Jeffrey Zeldman Quotes

Content informs design; design without content is decoration.

I was a journalist, but I was starving. And I've written fiction, but I couldn't get a publisher. So, I was basically a very frustrated creative person working in advertising, and even there, I have a great idea that client won't buy it.

When I see Facebook, I feel like Howlin' Wolf must have felt when he first heard Elvis. 'They finally taught a white boy to do this.'

Even if it's not always the best markup, what are Facebook and Twitter? They're web standards with some scripts. They may not validate, but they're still CSS layouts and simple markup, and that's great!

To my way of thinking, passive management of file assets is okay for screwing around with iPads, where we're mainly watching TV on Netflix or obsessive-compulsively checking the popularity of our Instagram uploads.

With consumers buying two smartphones for every desktop computer they purchase, the demands, challenges and opportunities of the mobile space are reshaping our assumptions about design and user behaviour.

Dropbox sweats the user experience details as commendably as it masters the considerable engineering challenges required to reliably sync files everywhere a user may need them.

We at The Web Standards Project turned everything on its head. We said browsers should support the same standards instead of competing to invent new tags and scripting languages. We said designers, developers, and content folks should create one site that was accessible to everyone.

My first typewriter cost me $75. I can't tell you how many hours it took me to earn that money, or how proud I was of that object. I wrote my first books on it. They will never be published, but that's all right.

Many thought it was a fool's errand - that the browser companies were never going to listen to us. Others argued that, 'Users don't care if you use Web standards.' Well, of course they don't. They just know that your site works better.

I spent all day in front of a digital screen, but I'm about to curl up with a book.

Amazon doesn't want to give Apple a cut of its media sales, so Apple won't let Amazon sell products in its apps.

Every industry has standards. For example, the motion picture camera, there are 2 or 3 film formats with a number of brackets and number of speed, a shooting speed that is standard. If we didn't have that, then some motion pictures will play back too slowly, and people would talk very slowly, and it will be bizarre.

The less concerned with aesthetics and usability these friends and family members are, the more easily they navigate sites and applications I can't make head nor hair of. Like the ex-girlfriend who mastered Ebay.

Whether the task is writing, design, or hanging a picture straight, it is obvious that we do our best work when healthy, rested, refreshed, alert, and eager to do the job for its own sake.

Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

Marketing is not bragging, and touting one's wares is not evil. The baker in the medieval town square must holler, 'Fresh rolls!' if he hopes to feed the townfolk.

The code core of the 2001 browser upgrade campaign was the first instance of capability detection in place of browser detection.

I like files. I like editing a CSS file without necessarily having to edit an HTML file. I like fixing a problem by replacing a corrupted file with a clean one. Maybe I'm set in my ways, but I don't consider it a hardship to open a folder or replace a file.

Comments are proof most people don't read the articles.

I was a frustrated musician, frustrated designer, frustrated art director, frustrated novelist, right. I'd fail at all these different professions.

The web's strength lies precisely in its unique position as the world's first universal platform.

At one point, I was blogging prodigiously, in the late '90s; and I was getting, like, millions of pages because I was, like, one of the only people writing about web design, and I was always writing about web design.

Many young web designers view their craft the way I used to view pop culture. It's cool or it's crap. They mistake Style for Design, when the two things are not the same at all. Design communicates on every level. It tells you where you are, cues you to what you can do, and facilitates the doing. Style is tautological; it communicates stylishness. In visual terms, style is an aspect of design; in commercial terms, style can communicate brand attributes.

When we launched The Deck, I hoped other networks would take inspiration from it and figure out how to increase engagement while minimizing clutter. I even tried to sell my studio's media clients on the notion of fewer, better-priced, better-targeted ads.

The printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone, either because books don't require monthly hosting, and blogs and websites do ... or because the languages and platforms for which a particular digital creation was published will become obsolete.

Good information architecture enables people to find and do what they came for. Great information architecture takes find out of the equation: the site behaves as the visitor expects. Poor or missing information architecture neuters content, design, and programming and devalues the site for its owners as well as the audience it was created to serve. It's like a film with no director. The actors may be good, the sets may be lovely, but audiences will leave soon after the opening credits.

I'd like to be able to design as easily as if I was using Photoshop. I'd like to be able to create a multicolumn layout and control source order without having to do advanced mathematics or hire Eric Meyer or Dan Cederholm to figure out the CSS, because I can't.

For a long time, nobody had figured out Information Architecture, so we all just made stuff up.