Category: Travel

Shoe leather and gasoline.

Categories
Authoring books family glamorous Publishing Travel

My Glamorous Life: Roman Holiday

aerial view of ancient ampitheater
Photo by Mike van Schoonderwalt on Pexels.com

While honeymooning in Rome, we spotted an Italian translation of my second book in the display window of a quaint old shop two blocks from the Colosseum.

The ancient amphitheatre was our destination; we had been walking toward it excitedly, with greater and greater speed. But the bizarre sight of Designing With Web Standards in this strange location halted our progress.

For my book, my name, my face to be here, of all places! What were the chances? For a text about something as new and ephemeral as web design to show up in this timeless and eternal plaza! How crazy was that?

The shop owner, adjusting his window display, shot us a quizzical smile. My companion pointed to my face, and then to the book cover, which bore my photo. The owner shrugged; he did not understand. If life were a movie, I would have whipped a blue beanie out of my coat pocket. But it isn’t, and I had none.

So there I stood. The author, at a loss for words.

And then we smiled, and he smiled, and we continued our passage toward the ancient home of bread and circuses.

Categories
family glamorous parenting Travel work Working

I Cry Inside

MY DAUGHTER cries and begs me not to leave on my business trip. I hold her and tell her I will return soon.

My grandfather died in a plane crash between New York and California. My mother, who was eleven, had begged him not to leave. He lied and told her he would cancel the trip. I never lie to my daughter.

I always thought my grandfather died on a business trip. Two years ago I finally learned he was actually flying to California to divorce my grandmother. My mother never told me.

My grandmother never told her children their father was dead. They figured it out gradually.

When my mother was a young adult, her fiancée died in a plane crash.

My mother was never able to be happy, to feel safe, to trust the world.

One of my jobs is to help my daughter learn to be happy, to feel safe, to trust the world.

It is hard for any parent. Harder when you are divorced. My daughter is sensitive, creative, and has a learning disability. She feels different from other kids. Family is everything to her.

My daughter is everything to me. To support her, I do several jobs. Jobs I love, working with people I love and trust. One of my jobs requires me to travel frequently, staying away for up to a week at a time.

My father worked twelve hours a day to support his family. We grew up in his absence and long shadow.

I am grateful for my daughter’s life and my ability to spend so much time with her. She knows her parents love her and will always be there for her.

But when I leave, she cries, and I cry inside.

Categories
cities conferences Design glamorous people photography Travel Zeldman

To Leiden, To Leiden

THEY’RE SLEEPING in New York. They’re sleeping all over the world. Even here in Leiden, The Netherlands, they’re still mumbling and drooling in their beds. But not me. I’m awake and packing for my return home to NYC after three glorious days here in this ancient university town, where I was privileged to speak at the first Inspire conference. And all you got were these lousy photos.

Related: Design Problem

Categories
architecture art arts cities New York City Parks Travel Urbanism

NYC Must-See

People who are coming to New York for the first time always ask me what they should see. So I’ve made a little list. Here are eighteen of my favorite places in New York City.

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cities glamorous London Travel Zeldman

English Letter

Steaming suit, listening to A Love Supreme, watching birds circle rainy plaza in wet grey morning London. Perfect, perfect.

Categories
cities glamorous London Travel Zeldman

London Calling

London, 2010 – a travel photo set in progress on Flickr.

Categories
An Event Apart Announcements Appearances Travel Web Design Web Standards

Of Thee I Sing

According to Lanyrd and this Amtrak ticket, I’m on my way to Washington, DC, home of the 9:30 Club, Embassy Row, museums and monuments, and the site of An Event Apart DC—three days of design, code, and content for people who make websites.

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents

I love DC the way someone who used to live there loves a town. In DC I fell in love, played in some little-known but great bands, wrote for City Paper and The Washington Post, and started an advertising career that would take me to New York and lead me to web design.

And now, in the very neighborhood where I once struggled to pay rent, a place haunted by a friend’s ghost and memories of ordinary madness, I’m co-hosting a three-day celebration of a profession that didn’t exist fifteen years ago and that is only now coming to maturity. (I can relate.)

An Event Apart DC features 12 great speakers and 12 sessions. The sold-out, two-day show is followed by A Day Apart, a one-day learning experience on HTML5 and CSS3 led by our good friends Jeremy Keith (author, HTML5 For Web Designers) and Ethan Marcotte (co-author, Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition).

I’m truly looking forward to this conference and to meeting some of you there. For those who can’t attend, there’s A Feed Apart, An Event Apart’s official aggregator of live tweets, and, of course, the Flickr group. These should start filling with content shortly after the conference begins on Thursday morning.

Kisses.

Categories
Appearances conferences DWWS speaking State of the Web SXSW Travel

My SXSW

It’s that time again. Spring and pheromones are in the air, and 11,000 web geeks are about to descend on beauteous Austin, TX for our industry’s version of the TED Conference plus Spring Break, SXSW Interactive.

Along with nearly all of Happy Cog, I’ll be there. Join us, won’t you?

  • Friday, March 12, at 3:30 PM, come to Battledecks 2010 in Room 18ABCD, where I’ll compete against the likes of Avery Edison, Ted Rheingold, Mike Monteiro, and SeoulBrother Number 1 Albert McMurry to see who can create the best impromptu presentation in response to random slides.
  • Saturday, March 13, at 5:00 PM, open your mind to New Publishing and Web Content, where I’ll explore the creative, strategic, and marketing challenges of print and web (and hybrid) book and magazine publishing with the brilliant Erin Kissane, Lisa Holton, Mandy Brown, and Paul Ford.
  • Also on Saturday, March 13, beginning around 10:00 PM, join the fine folks of Happy Cog and 700 screaming karaoke fans for the best official party of SXSW, Ok! Happy Cog’aoke 2, brought to you by Happy Cog and sponsored by these good folks.
  • Don’t miss the book signing on Sunday, March 14! Swing by the South by Bookstore with your copy of Designing With Web Standards; Ethan Marcotte and I will be glad to scribble on it for you.

The rest of the time, depending on what else is going on, I will probably be findable via my personal SXSW schedule. (Create your own with Sched by MailChimp.) You can also find me on SitBy.Us, a scheduling web app for iPhone or any good web-enabled phone, designed by Weightshift—and bless them and HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for it. Sitby.us members, my schedule is posted at http://sitby.us/zeldman/.

If you can’t be with us at SXSW, please watch this space and my Twitter feed for photos, links, etc.

And if you aren’t attending and couldn’t care less about SXSW, you might want to unplug for the next six days, because the internets, they will be filthy with SXSW tweetage, bloggage, Flickrage, retweets, retumbling &c.

Categories
air travel An Event Apart Apple books business cities conferences content Design development San Francisco Travel

In the bag

Early tomorrow, I leave for San Francisco. Headed into my laptop bag, along with my MacBook, are…

  • An iPod Classic containing 8624 “songs” (I like music) and 46 “movies.” Sample titles: A Mighty Wind, A Night at the Opera, Helvetica, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Lost in Translation, North by Northwest, Rushmore, Spirited Away, Stardust Memories, Stranger Than Paradise, Swing Time. The iPod also provides two days of interstitial music for the conference.
  • Power and stage adapters for all gear.
  • The latest issue of Macworld.
  • One or more novels (haven’t decided which; I always travel with at least one great book I’ve read before, and it’s always a new experience).

In my carry-on bag, in place of the usual dress shoes and gym shoes, I’m packing Crocs. It’s not my normal travel or presentation attire, but my foot (although much better) is still a bit out of whack, and you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.

See some of you in San Francisco and the rest of you here and there.

[tags]sanfrancisco, airtravel, iphone, ipod, apple[/tags]

Categories
An Event Apart art direction Boston Community conferences content CSS Design development eric meyer events experience Happy Cog™ Ideas industry Jason Santa Maria Layout links Standards style Travel UX Web Design Zeldman

AEA Boston 2008 session notes

Early, initial linkage and reviews. Let us know what we missed!

Functioning Form – An Event Apart: Understanding Web Design

Luke Wroblewski: “Jeffrey Zeldman’s Understanding Web Design talk at An Event Apart Boston 2008 highlighted factors that made it challenging to explain the value and perspective of Web designers but still managed to offer a way to describe the field.”

Functioning Form – An Event Apart: The Lessons of CSS Frameworks

Luke Wroblewski: “At An Event Apart Boston 2008, Eric Meyer walked through common characteristics of several Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) frameworks and outlined lessons that can be learned from their structure.”

Functioning Form – An Event Apart: Good Design Ain’t Easy

Luke Wroblewski: “Jason Santa Maria’s Good Design Ain’t Easy talk at An Event Apart 2008 argued for deeper graphic resonance in the presentation of content online.”

KarlynMorissette.com: An Event Apart: Day one schedule

Karyln is an educator who attended An Event Apart Boston 2008, sat in the front row, and took fabulous notes. This summary post links to her individual notes from each session of day one.

Karlyn’s session notes are informative, opinionated, and fun to read, and include photos of speakers and presentations. Well worth your time!

KarlynMorissette.com: An Event Apart: Day two schedule

Karyln assesses day one and posts links to her individual notes from each session of day two (except for the last session, as “you had to be there” for the live critiques).

Idiot Banter: An Event Apart session notes

Notes from all sessions.

Slide sharing

Luke Wroblewski – An Event Apart: Web Application Hierarchy

“In my Web Application Hierarchy presentation at An Event Apart Boston 2008, I walked through the importance of visual hierarchy, visual principles for developing effective hierarchies, and utilizing applications of visual hierarchy to communicate central messages, guide actions, and present information. Download the slides from my presentation.”

Quirksmode: AEA Boston slides

From Peter-Paul Koch’s presentation on unobtrusive scripting.

[tags]aneventapart, design, webdesign, conference, aeaboston08, session notes, downloads[/tags]

Categories
An Event Apart Design Diversity eric meyer events experience Happy Cog™ industry Jason Santa Maria links Standards Travel Web Design work Zeldman

So long, Boston. We’ll be back.

An Event Apart Boston 2008 is over but the memories and photos linger on.

Eric and I started An Event Apart because we saw the need for a live, concentrated, learning and sharing experience about best practices and inspiration for the standards-based web design community. Thanks to brilliant speakers, phenomenally dedicated and supremely competent staff, and an extraordinary and growing attendee base of passionate practitioners, the show is steadily becoming the thing of which we dreamed.

And the food was pretty good, too.

Thank you for the ideas, jokes, and kick-ass Keynote graphics, Luke, Jeff, Jared, Ethan, ppk, Chris, Andy, Kim, Jason, and Doug.

Thanks also to our wonderful sponsors, Adobe (who gave away six copies of Creative Suite 3), GoodBarry (who packed goodies for everyone), and (mt) Media Temple (who threw a party so good, many people who attended don’t remember having been there).

Most of all, our deep thanks to all who came. Without you, Eric and I would be two lonely crackpots with a theory that web design matters. It will sound insincere because I have a vested interested for saying and thinking this, but you are truly the smartest and coolest “audience” going, and I put audience in quotes because you are so much more than that. So, you know, thanks.

Thank you, Boston. We’ll be back in 2009. (And now, on to San Francisco and Chicago.)

Watch this space for AEA Boston session notes and download links, coming momentarily.

[tags]aneventapart, design, webdesign, conference, aeaboston08[/tags]

Categories
An Event Apart Boston Design events New Orleans Travel Vancouver Zeldman

That’s me all over

An Event Apart is over until next year; we open in New Orleans in April, 2008. If you need a Zeldman fix before then, I can be seen in these interesting places:

[tags]zeldman, FOWD, businessweek, webdesignworld, webdirections, webdirectionsnorth, NYC, boston, vancouver, design, conferences, jeffreyzeldman[/tags]