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A Book Apart Advocacy art direction Best practices Design Designers Happy Cog™ industry

Expressive Design Systems

Yesenia Perez-Cruz started her career as a designer at Happy Cog Philadelphia. From the first day, her design gifts were unmistakable. As her career progressed, she moved from one challenging role to another. At companies like Vox Media and Shopify, and at conferences around the world, she has been a design team leader, a popular speaker, an advocate for design systems, and a voice of our industry. Today that voice took book form.

Expressive Design Systems, the first book by Yesenia Perez-Cruz, is now available from A Book Apart.

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Best practices Career engagement eric meyer facebook Happy Cog™ industry

Unexamined Privilege is the real source of cruelty in Facebook’s “Your Year in Review”

UNEXAMINED PRIVILEGE is the real source of cruelty in Facebook’s “Your Year in Review”—a feature conceived and designed by a group to whom nothing terrible has happened yet. A brilliant upper-middle-class student at an elite university conceived Facebook, and college students, as everyone knows, were its founding user group. The company hires recent graduates of expensive and exclusive design programs and pays them several times the going rate to brainstorm and execute exciting new features.

I’m not saying that these brilliant young designers are heartless, or that individuals among them haven’t personally experienced tragedy—that would be mathematically impossible. I have taught some of these designers, and worked with others. Those I’ve known are wonderful people who want to make a difference in the world. And in theory (and sometimes in practice) a platform like Facebook lets them do that.1

But when you put together teams of largely homogenous people of the same class and background, and pay them a lot of money, and when most of those people are under 30, it stands to reason that when someone in the room says, “Let’s do ‘your year in review, and front-load it with visuals,’” most folks in the room will imagine photos of skiing trips, parties, and awards shows—not photos of dead spouses, parents, and children.

So it comes back to this. When we talk about the need for diversity in tech, we’re not doing it because we like quota systems. Diverse backgrounds produce differing points of view. And those differences are needed if we are to put the flowering of internet genius to use actually helping humanity with its many terrifying and seemingly intractable problems.

If we keep throwing only young, mostly white, mostly upper middle class people at the engine that makes our digital world go, we’ll keep getting camera and reminder and hookup apps—things that make an already privileged life even smoother—and we’ll keep producing features that sound like a good idea to everyone in the room, until they unexpectedly stab someone in the heart.


1 Of course, not all my former students and employees work at Facebook; most don’t. But those who have gone there had other, equally lucrative options; they took the job to make Facebook, and maybe the world, a little better.

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Fonts Happy Cog™ type

Happy Cog: Building Hand-Crafted Websites

OUR FRIENDS at Typecast shot a video of some of Happy Cog’s designers discussing readability in design and the importance of great type tools to our process.

Happy Cog: building hand-crafted websites from Typecast on Vimeo.

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An Event Apart business Chicago cities client services conferences Design Happy Cog™

From Chicago, With Love

Marina City, Chicago, IL, USA. Part of a photo set by Jeffrey Zeldman.

HEY, FRIENDS. I write from the magical city of Chicago, where I’m enjoying the first Happy Cog Summit. Next week, following our meet-up cum strategy session cum karaoke party, comes An Event Apart Chicago, three days of peace, love, and web standards (plus more Chicago magic).

I won’t be writing here much while these events continue, but I’ve started a Chicago 2012 photo slide show for your pleasure, and will add to it as time and aesthetics permit. You can also stalk me via my new Foursquare Chicago list.

Once An Event Apart kicks in, starting Monday August 27, and until it ends Wednesday night, August 29, I’ll post links and notes here—and you can follow the hot tweet-by-tweet action on A Feed Apart, the official feed aggregator for An Event Apart. Yowee!

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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.

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A List Apart Announcements business content editorial Happy Cog™ people

A List Apart news

Presenting Sara Wachter Boettcher, ALA’s new editor-in-chief.

WITH THE RELEASE on July 10, 2012 of the A List Apart Summer Reading Issue (a collection of favorite articles from 355 issues of the magazine), ALA’s editor-in-chief Krista Stevens has hung up her spurs and moved on.

Over six significant web years, Krista’s passion for great writing led to such extraordinary articles as More Meaningful Typography by Tim Brown, Orbital Content by Cameron Koczon, In Defense of Readers by Mandy Brown, Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte, and many others.

She helped ALA anticipate the important ideas in the rapidly changing fields of web design, web development, user experience, and content strategy, and continued the magazine’s tradition of pioneering and promoting best practices, while also broadening the kinds of stories we covered. Behind the scenes, she also updated our processes; coaxed the best work possible out of authors and staff; remembered birthdays and anticipated conflicts before feelings could get hurt; and more. She led us and mothered us, and she will be missed. You can follow Krista on Twitter, benefit from her user advocacy at Automattic, and continue to be enlightened by her via Contents Magazine. Thank you, Krista.


New editor-in-chief Sara Wachter Boettcher is a content strategist and writer who recently moved to Lancaster, PA, where she bucks the local Amish tradition by spending her days making, reading, and writing things on the web. She is the author of the upcoming Rosenfeld Media book Content Everywhere, a frequent conference speaker, and has contributed articles and essays to A List Apart (Future-Ready Content) and Contents (On Content and Curiosity).

Currently a consultant under her own shingle, Sara previously spent a half-dozen years working in agencies, mainly at Off Madison Ave, where she started as a web writer and became the director of interactive content and marketing strategy. Although her A List Apart editorship does not officially begin until August, Sara has already dived in behind the scenes. She is whip-smart and a pleasure to know.

Welcome, Sara!

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Happy Cog™

Happy Cog Web Designers Join Ganapati Kulam

YESTERDAY AND TODAY the Ganapati Kulam held a two-day intensive kick-off meeting with three members of Happy Cog, a leading web-design firm that the monastery hired for a complete, professional redesign of this Himalayan Academy/Kauai’s Hindu Monastery website using funds raised during last year’s Digital Dharma Drive.”

Today at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery, 9/01/2011: Happy Cog Web Designers Join Ganapati Kulam.

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Code Design Happy Cog™ HTML HTML5 Web Design Web Design History

Two Years Ago: HTML5 SuperFriends Meet in New York

IMG_4991.JPG | Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

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An Event Apart Announcements Appearances apps Atlanta Authoring Best practices business cities client services clients Code Community Compatibility conferences content content strategy creativity CSS CSS3 Design Designers development editorial Education eric meyer events Fonts Formats glamorous Happy Cog™ HTML HTML5 Ideas industry Information architecture interface IXD Jeremy Keith Platforms Real type on the web Redesigns Responsive Web Design Scripting speaking spec Standards State of the Web The Profession Usability User Experience UX W3C Web Design Web Design History Web Standards webfonts webkit webtype work Working Zeldman

An Event Apart Atlanta 2011

YOU FIND ME ENSCONCED in the fabulous Buckhead, Atlanta Intercontinental Hotel, preparing to unleash An Event Apart Atlanta 2011, three days of design, code, and content strategy for people who make websites. Eric Meyer and I co-founded our traveling web conference in December, 2005; in 2006 we chose Atlanta for our second event, and it was the worst show we’ve ever done. We hosted at Turner Field, not realizing that half the audience would be forced to crane their necks around pillars if they wanted to see our speakers or the screen on which slides were projected.

Also not realizing that Turner Field’s promised contractual ability to deliver Wi-Fi was more theoretical than factual: the venue’s A/V guy spent the entire show trying to get an internet connection going. You could watch audience members twitchily check their laptops for email every fourteen seconds, then make the “no internet” face that is not unlike the face addicts make when the crack dealer is late, then check their laptops again.

The food was good, our speakers (including local hero Todd Dominey) had wise lessons to impart, and most attendees had a pretty good time, but Eric and I still shudder to remember everything that went wrong with that gig.

Not to jinx anything, but times have changed. We are now a major three-day event, thanks to a kick-ass staff and the wonderful community that has made this show its home. We thank you from the bottoms of our big grateful hearts.

I will see several hundred of you for the next three days. Those not attending may follow along:

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business Design Happy Cog™ Jason Santa Maria The Essentials Zeldman

One blog post is worth a thousand portfolio pieces.

I HIRED JASON SANTA MARIA after reading this post on his site.

The year was 2004. Douglas Bowman, one of my partners on a major project, had just injured himself and was unable to work. I needed someone talented and disciplined enough to jump into Doug’s shoes and brain—to finish Doug’s part of the project as Doug would have finished it.

I lack the ability to emulate other designers (especially classy ones like Douglas Bowman) and I was a Photoshop guy whereas Doug worked in Illustrator, so I knew I needed a freelancer. But who?

A Google search on Illustrator and web design led me to a post by a guy I’d never heard of. The post was enjoyably written and reflected a mature and coherent attitude not simply toward the technique it described, but to the practice of design itself. Yes, the blog itself was intriguingly and skillfully designed, and that certainly didn’t hurt. But what made me hire Jason was not the artistry of his website’s design nor the demonstration that he possessed the technical skill I sought, but the fact that he had an evolved point of view about web design.

Anyone can write a how-to. Not everyone thinks to write a why.

Jason had.

I offered him the thankless task of aping another designer’s style for not a ton of money under extreme time pressure, and to my pleased surprise, he accepted. He did so well, and performed so selflessly, that I hired him for another project, this time one with full creative freedom. I have never regretted those decisions.

Just about everyone I know and work with I first met online. And, although well-done portfolio services have their place, neither I nor anyone at Happy Cog has ever hired someone purely (or even largely) on the basis of their portfolio. It’s all about how you present yourself online. Before I even meet you, do I feel like I know you—or like I wish I knew you?

Have you got a point of view? Are you sharing it?

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Best practices business clients Design Happy Cog™

On Creative Direction

IN MY APPRENTICE DAYS, I worked for Marvin Honig, a Hall of Fame copywriter who created indelible commercials for Alka-Seltzer, Cracker Jack, and Volkswagen during the 1960s and 1970s, and who assumed creative leadership of Doyle Dane Bernbach upon legendary founder Bill Bernbach’s death. It was not one of those bloody successions that stain the pages of history and advertising. Bill chose Marvin to carry on in his place.

By the time I met Marvin, he and I were toiling at Campbell-Mithun-Esty. He had been brought in to radically upgrade the financially successful but talent-challenged agency’s creative product. I was there because it was the first job I could get in New York.

Marvin was gentle. He never told you how stale your ideas were or how disappointed he was in you for not working harder. He made you believe you were the future, not only of the place, but of the profession.

Besides his warmth, what I remember most is a piece of advice he gave me: “If you’re not a creative director by the time you’re 40, get out of the business.”

Continue reading But What I Really Want to Do is Direct at Cognition, the blog of Happy Cog.

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An Event Apart Archiving Boston Career cities Code Community conferences content creativity CSS CSS3 Design Designers development Education events Fonts glamorous Happy Cog™ HTML HTML5 Ideas industry Information architecture IXD Layout Marketing Markup people photography Real type on the web The Profession This never happens to Gruber Typekit Usability User Experience UX W3C Web Design Web Design History Web Standards webfonts Websites webtype Zeldman

HTML5, CSS3, UX, Design: Links from An Event Apart Boston 2011

Meeting of the Minds: Ethan Marcotte and AEA attendee discuss the wonders of CSS3. Photo by the incomparable Jim Heid.

Meeting of the Minds: Ethan Marcotte and AEA attendee discuss the wonders of CSS3. Photo by the incomparable Jim Heid.

THE SHOW IS OVER, but the memories, write-ups, demos, and links remain. Enjoy!

An Event Apart Boston 2011 group photo pool

Speakers, attendees, parties, and the wonders of Boston, captured by those who were there.

What Every Designer Should Know (a)

Jeremy Keith quite effectively live-blogs my opening keynote on the particular opportunities of Now in the field of web design, and the skills every designer needs to capitalize on the moment and make great things.

The Password Anti-Pattern

Related to my talk: Jeremy Keith’s original write-up on a notorious but all-too-common practice. If your boss or client tells you to design this pattern, just say no. Design that does not serve users does not serve business.

What Every Designer Should Know (b)

“In his opening keynote … Jeffrey Zeldman talked about the skills and opportunities that should be top of mind for everyone designing on the Web today.” Luke Wroblewski’s write-up.

Whitney Hess: Design Principles — The Philosophy of UX

“As a consultant, [Whitney] spends a lot of time talking about UX and inevitably, the talk turns to deliverables and process but really we should be establishing a philosophy about how to treat people, in the same way that visual design is about establishing a philosophy about how make an impact. Visual design has principles to achieve that: contrast, emphasis, balance, proportion, rhythm, movement, texture, harmony and unity.” In this talk, Whitney proposed a set of 10 principles for UX design.

Veerle Pieters: The Experimental Zone

Live blogging by Jeremy Keith. Veerle, a noted graphic and interaction designer from Belgium, shared her process for discovering design through iteration and experimentation.

Luke Wroblewski: Mobile Web Design Moves

Luke’s live awesomeness cannot be captured in dead written words, but Mr Keith does a splendid job of quickly sketching many of the leading ideas in this key AEA 2011 talk.

See also: funky dance moves with Luke Wroblewski, a very short video I captured as Luke led the crowd in the opening moves of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Ethan Marcotte: The Responsive Designer’s Workflow (a)

“The next talk here at An Event Apart in Boston is one I’ve really, really, really been looking forward to: it’s a presentation by my hero Ethan Marcotte.”

Ethan Marcotte: The Responsive Designer’s Workflow (b)

Ethan’s amazing talk—a key aspect of design in 2011 and AEA session of note—as captured by the great Luke Wroblewski.

An Event Apart: The Secret Lives of Links—Jared Spool

“In his presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Jared Spool detailed the importance and role of links on Web pages.” No writer can capture Jared Spool’s engaging personality or the quips that produce raucous laughter throughout his sessions, but Luke does an outstanding job of noting the primary ideas Jared shares in this riveting and highly useful UX session.

An Event Apart: All Our Yesterdays—Jeremy Keith

Luke W: “In his All Our Yesterdays presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Jeremy Keith outlined the problem of digital preservation on the Web and provided some strategies for taking a long term view of our Web pages.”

Although it is hard to pick highlights among such great speakers and topics, this talk was a highlight for me. As in, it blew my mind. Several people said it should be a TED talk.

An Event Apart: From Idea to Interface—Aarron Walter

Luke: “In his Idea to Interface presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Aarron Walter encouraged Web designers and developers to tackle their personal projects by walking through examples and ways to jump in. Here are my notes from his talk.”

Links and Resources from “From Idea to Interface”

Compiled by the speaker, links include Design Personas Template and Example, the story behind the illustrations in the presentation created by Mike Rhode, Dribble, Huffduffer, Sketchboards, Mustache for inserting data into your prototypes, Keynote Kung Fu, Mocking Bird, Yahoo Design Patterns, MailChimp Design Pattern Library, Object Oriented CSS by Nicole Sullivan and more!

An Event Apart: CSS3 Animations—Andy Clarke

“In his Smoke Gets In Your Eyes presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Andy Clarke showcased what is possible with CSS3 animations using transitions and transforms in the WebKit browser.” Write-up by the legendary Luke Wroblewski.

Madmanimation

The “Mad Men” opening titles re-created entirely in CSS3 animation. (Currently requires Webkit browser, e.g. Safari, Chrome.)

CSS3 Animation List

Anthony Calzadilla, a key collaborator on the Mad Men CSS3 animation, showcases his works.

Box Shadow Curl

Pure CSS3 box-shadow page curl effect. Mentioned during Ethan Marcotte’s Day 3 session on exploring CSS3.

Multiple CSS Transition Durations

Fascinating article by Anton Peck (who attended the show). Proposed: a solution to a key problem with CSS transitions. (“Even now, my main issue with transitions is that they use the same time-length value for the inbound effect as they do the outbound. For example, when you create a transition on an image with a 1-second duration, you get that length of time for both mousing over, and mousing away from the object. This type of behavior should be avoided, for the sake of the end-user!”)

Everything You Wanted to Know About CSS3 Gradients

Ethan Marcotte: “Hello. I am here to discuss CSS3 gradients. Because, let’s face it, what the web really needed was more gradients.”

Ultimate CSS3 Gradient Generator

Like it says.

Linear Gradients Generator

By the incomparable John Allsopp.

These sessions were not captured

Some of our best talks were not captured by note-takers, at least not to my knowledge. They include:

  1. Eric Meyer: CSS Anarchist’s Cookbook
  2. Mark Boulton: Outing the Mind: Designing Layouts That Think for You
  3. Jeff Veen: Disaster, DNA, and the Fathomless Depth of the Web

It’s possible that the special nature of these presentations made them impossible to capture in session notes. (You had to be there.)

There are also no notes on the two half-day workshop sessions, “Understand HTML5 With Jeremy Keith,” and “Explore CSS3 With Ethan Marcotte.”

What have I missed?

Attendees and followers, below please add the URLs of related educational links, write-ups, and tools I’ve missed here. Thanks!

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A Book Apart A List Apart An Event Apart better-know-a-speaker Code Community conferences content strategy Design Designers DWWS Happy Cog™ HTML HTML5 industry Interviews ipad iphone IXD Standards State of the Web The Essentials The Profession type Typekit UX W3C Web Design Web Design History Web Standards Zeldman zeldman.com

Webvanta Video: Jeffrey Zeldman on the State of Web Design

From the floor of An Event Apart Seattle 2011:

Jeffrey Zeldman at An Event Apart Seattle 2011.

“Mobile is huge. The iPhone, iPad, and Android are huge. On the one hand, they are standards-facing, because they all support HTML5 and CSS3, so you can create great mobile experiences using web standards. You can create apps using web standards. On the other hand, there is also the temptation to go a proprietary route. In a strange way, although the browsers are much more standards compliant, it seems like we are redoing the browser war. Only now, it’s not the browser wars, it’s platform wars.”

Video interview, plus transcript: Interview with Jeffrey Zeldman on the State of Web Design. Thank you, Michael Slater.

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Applications apps architecture art direction Authoring Best practices Brands business Community content Damned Fine Journalism Design Designers development Happy Cog™ Journalism at its Finest Microblogging Platforms State of the Web The Big Web Show

Episode 39: Crowd Fusion’s Brian Alvey live on The Big Web Show

Brian Alvey

BRIAN ALVEY (home, Twitter) is our guest on The Big Web Show Episode 39, recording live Thursday, February 16, at 12:00 PM Eastern at 5by5.tv/live.

Brian is CEO of Crowd Fusion, a publishing platform that combines popular applications like blogging, wikis, tagging and workflow management, and a leader in the content management world. He co-founded Weblogs, Inc.—home to Engadget, Autoblog, TUAW and more—and built the Blogsmith platform, both of which were acquired by Aol and are essential to their current strategy. Brian has been putting big brands on the web since 1995 when he designed the first TV Guide website and helped BusinessWeek leap from Aol to the web.

Brian built database-driven web applications and content management systems for many large companies in the 1990’s including Intel, J.D. Edwards, Deloitte & Touche and The McGraw-Hill Companies. His 1999 Tech-Engine site was a “skinnable HotJobs” which powered over 200 online career centers including XML.com, Perl.com, O’Reilly & Associates Network, DevShed, and Computer User magazine.

He has been the art director of three print magazines (I met him in 1995 when he was art director for “Net Surfer” or something like that) and was the Chief Technology Officer of Rising Tide Studios where he developed The Venture Reporter Network, which is now a Dow Jones property.

In 2003, Brian invented and launched Blogstakes, a sweepstakes application for the blogging community. He is a former Happy Cog partner of mine; at Happy Cog, Brian built content management systems for customers including Capgemini, A List Apart, and the Kansas City Chiefs. He was also the creator and host of the Meet The Makers conference, a series of talk show-style events that were so compelling, they helped inspired me to create An Event Apart with Eric Meyer.

And I’ll stop there. Ladies and gentlemen, a legend and true creative force in this medium. Please join us at tomorrow on 5by5.tv/live for a lively and wide-ranging discussion.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) records live every Thursday at 12:00 PM Eastern. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

The Big Web Show #39: Brian Alvey.

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Best practices Brands business Design Happy Cog™ This never happens to Gruber Web Design

Happy Cog Hosting

HOSTING IS HARD. So why exactly are we offering hosting? Why get into a business that requires tremendous patience, extraordinary responsiveness, and technological wizardry? Mr Hoy tells all in the cleverly titled announcement, Happy Cog Hosting.

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