CINDY CHASTAIN, Creative Director & Experience Strategist at R/GA—plus actress, screenwriter, and freelance strategist—is my guest in today’s Big Web Show podcast, sponsored by Happy Cog.
Category: The Big Web Show
IN EPISODE No. 78 of The Big Web Show (“everything web that matters”), I interview Margot Bloomstein, author of Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Engagement (Morgan Kaufmann, 2012), about her professional transition from design to content strategy; the vagaries of the consulting life; how mentoring and non-traditional academic backgrounds can fit into a web career; how to write a content strategy book for people who are not content strategists; and the beauties of Pittsburgh.
THE BIG WEB SHOW is back, baby! In spite of hurricanes, blackouts, and the vagaries of international travel, my 5by5 audio podcast about “everything web that matters” has returned to weekly broadcasting. Here are the latest episodes for your edification and listening pleasure:
Episode 76: Jen Robbins
Creator of four classic web design books (in 13 editions) Jennifer Robbins and I chat about her upcoming Artifact Conference for multi-device design; why sites are now systems, not pages; how style guides can function as a system design description tool; getting digital UX design into its natural habitat (hint: not a comp) sooner than later; what’s new in web design and the 4th Edition of her O’Reilly classic Learning Web Design; and loads more.
Jennifer Robbins has two decades of web design experience, having designed the first commercial website, O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator (GNN), in 1993. She’s the author of O’Reilly’s Web Design in a Nutshell, and has taught web design at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and Johnson and Wales University in Providence, RI.
Episode 75: Evan Williams
Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, discusses what it’s like to be an internet entrepreneur, from the origin of product ideas to the art of the pivot. Ev is a notoriously private guy; it is wonderful to hear him open up and share his hard-won web wisdom in this episode.
Evan Williams is an American entrepreneur who has co-founded several internet companies, including Pyra Labs (creators of Blogger) and Twitter, where he was previously CEO. His new thing is Medium. Ev was born and raised on a farm in central Nebraska. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons. He likes long walks, tofu, and bourbon. Ev has blogged for over a decade at evhead.com; you can follow him on Twitter at @ev.
Episode 74: Chris Coyier
In Episode No. 74 of The Big Web Show, I interview Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks, CodePen, and ShopTalk about the path from employee to media maven, upcoming secret features for CodePen, coping with Retina images, finding sponsors, the success of his Kickstarter campaign, tee shirts for manly men, Twitter dramas about baseline grids, and more.
Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) founded and writes at CSS-Tricks, co-hosts a podcast at ShopTalk, and co-founded and is a designer at CodePen, a sort of Dribble for coders.
Episode 73: Sara Wachter-Boettcher
I chat with content strategist and author of Content Everywhere Sara Wachter-Boettcher (@sara_ann_marie) about how practitioners can organize and structure content to maximize its value, longevity, and future-friendliness.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher is a content strategist and writer based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where she drinks strong coffee and sometimes blogs. She is editor in chief at A List Apart magazine, and her book, Content Everywhere, is due out from Rosenfeld Media in the very near future. You can find Sara on Twitter trying not to say all the snarky things she thinks.
Episode 72: Derek Powazek
For the return of The Big Web Show, I speak with web pioneer Derek Powazek (@fraying), Founder and CEO of Cute-Fight, the online game for real-life pets and the people who love them.
Derek Powazek has worked the web since 1995 at pioneering sites like HotWired, Blogger, and Technorati. He is the author of Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places (New Riders, 2001) and the cofounder of JPG, the photography magazine that’s made by its community. He has also been Chief of Design for HP’s MagCloud, advisor to a handful of startup companies, and creator of Fray, the quarterly book of true stories and original art. Derek is now Founder and CEO of Cute-Fight, the online game for real-life pets and the people who love them. Derek lives in San Francisco with his wife, two nutty Chihuahuas, and a house full of plants named Fred.
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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.
O’REILLY AUTHOR, INTERVIEWER OF ROCK STARS, and longtime web and UX designer Jen Robbins (jenville.com, @jenville) is our guest in Episode No. 50 of The Big Web Show, to be recorded in front of a live internet audience on Thursday, June 2, at 12:30 PM Eastern via 5by5.tv/live.
Jen began designing for the web in May 1993 as the designer of O’Reilly Media’s “Global Network Navigator.” Since then, she’s written several books about web design, including Web Design in a Nutshell and Learning Web Design. She recently made the switch to mobile as the Senior Designer for O’Reilly Media’s new mobile publishing department. Her first app, “HTML 4 & 5 Complete Reference,” an adaptation of her HTML Pocket Reference book, is available in the App Store now.
The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) records live every Thursday. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!
Note that, for the time being, the shows are audio only. If you subscribed to the video feed in iTunes, you’ll need to switch to audio. Sorry about that!
FOODSPOTTING FOUNDER ALEXA ANDRZEJEWSKI (@ladylexy) is our guest in Episode No. 47 of The Big Web Show, to be recorded in front of a live internet audience on Thursday, April 28, at 3:00 PM Eastern via 5by5.tv/live.
Foodspotting, a visual local guide that makes finding and sharing food recommendations as easy as snapping a photo, has received attention from Techcrunch, Mashable, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN blogs, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2010.
Before launching Foodspotting in January 2010, Alexa was a user experience designer for Adaptive Path, where she helped both startups and established companies create great experiences that improve people’s lives. From redesigning MySpace to conducting the research that underlies the Palm Pre, Alexa has helped clients reimagine products from the ground up.
Through speaking, writing and teaching, Alexa strives to advance experience-minded thinking and methods to all who will listen. Recent appearances include An Event Apart Seattle, WebVisions, Big Omaha, SXSWi, the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and New York, UX Week, and LIFT in South Korea.
The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) records live every Thursday at 3:00 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!
HTML5 RESET DEVELOPER TIM MURTAUGH (@murtaugh, timmurtaugh.com) is our guest on The Big Web Show Episode 45, to be recorded in front of a live internet audience on Thursday, April 14, at 3:00 PM Eastern via 5by5.tv/live.
Tim is the creator of the open-source HTML5 Reset, a set of baseline HTML and CSS templates to get your new web project off on the right foot, and the co-founder of MonkeyDo, a two-person web design and development shop in New York City.
Tim has been building websites since 1997 and specializes in creating standards-based HTML/CSS templates. His eye for design and serious affinity for clean code allow him to painlessly integrate his templates into larger systems without sacrificing user experience or aesthetics.
Recent work includes World Science Festival, Seed Magazine, Scientific American (with Roger Black Studio and Happy Cog), and ScienceBlogs.com. He is also the developer/curator for the online art gallery Cloud King, which won an award for Best CSS-Based Website at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.
The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) records live every Thursday at 3:00 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!
SARAH PARMENTERÂ (@sazzy, sazzy.co.uk) is our guest on The Big Web Show Episode 44, available for your listening and dancing pleasure at 5by5.tv/bigwebshow/44.
Sarah owns You Know Who, a small design studio based in Leigh-on-Sea, specializing in the User Interface Design of websites, iPhone, and iPad applications.
Her wide-ranging discussion with co-host Dan Benjamin and me includes the thin line between sharing and oversharing on Twitter, yourself as your brand, the virtues of smallness and honesty, coping with stalkers and sexism, running iOS workshops, native vs. web design, the connection between acting and client services, and much more.
The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) records live every Thursday at 3:00 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!
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Questions, Please: Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design Panel today at SXSW Interactive
HEY, YOU WITH THE STARS in your eyes. Yes, you, the all too necessary SXSW Interactive attendee. Got questions about the present and future of web design and publishing for me or the illustrious panelists on Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design Panel at SXSW Interactive 2011? You do? Bravo! Post them on Twitter using hashtag #jzsxsw and we’ll answer the good ones at 5:00 PM in Big Ballroom D of the Austin Convention Center.
Topics include platform wars (native, web, and hybrid, or welcome back to 1999), web fonts, mobile is the new widescreen, how to succeed in the new publishing, responsive design, HTML5, Flash, East Coast West Coast beefs, whatever happened to…?, and many, many more.
Comments are off here so you’ll post your questions on Twitter.
The panel will be live sketched and live recorded for later partial or full broadcast via sxsw.com. In-person attendees, arrive early for best seats. Don’t eat the brown acid.
ANDY RUTLEDGE (personal site, Twitter) is our guest on The Big Web Show Episode 40, recording today, March 3, before a live internet audience at 5by5.tv/live.
Andy is a designer, composer, author, speaker, bonsai artist, capitalist, and co-founder of Unit Interactive. Before entering the design profession, he worked for 12 years as GM of a successful retail chain. Andy writes about various topics on his own sites and he’s an occasional contributor to print and online design publications.
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!
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!
JEN SIMMONS is our guest today, January 20, 2011, in Episode No. 35 of The Big Web Show, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin. Tune in to 5by5.tv/live at 12:00 PM Eastern (new time!) to be part of the live recording.
Jen (jensimmons.com, @jensimmons), is a designer who builds stuff too. She designed and created the new default theme for Drupal 7, named Bartik. And she’s currently leading a movement to bring HTML5 to Drupal. Jen began using Drupal in early 2007, when it was frighteningly hard to use. She started creating websites in 1996, and used many flavors of technology over the years.
Besides designing for the web, Jen has 20 years experience designing for live performance and for print. She’s created seven-channel digital projections for an opera about Nikola Tesla. She’s created short films that toured the globe in film festivals. And she’s taught media arts to high school kids in San Antonio. Jen has a MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, where she taught as an Adjunct Professor.
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!
CRAIG MOD is our guest today January 13, 2011 in Episode No. 34 of The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”), co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and recorded at 12:00 PM Eastern (new time!) before a live internet audience.
Mod (craigmod.com, @craigmod) is a writer, designer, publisher, and developer concerned with the future of publishing and storytelling. Based in Tokyo for a decade, he is co-author and designer of Art Space Tokyo, an intimate guide to the Tokyo art world. Since October 2010 Craig has been working in the California Bay Area helping sculpt the future of digital publishing with Flipboard.
Craig speaks frequently on the future of books, publishing, and digital content design. In this week’s A List Apart he presents the initial release of Bibliotype, an HTML baseline typography library for tablet reading released under the MIT License.
The Big Web Show records live every Thursday at 12:00 PM Eastern (new time).
Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!
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2010: The Year in Web Standards
WHAT A YEAR 2010 has been. It was the year HTML5 and CSS3 broke wide; the year the iPad, iPhone, and Android led designers down the contradictory paths of proprietary application design and standards-based mobile web application design—in both cases focused on user needs, simplicity, and new ways of interacting thanks to small screens and touch-sensitive surfaces.
It was the third year in a row that everyone was talking about content strategy and designers refused to “just comp something up” without first conducting research and developing a user experience strategy.
CSS3 media queries plus fluid grids and flexible images gave birth to responsive web design (thanks, Beep!). Internet Explorer 9 (that’s right, the browser by Microsoft we’ve spent years grousing about) kicked ass on web standards, inspiring a 10K Apart contest that celebrated what designers and developers could achieve with just 10K of standards-compliant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. IE9 also kicked ass on type rendering, stimulating debates as to which platform offers the best reading experience for the first time since Macintosh System 7.
Even outside the newest, best browsers, things were better than ever. Modernizr and eCSStender brought advanced selectors and @font-face to archaic browsers (not to mention HTML5 and SVG, in the case of Modernizr). Tim Murtaugh and Mike Pick’s HTML5 Reset and Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate gave us clean starting points for HTML5- and CSS3-powered sites.
Web fonts were everywhere—from the W3C to small personal and large commercial websites—thanks to pioneering syntax constructions by Paul Irish and Richard Fink, fine open-source products like the Font Squirrel @Font-Face Generator, open-source liberal font licensing like FontSpring’s, and terrific service platforms led by Typekit and including Fontdeck, Webtype, Typotheque, and Kernest.
Print continued its move to networked screens. iPhone found a worthy adversary in Android. Webkit was ubiquitous.
Insights into the new spirit of web design, from a wide variety of extremely smart people, can be seen and heard on The Big Web Show, which Dan Benjamin and I started this year (and which won Video Podcast of the Year in the 2010 .net Awards), on Dan’s other shows on the 5by5 network, on the Workers of the Web podcast by Alan Houser and Eric Anderson, and of course in A List Apart for people who make websites.
Zeldman.com: The Year in Review
A few things I wrote here at zeldman.com this year (some related to web standards and design, some not) may be worth reviewing:
- iPad as the New Flash 17 October 2010
- Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy.
- Flash, iPad, and Standards 1 February 2010
- Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to build the semantic HTML layer first.
- An InDesign for HTML and CSS? 5 July 2010
- while our current tools can certainly stand improvement, no company will ever create “the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript.” The assumption that a such thing is possible suggests a lack of understanding.
- Stop Chasing Followers 21 April 2010
- The web is not a game of “eyeballs.” Never has been, never will be. Influence matters, numbers don’t.
- Crowdsourcing Dickens 23 March 2010
- Like it says.
- My Love/Hate Affair with Typekit 22 March 2010
- Like it says.
- You Cannot Copyright A Tweet 25 February 2010
- Like it says.
- Free Advice: Show Up Early 5 February 2010
- Love means never having to say you’re sorry, but client services means apologizing every five minutes. Give yourself one less thing to be sorry for. Take some free advice. Show up often, and show up early.
Outside Reading
A few things I wrote elsewhere might repay your interest as well:
- The Future of Web Standards 26 September, for .net Magazine
- Cheap, complex devices such as the iPhone and the Droid have come along at precisely the moment when HTML5, CSS3 and web fonts are ready for action; when standards-based web development is no longer relegated to the fringe; and when web designers, no longer content to merely decorate screens, are crafting provocative, multi-platform experiences. Is this the dawn of a new web?
- Style vs. Design written in 1999 and slightly revised in 2005, for Adobe
- When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don’t start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name.
Happy New Year, all!
BIG WEB SHOW EPISODE 32 is now online for your listening and viewing pleasure. Mandy Brown (Typekit, A Book Apart) joins Dan Benjamin and me to
discuss the value of customer support, the present and future of type on the web, font choice on reader platforms, what traditional print publishers can learn from the new breed of web-based print publishers, why you’ve got to write, and why the future belongs to editors.
Dan and I thank all of you for listening, watching, and contributing your questions and comments in the chat room during the live sessions. You’ve made our little show worthwhile. We promise more thought-provoking questions and more great guests in 2011.
Join us Thursday, 6 January 2011 at 1:00 PM Eastern for the live recording of Episode 33, as Dan and I talk with Dana Chisnell, co-author, Handbook of Usability Testing Second Edition (Wiley, 2008) about her election design usability project for the US Government, plus usable security, researching social interactions mediated by technology, whether UX is a female ghetto, and lots more.