Web Design

Many designers still think in px first when creating baseline styles. But we know intellectually that various relative typography approaches are better suited to our medium in all its complexity. Better for accessibility. Better for avoiding bizarre typographic disasters linked to user preference settings, device limitations, and the unforeseen ways our overwrought styles can interact with one another.

As I contemplate a long-overdue redesign of my own site, it’s worth taking a refreshing dip into what we’ve learned about web typography over the past 20+ years. From the pages of (where else?) A List Apart:

Bojan Mihelac: “Power to the People: Relative Font Sizes” (2004)

An early and simple creative solution for text resizing that respects users’ choices and also gives them an additional option for resizing despite the limitations of some of the most popular browsers of the day. Presented for its historical importance, and not as a how-to for today. https://alistapart.com/article/relafont/

Lawrence Carvalho & Christian Heilmann: “Text-Resize Detection” (2006)

Detect your visitors’ initial font size setting, and find out when they increase or decrease the font size. With this knowledge, you can create a set of stylesheets that adapt your pages to the users’ chosen font sizes, preventing overlapping elements and other usability and design disasters. Presented for its historical importance as an insight into the complex dancing we’ve done in the past to ensure readability. https://alistapart.com/article/fontresizing/

Richard Rutter: “How to Size Text in CSS“ (2007)

Sizing text and line-height in ems, with a percentage specified on the body (and an optional caveat for Safari 2), provides accurate, resizable text across all browsers in common use today. An early move toward more responsive type and away from the accessibility problems created by setting text sizes in px in some browsers and devices. https://alistapart.com/article/howtosizetextincss/

Wilson Miner: Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid

The main principle of the baseline grid is that the bottom of every line of text (the baseline) falls on a vertical grid set in even increments all the way down the page. The magical end result is that all the text on your page lines up across all the columns, creating a harmonious vertical rhythm. https://alistapart.com/article/settingtypeontheweb/

Tim Brown: “More Meaningful Typography” (2011)

Introduces modular scales, the golden ratio of readable typography. Delivers accessibility plus aesthetic beauty derived from the math underlying all of creation. https://alistapart.com/article/more-meaningful-typography/

Tim Brown: “What is Typesetting?” (2018)

“We must now practice a universal typography that strives to work for everyone. To start, we need to acknowledge that typography is multidimensional, relative to each reader, and unequivocally optional.” https://alistapart.com/article/flexible-typesetting/

Keep going…

For more web design community wisdom and web typography history, see Typography & Web Fonts in A List Apart, for people who make websites.

And in the Comments below, please share your favorite resources for creating websites that look great and read beautifully, no matter what technical and human capabilities get thrown at them.

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My father, Maurice Zeldman, was a giant in the field of project management, though I suspect few in my world of web standards and design would recognize his name. Dad consulted for over 180 organizations and led seminars around the world. Project managers everywhere used his techniques to create realistic estimates and timelines that actually worked—a rare skill in any technical field, then and now.

Before founding EMZEE Associates (the name a play on his initials, M.Z.), Dad was Corporate Director of Technical Development for Rockwell International’s Industrial & Marine Divisions. He designed, built, and staffed their entire Engineering Development Center. Earlier in his career, he worked with Perkin Elmer developing an Atomic Absorption Spectrometer and with American Machine & Foundry as Chief Engineer of their Versatran Robot division. His robotics knowledge led to his book Robotics: What Every Engineer Should Know, published by CRC Press in 1984, followed by Keeping Technical Projects on Target, an AMA management briefing.

EMZEE Associates, Dad’s consulting and training company, specialized in project management and technology implementation. While I was designing websites and campaigning for web standards in the mid-90s, Dad was already running a successful business teaching Fortune 500 companies how to bring their complex technical projects in on time and under budget.

Then there was ZGANTT, his DOS-based project management software from the late 80s/early 90s. The name combined “Zeldman” with “Gantt chart—those horizontal bar charts showing project schedules that are still used today. While I was learning to code and finding my path, Dad had already created specialized software implementing his project management methodologies. This was during the first wave of specialized project management tools, before Microsoft Project took over the market.

Looking back, I realize my obsession with systems, standards, and improving how people work together didn’t come from nowhere. While I applied these principles to web design, Dad had been applying similar thinking to the complex world of project management decades earlier. His ZGANTT software and EMZEE Associates consultancy were direct expressions of his belief that the right methods, correctly implemented, could bring order and success to even the most complex technical challenges.

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The first website my colleagues and I created was for “Batman Forever” (1995, d. Joel Schumacher), starring Val Kilmer. That website changed my life and career. I never saw “Top Gun,” but Val Kilmer made a brilliant Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors.” Rest in peace.

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Beloved reader, I spent 90 minutes on hold with Con Edison yesterday, getting my power turned back on after a billing contretemps.

The whole 90 minutes, my brain’s shrieking, “You’re having a panic attack!”

And maybe I was.

I could rattle off my diagnoses, but the simplest way to state it is that the ordinary setbacks of life fill me with dread. Always have. For over a decade, I self-medicated daily. And nightly. And afternoonly. In 1993, with help from others, I changed my life’s trajectory. But removing the booze didn’t make me “normal.” Step work healed some old wounds, but I’m still deeply anxious on my best days. And this was not shaping up to be one of them.

Look, if recovering from alcoholism during the Clinton years didn’t magically cure me of the rest of my problems, you can imagine what it feels like, being me during these dark days of fascist overreach. And, hey, maybe you don’t need to imagine. Maybe every blank unholy news day feels scary, wrong, and depressing to you, too. No need to apologize. Some days, just showing up takes courage.

Even the positive things, like the kick-ass job my daughter did applying to colleges, come with deluxe boxed sets of anxiety for folks like me. Then factor in an IRS audit, medical debt, and various friend and family traumas unrelated to the ongoing assault on decency.

Got all that?

Now, take away my electricity (and therefore my internet access), sit me down in the dark beside an iPhone with a low battery (Will it die before I finish this call? I can’t charge it, I have no electricity!), and tell me to get on the phone with the utility company that just shut off my power.

You may expect me to show up, but not to glide serenely through.

Look, I wasn’t abducted by ICE or fired without cause after years of dedicated civic service. But, for Mrs Zeldman’s little boy, loss of light and power and 90 minutes of antipatterns are grounds enough for a panic attack. (Besides, nobody tells you it will take 90 minutes to speak for 60 seconds to a human being who’ll take your debit card number over the phone. It might have taken longer. In another timeline, I might still be on hold.)

Yes, they have a “pay your bill online” website. No, it doesn’t work on my phone. Yes, it semi-works on my desktop. But a desktop needs electricity to run and to access the web. And they had cut off my electricity. It was call them or stay without power.

(Footnote: Later, when everything was resolved, I discovered that their website also doesn’t work. I use Google’s Auth app for two-factor ID, which signs me in. But when I try to see my bill, the Con Ed website asks me to sign in again, and rejects the two-factor ID. Instead it needs to send a different code to my cell phone. Why a different code? Why not the Auth code? I assume because the developers worked in siloes and were forbidden to speak to each other when creating the website. So I give it permission to send the code to my phone, and then it never sends it. I tried four times. And yes, they had my correct phone number on file. It also says, if it keeps failing to send a code to my phone (so they obviously know they have a problem), I can have it send a code to my email address instead. Except that there is no affordance to do so. It’s like if I said you could win a prize by touching this sentence. Heckuva UX, Brownie. It’s almost like they want you to have to call their overworked, underpaid, understaffed support staff. Because you can’t use their site. To rub it in, every five minutes the bot that thanks you for being a customer is interrupted by a bot that tells you to use their website to pay your bill online, which, as I just explained, you can’t. But I digress.)

As the Muzak ground on, during the better moments when I was able to focus on breathing, I pushed down the panic by telling myself I’d take a personal day as soon as the call ended and my lights came back on. Why take a personal day? I love my job. But I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to put in a day’s work after 5400 seconds of “your call is important to us, please stay on the line.” I reckoned I’d be wrecked.

But here’s the thing, and it’s why I bothered tell you this: the instant the lights came back on, I was fine. Utterly, totally, calmly, and completely.

More than that: when the modem connected and told the router the news, I pounced on my desk and got back to work, a happy cog. As if I hadn’t just spent 90 minutes in the stench of my own fear and gloom.

Am I becoming slightly more resilient with age?

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There’s a new AI model that can render photorealistic people and products, including text and logos.

Geisha With Walkman is something I tried to draw 40 years ago, but my rendering skills were simply too poor. The Reve Image 1.0 preview allowed me to do it instantly this morning with a single, basic prompt.

P.S. I retro-updated the Walkman with an iPod to “modernize” the concept.

The post This Years Model appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Here’s a fact: “Opt-in” is great for programs a platform controls, but meaningless when that platform has no control.

Take, for example, oh, I don’t know, let’s say AI companies scraping web content without your permission. The heart wants to make content scraping permissions “opt-in,” so people who post content online are protected by default.

Except we won’t be. Smaller, “good” AI companies may comply with “opt-out” notices; big ones surely won’t. Scrapers gonna scrape.

So why even bother with an “opt-out” setting? Because companies that continue to scrape opted-out content may find themselves on the losing end of major lawsuits.

Of course there’s no telling how these lawsuits will work out—not with ketamine supervillains and their GOP enablers willfully violating consumer, worker, and climate protection laws here in the benighted States of America. But even so, an opt-out notice is a red line, and most corporate legal teams are cautious and sober—at least during working hours.

An opt-out notice is *something.* It smells funky, but has a chance of working.

Of course opt-in feels better. It’s how we’d do things if we had control over third-party scrapers. But we don’t have that control.

Which makes opt-in for AI scraping a feel-good but basically performative gesture. And we don’t have time for those.

However pretty it might be to think otherwise, something imperfect that might work beats something pure that won’t. Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful. I’m only here to tell you what we both know in our souls.

Your AI sponsor,

z

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash.

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A whinnying horse. A blaxploitation sample. A female instructor saying Chinese is the easiest language to learn. These three brief audio samples regularly interrupt my late-night headphone music listening.

I’m not tripping or having a medical episode. My bedroom faces the rear of the Chinese Mission to the UN. I can’t be certain that these unwelcome late-night audio interruptions come from there, but it’s a theory. If you’ve never fallen gently asleep to a bespoke playlist of jazz ballads, only to sit bolt upright in terror an hour later because a horse is shrilly whinnying in your ears, you should try it some time.

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

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Two Jews are standing in an open cattle car en route to Auschwitz. The train pauses on a bridge overlooking a river. Directly below them is a transport ship.

“Look!” the first Jew excitedly tells his friend. “Now’s our chance! That ship down there is delivering war supplies to the port city of Kaiserberg. If we jump down to the deck now and hide in one of those tanks, maybe we can avoid Auschwitz and ride things out in Kaiserberg!”

The second Jew thinks a moment.

“What if Kaiserberg’s worse?” he asks.

Disclaimer (only read if offended):

I don’t like to explain jokes, but if this one offends you, consider that I’m Jewish myself. The joke came to me fully formed while I was chatting with a friend about something unrelated. It felt like a perfect distillation of Jewish pessimism. Not that Judaism as a religion is pessimistic, but after two thousand years of, you know, we can be a bit touchy. I’m sorry if this disclaimer ruined the joke for you. I did say not to read it unless you were offended.

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The bullies who beat and mocked me in eighth grade were cruel and stupid. They despised intelligence and worshipped violence, although they would settle for athletic ability. The school blessed their thuggery by scheduling dodgeball. It was good preparation for Viet Nam, the country where I expected to be blown apart if I managed to survive to eighteen. 

If you were smart in eighth grade, you were also a fag. I don’t even think they meant you were actually queer. I think it was just one of the worst things a bully could call you before pounding on you. Indeed, it lent an aura of righteousness and inevitability to the beatings that got doled out to you. Surely all red-blooded American boys would want to beat up fags! And who could blame them? Not the schools. Not the churches. And certainly not the cops. Why, it was practically a young man’s duty to rid the world of insufficiently macho peers. A kind of post-birth eugenics, if you will.

The other word the bullies used for me was pussy, because they could imagine nothing lower than a woman, I suppose. They even called me Zeldwoman. 

I’d been picked on in the seventh grade, in Connecticut, too, but that was mostly by my pals, who were possibly just busting balls, something they’d have learned to do (and I had not) over the previous year’s summer break. My friends’ taunts once made me cry in school, which was unforgivable in a boy, so I would have been destroyed had we stayed in Connecticut, anyway. But we moved.

And the Pittsburgh of those years was worse for me. In the end, I survived eighth grade in Pittsburgh because I could crack jokes and write and draw what were called underground or head comics at the time, and one of the toughest kids in the school thought I was funny and let me hang out with his gang. They were called the Garage Gang, and they probably had roots in preadolescent group onanism, but by the time I joined as a sort of amusing mascot, they were mostly about smoking, shoplifting, stealing beer, making out with girls, and buying and selling pot and psychedelics. Eventually I would become a dealer myself, and hang with the freaks instead—smart kids who made art and got high a lot. This enabled me to survive until I was old enough to go college and reinvent myself.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about these things again lately. It’s not like America’s most vulnerable citizens are being targeted by a hostile, mentally retrograde government. Not like bullies, racists, and homophobes everywhere have been set free to revert to their ugliest selves by a mentally deficient ringleader who knows how to whip up a crowd and feed their hunger for violence as a screen behind which he robs us all. Of our money, of course. But more importantly of our rights, our dignity, our ability to accept one another and celebrate our differences instead of masking them. Most of all, the bullying crowd is robbing us of the more perfect union many of us hoped America was beginning to achieve. But, hey. How ’bout that Gulf of America. Winning.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov.

See also “How my grandfather came to America.”

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It’s Sunday; I’m playing with my music collection, content as a fed-and-burped babe. Allow me to explain.

I realized last night that, in tracking my shifting musical tastes via my Last.fm Pro account, I’m basically remaking “Pardon My Icons,” the creative project I launched on this very website in 1995, back when it was still at a tilde address (it did not become zeldman.com until ’96), and which first brought my work to the attention of other creatives who were also discovering the early web and making it their own.

Me, collage, and music

Although I was not serious about it, I started making collage art when I lived in Washington DC in my 20s.

Back then I was serious about composing and producing. I used an Akai 12-track recorder, a rack of synth modules commanded by my Yamaha DX7 with a custom E! card, and a PC running Personal Composer MIDI, arranging, and composition software. I also had an old Selmer Bundy flute, an African reed instrument whose name I forget (and whose “reed” turned out to be a dried locust carcass, as I would discover, to my horror, when the instrument broke), Fender amps, mics, and a variety of percussion instruments with which I made music in my Washington, DC-based recording studio. But that’s a whole ’nother story.

I did not expect to earn a living as a composer, and in that negative expectation I was more than amply fulfilled.

So I scrounged up a day job at a local advertising agency as a naively optimistic copywriter.

And a night job as a stringer for The Washington Post’s Arts section.

Music journalist by night

The paper’s arts section editor in those days was named Richard. I’d gotten his attention without soliciting it after creating “Khz” for City Paper. Khz was my weekly music column. I covered the emerging go-go and hardcore scenes, as they were what was happening in DC, and the whole country would soon be listening. Naturally, the Post made me stop writing about that interesting and relevant stuff, and instead paid me $40 per to crank out anodyne concert reviews of mainstream artists like Kenny Rogers when their tours came through DC. (I was comped to the ticket but paid my own travel and gas out of the 40 bucks.)

I typically had 30 minutes from the time the headliner started to call in my review, which meant I had to write it in my head while watching the beginning of the performance, then run to a pay phone booth (kids, ask your parents) and dictate it aloud to someone on the copy desk, before the concert had even begun to build up a head of steam. This wasn’t fair to the artists. I did the best job I could under the circumstances, taking pride in how quickly I could structure and ship a news story. Richard fired me before I could quit, but that, too, is another story.

Most importantly at that time, I lived with a girlfriend. She was an artist and architect who had left that career to study computer programming. We were social (many friends, drinking was often involved), and serious about our art—which, in my case, was music, even if I earned my living writing concert reviews and crafting passable but hardly brilliant ads.

Through all of those ups and downs, and to the side of those major efforts, I kept at the collage for years, putting in several hours a night making the things. When each was finished—and deciding that any art product was finished was damned tough for my restless young mind—I would carefully frame it behind glass, and mount it on the walls of our apartment.

Was it art? Just a hobby? Who knows? It made me happy.

And then gradually, as I put more effort into my music and ad careers, I set the collage-making aside, for a time.

New career in a new town

Ten years later, I was a New York art director and copywriter, two years sober, and no longer in that same romantic relationship. That’s okay, I was in a new one.

I’d packed my music studio equipment—now obsolete because Akai stopped making the proprietary multitrack tape format that their 12-track unit ran on—in a storage unit. Eventually I’d give away all that music and recording equipment (keeping only the multitrack masters), but that, too, is another story.

Cutting-edge for a day

Then in 1995, one of our ad clients asked the agency if we could make them a website. Like many of you, we lied and said, sure. And then we figured out how to actually do it.

The client was Warner Bros., the project was “Batman Forever,” our visionary client was Donald Buckley, my partners were Steve McCarron, Alec Pollak, and Doug Rice, and the website was a huge hit, attracting half the people who visited the early web. (Alec’s “Flashback 1995: batmanforever” shares screenshots, which are great, although they cannot convey what a breakthrough the site was in March, 1995.)

With 3 million people using the web in 1995, the site got 1.5 million visits a day for over a year. Not bad.

Pardon my icons (1995)

I immediately set to work creating a personal site (this one), and Pardon My Icons was one of its first “entertainments.”

As is often the case with my creative efforts, I made these tiny, Warhol-inflected bits of art as a protest against what I saw as the mediocrity of the icons in general use on that early, early web.

(Similarly, my friends and I would later start The Web Standards Project in protest against the dumb ways most folks were being told to create websites, e.g. using proprietary tags instead of W3C and ECMA standards, because browsers didn’t properly support those. Having lost access to my musical master tapes because I’d invested in Akai’s non-standard and eventually discontinued tape format, I was kind of keen on not letting the internet fall victim to the same kind of nonstandard f*ckery. But that, too, is another story. We are gathered here to talk about icons and collage. So let’s do that:)

A mental break

I track my music on Last.fm Pro. Here’s my account. (But don’t look unless you, too, have a Pro account. I’ll explain why in a moment.)

Some of the artists I listen to, as shown on last.fm Pro.

Last.fm lists the artists you play, arranging them by the number of plays. Thus, if you were to play three tracks by Freddie Gibbs and two by Bill Evans, you’d have a collage featuring those two artists, with Freddie preceding Bill because he has one more play than Bill.

But if you play three tracks each of Freddie Gibbs and Bill Evans, then Bill will come first, because Bill comes before Freddie alphabetically.

Through such moves, over time, an ever-shifting collage unfolds. But only in Last.fm Pro.

In regular, free old last.fm, you can see other people’s artists as a list, arranged by number of plays, interrupted by an ugly barrage of ads. This is a useful free service for those who are curious about what their friends listen to. But it is a list, not an artful collage, of course.

Collage for days

In Pro, you can see their artists and yours as an ad-free collage that goes on for pages and pages. Plus, as a Pro user, you can choose which photo represents which artist—and even upload your own. When viewing your collection, you and your visitors will see a collage of your favorite artists, in descending order of plays (and with the English alphabet deciding who at each play count precedes whom), using artwork you not only select, but you can also create and upload to the service.

I like Pro. And even though the product isn’t exactly in what you’d call hyper active development—even though the server isn’t always fast, even though there are a few bugs that will probably never get fixed, even though new features are introduced rarely, and the company’s customer service department isn’t exactly the most active help desk in tech—despite those minor drawbacks, the site does things no other website can do. And at US $3, the Pro account isn’t exactly priced out of reach for most customers. (If you can afford a computer, internet access, a music collection and/or a music streaming service, you can probably scratch the 3 bucks together as well.)

How to collage on last.fm

By controlling what I listen to, and the order in which I listen, I’m slowly building an infinite collage of my evolving musical tastes.

By choosing or finding the artist photos (often post-producing them in Photoshop), I create my mood, my rhythm, and my shifting color palettes.

There are design rules governing where portraits should be placed. For instance, people whose face or gaze points rightward get placed on the left of the grid, so they lead the viewer’s eye from left to right, into the composition, whereas those who gaze to my left belong on the right side, leading the viewer’s eye back in.

To reposition someone, I may listen to a few extra plays of them. Or use last.fm’s Pro Admin to subtract a few plays.

When I started using Last.fm, I merely wanted a visual record of what I was listening to, and when I listened. But as you may have inferred, an accurate count of everything I’ve listened to over the past years is no longer my goal in using last.fm; the goal is now the endless collage.

It’s kinda spiritual.

(Reminder: the only way to see it is to be a Pro member of last.fm, which turns off ads and enables you to view your own and other people’s collections in a grid format instead of a list. If you’re a non-member, you see a list jammed with ads.)

If a tree falls, is it art?

Unlike the real-world collages I made in my 20s (which could be mounted on a wall), and unlike 1995’s “Pardon My Icons” (which could be viewed in any browser connected to the web), my current art-making/hobby activity is not publicly viewable except by last.fm Pro users. And that’s okay. ’Cause I’m not designing this for anyone besides myself to enjoy. I mean, if you see it, cool. But if nobody ever sees it, engaging with it will still make me happy.

Which makes this collage business—what? Therapy? Gaming? (Just of a different sort than anybody else?) A form of stimming? It definitely helps lower my general anxiety, providing a space where I can make pretty pictures while listening to my favorite music, which, driven in part by the desire to expand the collage, is widely inclusive and always expanding.

The hunt for fresh collage material also helps keep me interested in new music. (Readers who feel stuck, take note.) And my collage-making, however unimportant it may be, also provides a needed mental health break during these hellish times.

I do this activity every weekend when my more normal friends are biking or baking or dancing.

Is this activity, into which I’ve now poured many hours of my life, artistry or autism? Who cares? The point is that it’s escapist and harmless and we all need some of that in our lives, however we can grab it.

However you grab your moments of calm, meditation, and happiness, never be ashamed of taking care of yourself.

See also…

Rediscovering music: If Spotify exposes you to new music other people are listening to, Last.fm helps remind you of great music in your existing collection that may have slipped your mind.

For love of pixels: Stroll with us down memory lane as we celebrate the pearl anniversary of pixel art creation’s primary progenitor, and some of the many artists and design languages it inspired.

The post My weekend project appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

I started using Twitter before the dawn of the iPhone. Back then, in 2006, it was a fun, funky, fully functional (if barebones) beta messaging service used mainly by The People of the Web—the kind of folks who attended the SXSW Interactive conference and probably spoke on the panels. 

You know. You were there. You were one of us: Designers. Developers. Pioneers. Writers of blog posts, trade books, and all the little guide texts that websites depended on to attract and serve their users. People who, in casual conversation, might use words like “digerati” unironically and without intending to be pretentious. 

We believed in the power of the web to highlight unheard voices and evolve a more just society. If we were naive, and we surely were, at least we were on the side of the angels. Turns out, not everybody was.

A new skill

Years before Slack, the early 140-character Twitter served as a kind of private pre-Slack for the digitally awake and aware.

Back in those days, if you’d asked me or my conference-going fellow bloggers and designers who that first, rudimentary Twitter was for, we’d have said it was for us. For people like us, who’d spent years mastering all manner of skills and technologies simply to communicate online. Who saw value in the act of putting words together, so long as there were people to read and react to those words.

(After expressing our feelings of pride and ownership in the Twitter community, of course, the more Ted-talk-y among us early users would have waxed rhapsodic about microblogging and its potential to improve the world. More about that in a moment.)

With the birth of Twitter, when we wanted to pin down something that was twitching about in our heads and transmit it to other heads, the skill we needed wasn’t CSS or HTML or art direction or back-end wrangling. It was the ability to edit our thoughts down to a glittering trophy built with 140 characters or less. A new skill to master!

How much do people like us love showing the world what we’ve learned! This much: Even after Twitter no longer relied on wireless carriers’ text messaging services, so that the permitted character count was consequently doubled, many of us would-be Oscar Wildes continued to whittle away at our tweets, limiting them to 140 characters or fewer on principle.

After all, if we could deliver fully functioning website in 10K or less, we could surely craft deathless sentences from a tightly constrained character count. Right? Of course right!

Only connect

Years later, with a huge international user base, the idea persisted that a globally connected free and open messaging network like Twitter could help humanity do less evil and more good.

If you wanted proof, you could look to the first Arab Spring, to Me Too, to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter—movements that were greatly abetted by the busy, worldwide network. 

Of course, while many cheered and participated in these activist-driven movements, others saw them as threatening. Some felt the world was changing too fast, and that their views on social issues, like their once-good jobs, had no champion among the ruling classes. We all know how that turned out. 

And now a brief digression about power and megaphones:

How I got over

Nearly two decades before Bluesky and its sweet starter packs, Twitter hired creatives to recommend selected  users to newcomers. Some of the coolest people I know did that work.

Web design was at its peak, so quite naturally the in-house team put together a list of influential designers, developers, and writers for new users to follow. And for a variety of reasons, I was among those early recommended follows. (I may still be listed there, if the current X still welcomes newcomers with follow recommendations.) Which is how, at my Twitter peak, I ended up with a blue checkmark and 355,000 followers.

Even now, on wretched “X,” where I no longer post, I still retain 305,000 followers. At least, that’s what the stats told me when I popped in just now to find out. But are there really that many folks following me there?

How many of my current Twitter/X “followers” used to participate but have since quit quietly, without bothering to close their accounts? Lots, I reckon.

Some may avoid the site but keep their accounts open for strategic reasons, such as preventing someone else from hijacking their name (not that the owner can’t take over your account whenever he feels like it—but I digress).

Mainly, I’m guessing a lot of folks lost interest in the site but forgot to close their accounts. In other words, the data says 305K, but it’s probably less than half that many active users at most, few of whom would even see my tweets if I still posted there, as the algorithm throttles texts from folks like me.

Who cares, besides me? Nobody. Nor should they. And, besides, except as a temptation to stay, my follower count is beside the point.

Come play with us, Danny

The point is that the former Twitter has become a hateful cesspool, not simply mirroring but amplifying its owner’s profound insecurities, god-awful beliefs, and self-serving lies, and forcing that insanity into the public consciousness, whether we avoid X or not.

Thus, millions of Americans who don’t use Twitter/X nevertheless believe conspiracies that the owner and his favorite acolytes use the site to broadcast.

And there’s no doubt that, in consequence of the above, X helped determine the results of the last US presidential election. (I use the phrase “last election” here to mean “most recent election,” although I fear it may come to mean more than that.)

So, in the interest of not supporting fascism, do I abandon these readers? Thanks for asking! Pretty much, yeah.

If you like my longer-form writing, you can find it here on zeldman.com, at A List Apart, and in my books.

If you like my chatty posts, news bytes, and occasional brief confessions, join me on Bluesky.

Good luck to us all in the coming year.

The post Valediction. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

If you have a website that gets steady but diminishing traffic, and whose domain registration dates back at least a decade, you may encounter offers to buy your domain. These used to come mainly from pornographers, on the premise that your readers, upon encountering nudity instead of the morning farm report in their web browsers, would be momentarily confused—but at least a few of them would stick around to become customers.

Over the years, tricking people into seeing unexpected content and converting a small percentage of them into customers has proven to be an effective business tactic. Mindless, sure. Depressing, you bet. But effective. If all you want to do is make money, this is a way to do it. See also the penny rounding error crime from Office Space (by way of Superman III). It’s a numbers game. Make an infinitesimal profit a gazillion times, and it becomes a healthy profit. Buy skrillions of popular domains at a low enough cost, and rake in double your money in subscription fees and paid downloads.

These days, of course, the lowball domain harvesters are not limited to pornographers or even human beings, but the point of the transaction has ever been the same: to ambush your community and convert at least some of them into customers.

What I’m working up to is that, for some reason, this morning I woke up recognizing that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a far more expensive—and destructive—version of that same old grift. It was conversion en masse. To seize a public commons shared by 600 million readers, writers, and keyboard adrenalin addicts, and to profoundly change the conversations they were having. A digital takeover with historic and deeply tragic real-world consequences.

For sale: personal, imperial power

Musk’s “folly,” it turns out, wasn’t the ego-fueled, soon regretted impulse purchase it looked like. At least, if it was that, it was not only that. It was also, as we can see now, a plan to buy not merely a U.S. presidential election outcome, but, with it, personal, imperial power. Whether that was always the plan, or only became the plan after Musk found himself stuck with the $44B Twitter deal and decided to make the best of it, the consequences for our world are the same. And, from Musk’s point of view—at least until he and the man he helped put in the White House have their inevitable supervillain falling out—the plan worked.

A psychological detail here is that, in contrast to the lowballing sleaze merchants whose tactics he otherwise emulated, Musk appeared to have wildly overpaid for his prize. How could he be so stupid, we grinned at each other—and put him out of our minds. Which gave him that much more freedom to make his moves. Which, although evil, were not stupid.

As an unelected U.S. co-president in an administration in which two-fisted self-dealing will be expected, and will go unreported by a weak and cowering press, Musk will become his own Treasury Department in his role as a cutter of “government waste.” (End Medicare. Get a job, Grandma! Launch Medicare dollars into SpaceX. While we’re at it, let’s stop pampering our military veterans with health care. And so on, ad nauseum.) And if that’s not enough—and somehow it never is enough for these people—he’ll also rule over economic realms in which his companies compete for astronomical government contracts. Gee, I wonder how that will go?

Either Musk deliberately spent enough to make his enemies think he was an idiot, and stop paying attention to him. Which is evil-genius-level chess-mastery if it was, in fact, planned that way. Or else he overspent as a bluff, got tripped up in his own hubris, ended up stuck with Twitter, decided to wreck it while high on Ketamine, and somehow blundered his way into a revenge plan for the history books—if we’ll still be allowed to have those. Either way, the rest of us are in the same bad trouble.

All things considered, the Titanic sank quickly. Our democracy has just a tad more time. What can good people do today to give non-billionaires a fighting chance?

The post Domain harvesting and the Twitter long game in retrospect appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Just as nobody who marries spends their wedding day planning their divorce, almost nobody starts a business contemplating what rocks it will eventually splinter and break upon, and how to build a life raft for themselves.

I take that back. Some folks I know, who played pivotal roles in the evolution of the web, actually started their businesses with a clear goal of selling them to somebody bigger. Like Typekit was designed to sell to Adobe. Or Blogger was designed to sell to Google.

Such folks, several of whom are now post-economy wealthy, lived in the Bay Area in the 1990s and early 2000s, where building to flip was widely discussed and accepted.

Meanwhile, in NYC…

I, on the other hand, live in New York. So I started my web businesses (like Happy Cog design studio) to serve clients, as NYC creatives have always done, and with no understanding that I would one day need to leave the company and should have an exit plan. Why would I exit? Why would I ever stop doing work that brought excitement and meaning to my life?

Similarly, I started my personal site with its “Ask Dr. Web” tutorials in 1995, and co-founded my web design publication, A List Apart, in 1997, for the sheer joy of sharing knowledge, with no concept of making money, let alone of one day selling the business.

Eventually, despite my naivete, and mostly thanks to Jim Coudal and Jason Fried, A List Apart began making money by running one carefully screened ad per page. I used that money, as you will expect, to pay our writers, editors, and producers. And when it came time to stop running ads, I slowed our publication schedule, paid writers out of my own pocket, and worked with a small crew of fellow volunteers, who published ALA because we believed in the mission. (Still do.)

If I had come of business age in San Francisco, I likely would have sold A List Apart to somebody like O’Reilly, but that was never my plan because I make toys to play with, not to give away.

An ecosystem apart

In spite of A List Apart’s running at a loss, in the early 2010s I co-founded two businesses that spun out of it: An Event Apart design conference with Eric Meyer, and A Book Apart with Mandy Brown (later replaced by CEO Katel LeDu) and Jason Santa Maria. And during those first years, business was great.

We published HTML5 For Web Designers the day after Steve Jobs, waving an iPhone on the world’s biggest stage (okay, sitting at his desk), announced that Flash was dead because HTML5 would bring app-like dynamism to the web using open standards instead of proprietary code. It (our first book, I mean) sold brilliantly. “Gee, publishing isn’t that hard” I naively told myself. (No, I knew it was hard. My favorite publishers had been laying off my favorite editors for ten years before my partners and I took the plunge. But the early success did make me think the books we published about web design would always find a large, eager audience. In time, I would learn otherwise.)

And while we began the publishing house by relying on the best writers we knew personally to write about the topics they were most passionate about, I’m proud to say that, as we went along, we also discovered brilliant first-time book authors, helping them create perfectly polished, fluff-free manuscripts that made genuine contributions to our readers’ understanding of UX and all it entails. (And not just to our readers. The insights they brought to their work after digesting our books rubbed off on their colleagues.)

In giving these brilliant writers a platform, we not only helped them take their careers to the next level, we also helped people who create web content think and work better, which in turn helped the people who used the websites, applications, and products our readers designed and built. Of that, I am proud.

Stay hungry

An Event Apart (RIP) was also a damned fine early success. Web designers liked our innovation of a multi-day, single-track conference, with a holistic approach to web design, code, and content, and unifying themes between the individual talks. Our freaking-amazing speakers debuted Huge Ideas including Mobile First and Responsive Web Design—ideas which, like perfect contextual menus in UX, arrived at the very moment designers needed them.

Not only that, but these humble geniuses also sat in the auditorium with our audience for all three days of each conference event: listening to each other’s presentations, and updating their own presentations to better bounce off each other’s ideas and the evolving themes of that particular show. 

I could spend hours telling you how our producer Toby M. made miracles happen at every show, or how person-in-charge Marci E. brought joy to our community. How many of our speakers became authors. How some “graduated” from An Event Apart as newcomers replaced them. How the diversity of our speaking line-up, which wasn’t terrific in 2008, improved greatly each year. (Not that we ever said, “We need another black speaker” or “We need a trans speaker” or what-have-you. Just that we learned to swim outside the pool we came from, and discover great talent everywhere.) Our speakers were also almost uniformly Just Nice Good People, which doesn’t always happen when you’re collecting the greatest minds in an industry. 

That’s not even to mention the incredible people who attended our shows, some of whom became lifetime friends for me.

So why, given the joy these businesses brought to everyone connected to them, including me, would my partners and I have even conceived of an exit strategy? We wanted the Good Times to roll on forever.

But of course they never do.

Things end

COVID did in An Event Apart. Some conferences survived, of course. Different priorities, different overheads, different business models. Some that survived do not pay their speakers. Others, where the conference is an adjunct to a bigger business, laid off or reassigned conference staff while the pandemic made live events impossible. Others that survived mostly rely on volunteer labor, whereas we had paid staff. They were worth their weight in platinum, and we’d have paid them more (because they were worth more) if the pandemic and six-figure hotel contracts hadn’t made continuing the show impossible. My partner and I earned nothing during the business’s last five years, and got personally stuck with a six-figure debt when the event closed. It is what it is.

Although books should be COVID-proof, multiple financial problems eventually beset our publishing house as well. For most of the run of the business, my partner and I earned nothing beyond the glow of contributing to our community’s knowledge. We paid our CEO, authors, and editors, kept nothing for ourselves, and tried, oh how we tried, to keep the business going as its revenues tanked.

Speaking only for myself, I’ve learned that I am good at starting businesses and keeping them going creatively, as long as somebody else figures out the money. I suck at that, and I’m obsessed with the notions of fairness and self-sacrifice that were drummed into me by a narcissistic family that valued me for taking on the roles they were emotionally incapable of handling—such as bringing up my baby brother in my father’s absence, which no child is  equipped or should be asked to do, and yet it happens all the time. Growing up this way made me put my own self-interest last. Which is also why it never occurred to me to plan an exit. And by the time I needed to do so, the businesses were not in shape to sell.

Closing a conference is bad, but attendees can go to other conferences, and speakers can speak at other conferences; closing a conference doesn’t end a community. It sucks for the business but doesn’t strand participants.

But closing a publishing house hurts like hell, and you feel you let everybody down. I know how much our closing hurt some of our authors, and I think about that, instead of the good we achieved, when I look back. 

No doubt when my partner and I write the large personal checks to cover our deceased business’s outstanding debts, we’ll be regretting the harm our closing caused, not basking in the warm glow of how many careers we changed for the better. Like the standup comedian who obsesses about the guy who’s frowning at table 3, and doesn’t hear the laughter of the rest of the crowd. We also, hopefully, won’t focus too closely on our financial wreckage. Just pay the bill, and move on.

Anyway, I hadn’t publicly addressed the endings of these businesses, so I figured it was time to do so. I’m sharing my experience only. If you ask any of the people I worked with on these projects, they might have a different story to tell. And that would be their story, and it would be every bit as valid as anything I’ve said here.

I also didn’t ask permission of my partners, speakers, or authors before sharing these thoughts. Probably I should have. But, hey. As I’ve said. I’m speaking here only for myself.

So, anyway.

Parting gift

Is it worth the risk of starting a web-related business that isn’t a venture-backed startup? I still think it is, and I applaud all who try. Heck, I might even do so myself someday. If you’re doubtful because of (((gestures at everything))), it might be worth noting that I started Happy Cog during the dot-com crash, when studios were closing all around me. And we launched A Book Apart during the world financial crisis of late 2008. Don’t let (((all this))) deter you from trying something bold. Let me know when you do. I’ll keep watching the skies.

P.S. Under swell third-party ownership and management, Happy Cog is still going strong. Check it out!

The post Of Books and Conferences Past appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Saturday, 30 November 2024, marks the 17th annual Blue Beanie Day celebration. It’s hard to believe, but web standards fan Douglas Vos conceived of this holiday way back in ’07:

The origin of the name of the holiday is the image of Jeffrey Zeldman on the cover of his book wearing a blue knit cap.[7][8][9] Over the years, the Blue Beanie Day also became an action day for web accessibility, for which the correct use of web standards is a basic requirement.[8] — Wikipedia

How can you join this year’s fun? That’s easy! Snap a self-portrait wearing a blue beanie and post your Blue Beanie Day photo to Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Facebook, your blog (you’ve still got one, right?), and whatevs. Hashtag: #BlueBeanieDay.

No blue toque to call your own? Kevin Cornell’s venerable illustration to the rescue! Download the zipped Photoshop file here. If you like, you can ping this web page with a link to your post’s URL. See below for details.

The post How to Join Blue Beanie Day: Wear and Share! appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

My daughter and I have three cats—all rescues:

There’s Snow White, our 16-year-old queen and my daughter’s consigliere, who, despite requiring thrice-a-week medication injections to keep her kidneys functioning, rules this place absolutely.

There’s subtle Mango, whose first year of life involved struggling to survive—and avoid human contact—in a weedy vacant lot adjoining the United Nations Secretariat building, and who, since entering our family, spends nearly all day, every day hiding. He hides under my bed until it’s time to hide in a closet. Once hidden in a closet, he becomes magically invisible until he chooses to reveal himself, hours later, staring at us from the end of a hallway, meowing softly, or waking me for cuddles at 3:00 am. (Somehow if I am on my back, asleep, I am less frightening to him than when standing or moving, and this lessening of fear allows him to settle near me and assure me that, despite all his hiding, he loves me.)

Jasper the kitten

But today’s story is about the junior member of our feline menagerie, Jasper—discovered at age two months, challenging death by dashing back and forth across car-and-bus-and-bike-ridden East 34th Street in Manhattan, apparently quite lost. We adopted him pronto and eased him into his elders’ company. He’s now nearly a year old, is longer and bigger than his elders (with huge paws—mark that—indicating how much larger he will grow), is curious about everything and fears nothing, loves people and two particular dogs as much as he loves Snow White and Mango, and is keen-witted beyond his years … and beyond most people’s guess as to the limits of a cat’s intellect.

Want proof? Slightly after dawn this morning, Jasper did something very smart (but also quite disgusting). So set aside your coffee and crumpets while I tell the tale:

A morning surprise

All three cats share one giant litter box in my bathroom, giving the room less-than-spa-spotlessness. I never feel completely clean on stepping out of the shower, because, at the very least, my preternaturally alert yoga feet will provide detailed feedback on every speck of cat litter that somehow inhabits the floor, no matter how often I sweep and mop it. If I owned a house, I could stash the litter box somewhere else, but I live in a New York apartment, so my potty casa is their potty casa.

I cleaned the cat box yesterday. But somehow, despite the relative freshness of its sands this morning, Jasper got cat shit on the bottom of his paws.

There was also cat shit tracked all over my bathroom floor and the hall between my bathroom door and the door to my room.

I suspect that Snow White (who is, after all, saddled with sick kidneys, and who pees on “puppy training pads” about ten times a day) somehow knocked a buried turd out of the deep sand onto my floor. Either that, or a messy fragment of her morning meditation got stuck to her fur and thence tracked everywhere. Thus did a noticeable layer of shit end up coating young Jasper’s pads.

The clever bit

But the fun part is, seeking cleanliness, young Jasper jumped up on my sink counter, which is always slightly wet (because New York apartment plumbing is, well, legendary) and tracked shit prints all over my sink to get the shit off his paws.

The keen-witted kitten had calculated correctly that that a wet stone or formica surface would, if contacted repeatedly, eventually clean all the shit off of him. And it worked. It cleaned his paws, and left me plenty of janitorial tasks to perform.

Thus, before coffee or even a sip of water, my first duty on waking on this American holiday morning was to address a poo-streaked double sink and dreck-dappled tile floor.

Which I didn’t mind, because I enjoy tackling unexpected little handyman jobs, even deeply unglamorous ones, first thing in the morning. Gets the heart going. Keeps me from jumping compulsively into desk work by giving me something slightly more physical to do first.

And of course I was proud of little Jasper’s creativity in figuring out how to wash his hands, as it were. Good boy!

Anyway, I got it all clean this morning and took all the mess down to the recycling room. We don’t pay our porters enough.

The moral to my tale

I hope you enjoyed my story as much as I enjoyed sharing it. And please remember, the animals we’re privileged to live with are far smarter than we give them credit for. And, most mysterious of all, in spite of all that intellect, they love us. 

The post Lessons from Cats: Jasper’s Clever Cleanup Routine appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

I’ve started a Bluesky list featuring some of the brilliant writers, designers, coders, editors, and others who’ve contributed to A List Apart “for people who make websites” from the magazine’s first dawning back in the 19(mumbles). Bluesky fans, grab the list here:

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pgjpl4opnmqxxpb74n4vuabv/lists/3lbozpqe2kq2t

Why only *some* of the contributors? Simple. Several are, sadly, deceased. Many others are likely alive and well but not yet on Bluesky. We can’t unmake death, but we can offer the living networked comradeship and a wee increase in visibility.

So if you’re an A List Apart contributor who’s been thinking of joining Bluesky, consider this an incentive. Note: I’m not a partner in Bluesky, and have nothing to gain from inviting you, beyond the pleasure of your company—be it salty or sweet.

Once you join and have started a profile, ping me and I’ll add you to the list. (I’m zeldman.bsky.social on Bluesky.)

And, hey, if you haven’t yet contributed to A List Apart, your ideas are always welcome.

Online since 1998, A List Apart (ISSN: 1534-0295) explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. About the magazine. | Complete list of Authors. | Style Guide. Cheers!

Related Open-source moderation

“Our online experience doesn’t have to depend on billionaires unilaterally making decisions over what we see.”

Category: A List Apart

From pixels to prose, coding to content.

In search of a digital town square

A personal assessment from February, 2024 of the fractured social network landscape.

The post A List Apart contributors list on Bluesky appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

At its core, MARTI is a bridge. It harmonizes with existing metadata standards like the Content Authenticity Initiative, Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy, and the W3C’s PROV. It anticipates the needs of future standards, laws and practices, such as those proposed by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, and Making Data FAIR.—Carrie Bickner

As I study Carrie Bickner’s initial posts on the MARTI Framework she’s developing to manage AI metadata across various disciplines, a familiar feeling steals over me.

It’s similar to how I felt during the early days of The Web Standards Project (WaSP), when a handful of us took on the quarreling browser makers in what seemed a Quixotic attempt to bring consistency, predictability, usability, and accessibility to an already Balkanized web.

Fortunately, at that time, we had two aces up our sleeves: 1., the standards already existed, thanks to the W3C, and 2., the EU and Clinton Administration were suing Microsoft, which meant that the tech press was interested in hearing what we had to say—even if evangelizing web standards had little to do with accusations that Microsoft was abusing its monopoly power.

Once more with feeling: standards from the community

Years after The WaSP declared victory, and browser stagnation had begun to set in, I felt that same thrill vicariously when Eric Meyer, Tantek Çelik, and Matt Mullenweg invented XFN (XHTML Friends Network), inverting the standards creation pyramid so that great ideas were empowered to bubble up from small groups to the wider community, Open Source style, rather than always coming from the top (W3C) down.

I’ve no doubt that microformats were the spark that lit the HTML5 fuse, and we all remember how Steve Jobs used the new markup language to power the first iPhone, initiating the mobile era we now live in.

More about microformats history is available, and you can read Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers online for free—or buy the 2nd Edition, coauthored with Rachel Andrew, directly from Jeremy.

And now I feel those same stirrings, that same excitement about possibilities, as I study Carrie’s first posts about MARTI, an emerging object-oriented metadata framework that can be used to articulate rights-permissions, preservation metadata, provenance, relationships between objects, levels of AI involvement, and contextual information such as usage history and ethical considerations. 

Here’s why I’m excited (and you may be, too).

What do you wanna do tonight, MARTI?

For better or worse, our ideas create our reality. For better or worse, we have atomic power, the web, and social media. There’s no putting these genies back into their bottles. And there’s certainly no shutting down AI, however you may feel about it. Nor need we, as long as we have smart guardrails in place. 

I believe that MARTI—particularly as it promotes responsibility, transparency, and integrity in documenting AI’s role in content creation and curation—has the potential to be one of those guardrails.

Drafted by a career digital librarian, this provisional  metadata framework for human/generative AI output won’t stop bad actors from scraping content without permission. But if it is extended by our community and embraced by the companies and organizations building AI businesses, MARTI has the potential to bring rigor, logic, and connectedness to the field. In Carrie’s words:

The emergence of generative AI marks a transformative moment in human creativity, problem-solving, and knowledge-sharing. MARTI (Metadata for AI Responsibility, Transparency, and Integrity) is a provisional metadata framework designed to navigate this new landscape, offering a standardized yet adaptable approach to understanding, describing, and guiding the outputs of human-AI collaboration—and even those generated autonomously by AI.

At the heart of MARTI lies a robust object model—a modular structure that organizes metadata into reusable, interoperable components. This model ensures transparency, traceability, and ethical integrity, making it the cornerstone of the MARTI framework.

MARTI is not just an architecture for describing AI output, but it offers a way of structuring policy and a possible foundation for a new literacy. This is not about teaching every individual to code or engineer prompts. It’s about empowering humanity to collectively understand, describe, and guide everything we make with AI, ensuring accountability, transparency, and ethical integrity at every step.

MARTI is a framework for creating structured, standardized documentation that is attached to or embedded in AI-generated content. This documentation, or metadata, can be created by people collaborating with AI tools to produce content. Additionally, AI processes themselves can generate and embed metadata into their outputs, ensuring transparency, traceability, and accountability at every stage of content creation.

MARTI also offers a variety of potentially transformative business applications.

Disclaimer: the author is a friend of mine. But then again, so is every other thought leader mentioned in this article (with the exception of the late Steve Jobs, although our lives did touch when he fired me from a project—but that’s another story).

For more MARTI magic, check these posts:

• Meet Marti
• Object Model Overview
• Domain-Specific Attributes in MARTI
• MARTI: The Object of Our Affections
• New! Safeguarding Intellectual Property: How Blogging Platforms Can Use MARTI to Protect the Creative Content Ecosystem
• Also new! Help Us Establish a Home for MARTI
• Haikus, Sonnets, and Leaves: The Morphology of Metadata for Intellectual Units
• This Is Your Brain on ChatGPT

And if you’ve a mind to do so, please pitch in!

The post Understanding MARTI: A New Metadata Framework for AI appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Writing on this website on November 11, 2002, one year and two months after 9/11, my late father Maurice had this to say:

My wife Catherine held up an Annenberg report on World War II, written by Donald L. Miller that she had just downloaded from the web. “Murray,” she said, “please read this, because I remember that you said the same thing to me one year ago.” She pointed to a place in the article where I read, “As one GI said: ‘I think it would have been a catastrophe if Hitler would’ve won.’” The article continued, “That expletive had to be stopped,” said another; “that’s why I joined up.”

I joined the Navy to “stop Hitler” when I was seventeen and a half, and had not finished high school. Since I was that young, I needed parental consent to join. My father, a WW I veteran, enlisted when he was fifteen because his father signed for him and said that he was seventeen. My father went through hell in Europe—survived a Mustard Gas attack, had his knee cap blown away, had surgery to get a silver knee cap, took a bayonet wound in the neck, and was shell shocked. He was in a veteran’s home for one year after the war ended and was given a total disability and honorable discharge.

My father and I were never close. I always seemed to be the object of his anger. He battered me frequently when I was a child. Yet, at the enlistment office where he signed for me, I saw tears in his eyes. I never knew if those tears were for him, for me, or for both of us.

One week after I joined, the war in the European theatre ended. After boot camp, I found myself in the Amphibious Corps being trained for the invasion of Japan. The Amphibious Corps predated the Navy Seals. We were the sailors that used amphibious craft to land on the beaches and return for more of the same until the invasion was over or we were blown out of the water.

The training prepared me to drive LCVP’s (Landing Craft Vehicles and Personnel) and LCM’s (Landing Craft Machinery). These diesel landing craft were used to carry troops, vehicles, and machinery to the beaches during an invasion. The life of an amphibious sailor was estimated at three minutes in combat.

After training, we were being made ready for the invasion when Truman approved release of the atomic bombs, thus ending the war. At the time, I didn’t realize that this action saved my life, the lives of many Americans, and countless Japanese who otherwise would have suffered through a lengthy invasion.

The war ended and I was assigned to train Marines in amphibious warfare. From the time that I enlisted ’til my discharge, my Navy career lasted 13 months. I had signed up for the duration plus six months.

Today, people seem to be ready to condemn troops for mistakes made by governments. Most young people who enlist do so for an ideal. After the war, I learned that my grandparents had been incinerated in Treblinka when they were in their eighties. I did not know that they lost their lives that way.

We still have to think about the megalomaniacs who would rule the world if they were given a chance. In WW II, we waited too long to try to stop Hitler. This caused a devastating war that lasted too long, killed too many people, and permitted insane villains to attempt to rule the world.

I love people who want peace, who worry about their children, who respect education, who see the potential for good in most people. But I also realize that there are people who would destroy a democracy, and return the world to an age of ignorance and tyranny. We must be vigilant to only fight when the battle is right, to survive in a chaotic world, and when a situation arises that requires a proper defense, not hope that the villains will go away of their own accord, but to let them know that we will fight for justice. This Veteran’s Day, let’s honor all of the people who have served their country in times of need.

The post Veterans Day Remembrance appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

If you’re finding today a bit stressful for some reason, grab a respite by sinking into any of these web design inspiration websites.

Gathered from conversations on Reddit and elsewhere, each site offers a collection of other sites’ designs, chosen for impact, originality, and innovation. Each collection should offer at least a few designs that will inspire your own ideas and creativity—and most contain more than a few. Lots more.

We make no claims as to usability, accessibility, or appropriateness of design. Which doesn’t mean that the chosen websites are unusable, inaccessible, or inappropriate to the brand, subject matter, or needs of the audience. Indeed, from the care devoted to the graphical interface, we assume that many of these sites are as good under the hood as they are on the surface. But it’s just an assumption; we haven’t tested, and the point of this post is purely to share visual and creative inspiration. Enjoy!

• https://godly.website/ (collection)
• https://www.awwwards.com/ (collection)
• https://www.cssdesignawards.com/ (collection)
• https://land-book.com/  (collection)
• https://httpster.net/  (collection)
• https://goodui.org/  (UI patterns A/B tested, experiments)
• https://saaslandingpage.com/ (SaaS landing page examples)
• https://mobbin.com/browse/ios/apps (collection)

And for dessert…

Enjoy https://betteroff.studio/, an individual studio’s rhythmically organized, sensory-appealing design.

The post Web Design Inspiration appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Are you like me, reading about people fading away as they burn out, and feeling unable to relate? Do you feel like your feelings are invisible to the world because you’re experiencing burnout differently? When burnout starts to push down on us, our core comes through more. Beautiful, peaceful souls get quieter and fade into that distant and distracted burnout we’ve all read about. But some of us, those with fires always burning on the edges of our core, get hotter. In my heart I am fire. When I face burnout I double down, triple down, burning hotter and hotter to try to best the challenge. I don’t fade—I am engulfed in a zealous burnout. 

So what on earth is a zealous burnout?

Imagine a woman determined to do it all. She has two amazing children whom she, along with her husband who is also working remotely, is homeschooling during a pandemic. She has a demanding client load at work—all of whom she loves. She gets up early to get some movement in (or often catch up on work), does dinner prep as the kids are eating breakfast, and gets to work while positioning herself near “fourth grade” to listen in as she juggles clients, tasks, and budgets. Sound like a lot? Even with a supportive team both at home and at work, it is. 

Sounds like this woman has too much on her plate and needs self-care. But no, she doesn’t have time for that. In fact, she starts to feel like she’s dropping balls. Not accomplishing enough. There’s not enough of her to be here and there; she is trying to divide her mind in two all the time, all day, every day. She starts to doubt herself. And as those feelings creep in more and more, her internal narrative becomes more and more critical.

Suddenly she KNOWS what she needs to do! She should DO MORE. 

This is a hard and dangerous cycle. Know why? Because once she doesn’t finish that new goal, that narrative will get worse. Suddenly she’s failing. She isn’t doing enough. SHE is not enough. She might fail, she might fail her family...so she’ll find more she should do. She doesn’t sleep as much, move as much, all in the efforts to do more. Caught in this cycle of trying to prove herself to herself, never reaching any goal. Never feeling “enough.” 

So, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t happen overnight in some grand gesture but instead slowly builds over weeks and months. My burning out process looks like speeding up, not a person losing focus. I speed up and up and up...and then I just stop.

I am the one who could

It’s funny the things that shape us. Through the lens of childhood, I viewed the fears, struggles, and sacrifices of someone who had to make it all work without having enough. I was lucky that my mother was so resourceful and my father supportive; I never went without and even got an extra here or there. 

Growing up, I did not feel shame when my mother paid with food stamps; in fact, I’d have likely taken on any debate on the topic, verbally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the disabled woman trying to make sure all our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the fear of not making those ends meet impacted people I love. As the non-disabled person in my home, I would take on many of the physical tasks because I was “the one who could” make our lives a little easier. I learned early to associate fears or uncertainty with putting more of myself into it—I am the one who can. I learned early that when something frightens me, I can double down and work harder to make it better. I can own the challenge. When people have seen this in me as an adult, I’ve been told I seem fearless, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem fearless, it’s because this behavior was forged from other people’s fears. 

And here I am, more than 30 years later still feeling the urge to mindlessly push myself forward when faced with overwhelming tasks ahead of me, assuming that I am the one who can and therefore should. I find myself driven to prove that I can make things happen if I work longer hours, take on more responsibility, and do more. 

I do not see people who struggle financially as failures, because I have seen how strong that tide can be—it pulls you along the way. I truly get that I have been privileged to be able to avoid many of the challenges that were present in my youth. That said, I am still “the one who can” who feels she should, so if I were faced with not having enough to make ends meet for my own family, I would see myself as having failed. Though I am supported and educated, most of this is due to good fortune. I will, however, allow myself the arrogance of saying I have been careful with my choices to have encouraged that luck. My identity stems from the idea that I am “the one who can” so therefore feel obligated to do the most. I can choose to stop, and with some quite literal cold water splashed in my face, I’ve made the choice to before. But that choosing to stop is not my go-to; I move forward, driven by a fear that is so a part of me that I barely notice it’s there until I’m feeling utterly worn away.

So why all the history? You see, burnout is a fickle thing. I have heard and read a lot about burnout over the years. Burnout is real. Especially now, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at once! It’s hard, and the procrastinating, the avoidance, the shutting down impacts so many amazing professionals. There are important articles that relate to what I imagine must be the majority of people out there, but not me. That’s not what my burnout looks like.

The dangerous invisibility of zealous burnout

A lot of work environments see the extra hours, extra effort, and overall focused commitment as an asset (and sometimes that’s all it is). They see someone trying to rise to challenges, not someone stuck in their fear. Many well-meaning organizations have safeguards in place to protect their teams from burnout. But in cases like this, those alarms are not always tripped, and then when the inevitable stop comes, some members of the organization feel surprised and disappointed. And sometimes maybe even betrayed. 

Parents—more so mothers, statistically speaking—are praised as being so on top of it all when they can work, be involved in the after-school activities, practice self-care in the form of diet and exercise, and still meet friends for coffee or wine. During COVID many of us have binged countless streaming episodes showing how it’s so hard for the female protagonist, but she is strong and funny and can do it. It’s a “very special episode” when she breaks down, cries in the bathroom, woefully admits she needs help, and just stops for a bit. Truth is, countless people are hiding their tears or are doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.

Women and burnout

I love men. And though I don’t love every man (heads up, I don’t love every woman or nonbinary person either), I think there is a beautiful spectrum of individuals who represent that particular binary gender. 

That said, women are still more often at risk of burnout than their male counterparts, especially in these COVID stressed times. Mothers in the workplace feel the pressure to do all the “mom” things while giving 110%. Mothers not in the workplace feel they need to do more to “justify” their lack of traditional employment. Women who are not mothers often feel the need to do even more because they don’t have that extra pressure at home. It’s vicious and systemic and so a part of our culture that we’re often not even aware of the enormity of the pressures we put on ourselves and each other. 

And there are prices beyond happiness too. Harvard Health Publishing released a study a decade ago that “uncovered strong links between women’s job stress and cardiovascular disease.” The CDC noted, “Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, killing 299,578 women in 2017—or about 1 in every 5 female deaths.” 

This relationship between work stress and health, from what I have read, is more dangerous for women than it is for their non-female counterparts.

But what if your burnout isn’t like that either?

That might not be you either. After all, each of us is so different and how we respond to stressors is too. It’s part of what makes us human. Don’t stress what burnout looks like, just learn to recognize it in yourself. Here are a few questions I sometimes ask friends if I am concerned about them.

Are you happy? This simple question should be the first thing you ask yourself. Chances are, even if you’re burning out doing all the things you love, as you approach burnout you’ll just stop taking as much joy from it all.

Do you feel empowered to say no? I have observed in myself and others that when someone is burning out, they no longer feel they can say no to things. Even those who don’t “speed up” feel pressure to say yes to not disappoint the people around them.

What are three things you’ve done for yourself? Another observance is that we all tend to stop doing things for ourselves. Anything from skipping showers and eating poorly to avoiding talking to friends. These can be red flags. 

Are you making excuses? Many of us try to disregard feelings of burnout. Over and over I have heard, “It’s just crunch time,” “As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better,” and “Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out.” And it might really be crunch time, a single goal, and/or a skill set you need to learn. That happens—life happens. BUT if this doesn’t stop, be honest with yourself. If you’ve worked more 50-hour weeks since January than not, maybe it’s not crunch time—maybe it’s a bad situation that you’re burning out from.

Do you have a plan to stop feeling this way? If something is truly temporary and you do need to just push through, then it has an exit route with a
defined end.

Take the time to listen to yourself as you would a friend. Be honest, allow yourself to be uncomfortable, and break the thought cycles that prevent you from healing. 

So now what?

What I just described is a different path to burnout, but it’s still burnout. There are well-established approaches to working through burnout:

• Get enough sleep.
• Eat healthy.
• Work out.
• Get outside.
• Take a break.
• Overall, practice self-care.

Those are hard for me because they feel like more tasks. If I’m in the burnout cycle, doing any of the above for me feels like a waste. The narrative is that if I’m already failing, why would I take care of myself when I’m dropping all those other balls? People need me, right? 

If you’re deep in the cycle, your inner voice might be pretty awful by now. If you need to, tell yourself you need to take care of the person your people depend on. If your roles are pushing you toward burnout, use them to help make healing easier by justifying the time spent working on you. 

To help remind myself of the airline attendant message about putting the mask on yourself first, I have come up with a few things that I do when I start feeling myself going into a zealous burnout.

Cook an elaborate meal for someone! 

OK, I am a “food-focused” individual so cooking for someone is always my go-to. There are countless tales in my home of someone walking into the kitchen and turning right around and walking out when they noticed I was “chopping angrily.” But it’s more than that, and you should give it a try. Seriously. It’s the perfect go-to if you don’t feel worthy of taking time for yourself—do it for someone else. Most of us work in a digital world, so cooking can fill all of your senses and force you to be in the moment with all the ways you perceive the world. It can break you out of your head and help you gain a better perspective. In my house, I’ve been known to pick a place on the map and cook food that comes from wherever that is (thank you, Pinterest). I love cooking Indian food, as the smells are warm, the bread needs just enough kneading to keep my hands busy, and the process takes real attention for me because it’s not what I was brought up making. And in the end, we all win!

Vent like a foul-mouthed fool

Be careful with this one! 

I have been making an effort to practice more gratitude over the past few years, and I recognize the true benefits of that. That said, sometimes you just gotta let it all out—even the ugly. Hell, I’m a big fan of not sugarcoating our lives, and that sometimes means that to get past the big pile of poop, you’re gonna wanna complain about it a bit. 

When that is what’s needed, turn to a trusted friend and allow yourself some pure verbal diarrhea, saying all the things that are bothering you. You need to trust this friend not to judge, to see your pain, and, most importantly, to tell you to remove your cranium from your own rectal cavity. Seriously, it’s about getting a reality check here! One of the things I admire the most about my husband (though often after the fact) is his ability to break things down to their simplest. “We’re spending our lives together, of course you’re going to disappoint me from time to time, so get over it” has been his way of speaking his dedication, love, and acceptance of me—and I could not be more grateful. It also, of course, has meant that I needed to remove my head from that rectal cavity. So, again, usually those moments are appreciated in hindsight.

Pick up a book! 

There are many books out there that aren’t so much self-help as they are people just like you sharing their stories and how they’ve come to find greater balance. Maybe you’ll find something that speaks to you. Titles that have stood out to me include:

• Thrive by Arianna Huffington
• Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
• Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis
• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Or, another tactic I love to employ is to read or listen to a book that has NOTHING to do with my work-life balance. I’ve read the following books and found they helped balance me out because my mind was pondering their interesting topics instead of running in circles:

• The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart
• Superlife by Darin Olien
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
• Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway 

If you’re not into reading, pick up a topic on YouTube or choose a podcast to subscribe to. I’ve watched countless permaculture and gardening topics in addition to how to raise chickens and ducks. For the record, I do not have a particularly large food garden, nor do I own livestock of any kind...yet. I just find the topic interesting, and it has nothing to do with any aspect of my life that needs anything from me.

Forgive yourself 

You are never going to be perfect—hell, it would be boring if you were. It’s OK to be broken and flawed. It’s human to be tired and sad and worried. It’s OK to not do it all. It’s scary to be imperfect, but you cannot be brave if nothing were scary.

This last one is the most important: allow yourself permission to NOT do it all. You never promised to be everything to everyone at all times. We are more powerful than the fears that drive us. 

This is hard. It is hard for me. It’s what’s driven me to write this—that it’s OK to stop. It’s OK that your unhealthy habit that might even benefit those around you needs to end. You can still be successful in life.

I recently read that we are all writing our eulogy in how we live. Knowing that your professional accomplishments won’t be mentioned in that speech, what will yours say? What do you want it to say? 

Look, I get that none of these ideas will “fix it,” and that’s not their purpose. None of us are in control of our surroundings, only how we respond to them. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. They are things that work for me most of the time. Maybe they’ll work for you.

Does this sound familiar? 

If this sounds familiar, it’s not just you. Don’t let your negative self-talk tell you that you “even burn out wrong.” It’s not wrong. Even if rooted in fear like my own drivers, I believe that this need to do more comes from a place of love, determination, motivation, and other wonderful attributes that make you the amazing person you are. We’re going to be OK, ya know. The lives that unfold before us might never look like that story in our head—that idea of “perfect” or “done” we’re looking for, but that’s OK. Really, when we stop and look around, usually the only eyes that judge us are in the mirror. 

Do you remember that Winnie the Pooh sketch that had Pooh eat so much at Rabbit’s house that his buttocks couldn’t fit through the door? Well, I already associate a lot with Rabbit, so it came as no surprise when he abruptly declared that this was unacceptable. But do you recall what happened next? He put a shelf across poor Pooh’s ankles and decorations on his back, and made the best of the big butt in his kitchen. 

At the end of the day we are resourceful and know that we are able to push ourselves if we need to—even when we are tired to our core or have a big butt of fluff ‘n’ stuff in our room. None of us has to be afraid, as we can manage any obstacle put in front of us. And maybe that means we will need to redefine success to allow space for being uncomfortably human, but that doesn’t really sound so bad either. 

So, wherever you are right now, please breathe. Do what you need to do to get out of your head. Forgive and take care.