Stein is the wizard behind the page’s performance.

Nick uses progressively enhanced CSS3 Columns to create his responsive multi-column layout, incorporating subtle tricks like switching to a condensed font when the multi-column layout shrinks below a certain size. (This is something A List Apart used to do as well; we stopped because of performance concerns.) In browsers like IE9 and earlier, which do not support CSS3 Multiple Column specification, the layout defaults to a quite readable single column. Nick adds:

It’s the first time I’ve used responsive CSS columns for a real-world project. This was both frustrating and fun because the CSS properties for controlling widows and orphans are very far behind what’s possible in InDesign, etc. It also required more thinking about vertical media queries to prevent a situation where the user would have to scroll up and down to get from the bottom of one column to the top of the next. If the viewport is too short to allow for easy reading across columns, it stays as a single column.

He describes the challenges of creating the site’s preview tool thusly:

We had to do some behind the scenes trickery in order to get the sliders to work for changing widths and weights. It’s a good way to allow people to type their own text and get a feeling for how the family can be used as a system for body text and headlines (unlike Helvetica, which is more limited to the middle range of sizes). Chris Lewis helped out a lot with getting this to work. It even works on a phone!

Book designers have long had access to great serif fonts dripping with character that were ideal for setting long passages of text. Now they have a well-made sans serif that’s as sturdy yet self-effacing as a waiter at a great restaurant. Congratulations to Robert Slimbach, Adobe, and the designers and developers mentioned or interviewed here. I look forward to seeing if Acumin makes it into new website designs (perhaps sharing some of Proxima Nova‘s lunch), especially among mature designers focused on creating readable experiences. And I pray Acumin makes its way into the next generation of ebook readers.

(Just me? In both iBooks and Kindle, I’m continually changing typefaces after reading any book for any period of time. All the current faces just call too much attention to themselves, making me aware that I am scanning text—which is rather like making filmgoers aware that they are watching projected images just when they should be losing themselves in the story.)

Categories
Big Web Show CSS CSS3 Layout Standards State of the Web The Big Web Show Web Design Web Design History Web Standards

Big Web Show ? 132: Modern Layouts with Jen Simmons

Jen Simmons

THE BIG WEB SHOW is back from its break. My guest this week is Jen Simmons (@jensimmons) of The Web Ahead. We discuss moving beyond cookie-cutter layouts on the web; the ins and outs of podcasting; tradeoffs when designing a website; learning from your users; Jen’s journey from theater to technology; and more. Sponsored by Dreamhost. Enjoy The Big Web Show ? 132. ?

URLS

http://thewebahead.net/81 (great links in the show notes!)
https://twitter.com/jensimmons
http://labs.thewebahead.net/thelayoutsahead/
https://github.com/jensimmons/thelayoutsahead
http://alistapart.com/article/css-shapes-101
https://css-tricks.com/examples/ShapesOfCSS/
http://sarasoueidan.com/blog/css-shapes/index.html
http://thewebahead.net/80
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-grid-layout/
http://thewebahead.net/49
http://next.zengrids.com
http://www.jensimmons.com/about/
http://www.pagetutor.com/common/bgcolors216.html

Categories
An Event Apart better-know-a-speaker CSS CSS3

Next Generation CSS Layout With Rachel Andrew

SINCE the early days of the web, designers have been trying to lay out web pages using grid systems. Likewise, almost every CSS framework attempts to implement some kind of grid system, using floats and often leaning on preprocessors.

The CSS Grid Layout module brings us a native CSS Grid system for the first time—a grid system that does not rely on document source order, and can create complex layouts which are easily redefined with media queries.

In Rachel Andrews’s “CSS Grid Layout” session at An Event Apart Boston 2015, by following along with practical examples, you’ll learn how Grid works, and how it can be used to implement modern layouts and responsive designs.

More at An Event Apart.

Categories
Code CSS CSS3 Design type Typography

Big, Beautiful Dropcaps with CSS initial-letter

Just beautiful.

demosthenes.info/blog/961/Big-Beautiful-DropCaps-with-CSS-initial-letter

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Big Web Show CSS CSS3 Design The Big Web Show

Big Web Show ? 110: CSS and JavaScript: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Nicole Sullivan

IN BIG WEB SHOW ? 110, Nicole Sullivan and I discuss CSS Conf, building scalable systems that won’t break, designing for speed and performance, learning Ruby, Object Oriented CSS, a CSS Style Guide, Type-o-matic, practical takeaways from stunt CSS, pairing as a work method, sexism and racism tests, and setting aside biases when selecting conference sessions. Enjoy!

Sponsored by Typekit.

Categories
Big Web Show books CSS CSS3 Design Designers The Big Web Show

Big Web Show ? 102: Sass for Web Designers with Dribbble’s Dan Cederholm

Dan Cederholm

DESIGNER, developer, banjoist, Dribbble co-founder, and all-around nice guy Dan Cederholm and I discuss fear of CSS pre-processors; the craft of code; growing the Dribbble design community; transitioning from a two-person part-time start-up to a full-time company with employees; and Dan’s new book Sass For Web Designers in Episode ? 102 of The Big Web Show on Mule Radio.

Tell Your Friends!


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Big Web Show CSS CSS3 Designers development Education eric meyer HTML podcasts Standards State of the Web

Big Web Show 79: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer

IN EPISODE No. 79 of The Big Web Show (“everything web that matters”), I interview CSS guru, Microformats co-founder, O’Reilly and New Riders author, and An Event Apart co-founder Eric A. Meyer (@meyerweb) about upcoming CSS modules including grid layout, flexbox, and regions; his career trajectory from college graduate webmaster to world-renowned author, consultant, and lecturer; founding and running a virtual community (CSS-Discuss); becoming an O’Reilly writer; the early days of the Mosaic Browser and The Web Standards Project’s CSS Samurai; “The Web Behind” variation of The Web Ahead podcast, and more.

Listen to the episode.

About Eric

Eric A. Meyer has been working with the web since late 1993 and is an internationally recognized expert on the subjects of HTML and CSS. He is the principal consultant for Complex Spiral Consulting and lives in Cleveland, Ohio, which is a much nicer city than you’ve been led to believe. Author of “Eric Meyer on CSS” (New Riders), “Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide” (O’Reilly & Associates), “CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference” (Osborne/McGraw-Hill), and the CSS Browser Compatibility Charts, Eric co-founded and co-directs An Event Apart, the design conference “for people who make websites,” and speaks at a variety of conferences on the subject of standards, CSS use, and web design.

URLs


Photo: Chris Jennings

Categories
business businessweek client management client services clients content Content First CSS3 Curation Dan Benjamin Design E-Books Ethan Marcotte findability Google Happy Cog™ HTML HTML5 Jeremy Keith Microsoft podcasts Publishing Real type on the web Redesigns Responsive Web Design Standards State of the Web The Big Web Show Usability User Experience UX Web Design Web Design History Web Standards Zeldman

Leo Laporte interviews JZ

IN EPISODE 63 of Triangulation, Leo Laporte, a gracious and knowledgeable podcaster/broadcaster straight outta Petaluma, CA, interviews Your Humble Narrator about web standards history, responsive web design, content first, the state of standards in a multi-device world, and why communists sometimes make lousy band managers.

Categories
A List Apart books business Career Code creativity CSS CSS3 Design Responsive Web Design The Profession

Build Books With CSS3; Design a Responsive Résumé

“WE ARE ALL PUBLISHERS,” claims Issue No. 353 of A List Apart for people who make websites. Design books with CSS3; craft a responsive web résumé.

Building Books with CSS3

by NELLIE MCKESSON

While historically, it’s been difficult at best to create print-quality PDF books from markup alone, CSS3 now brings us the Paged Media Module, which targets print book formatting. “Paged” media exists as finite pages, like books and magazines, rather than as long scrolling stretches of text, like most websites. With a single CSS stylesheet, publishers can take XHTML source content and turn it into a laid-out, print-ready PDF. You can take your XHTML source, bypass desktop page layout software like Adobe InDesign, and package it as an ePub file. It’s a lightweight and adaptable workflow, which gets you beautiful books faster. Nellie McKesson, eBook Operations Manager at O’Reilly Media, explains how to build books with CSS3.

A Case for Responsive Résumés

by ANDREW HOFFMAN

Grizzled job hunting veterans know too well that a sharp résumé and near-flawless interview may still leave you short of your dream job. Competition is fierce and never wanes. Finding new ways to distinguish yourself in today’s unforgiving economy is vital to a designer/developer’s survival. Happily, web standards whiz and mobile web developer Andrew Hoffman has come up with a dandy differentiator that is just perfect for A List Apart readers. Learn how to author a clean résumé in HTML5/CSS3 that scales well to different viewport sizes, is easy to update and maintain, and will never grow obsolete.


Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.

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