Jeff Zeldman is one of the best-known and most respected Web designers in the business. Craig Grannell caught up with him to talk about design, Web standards and his new book.
“My first experience with the Web was relatively late: 1994 or 1995, with Netscape 1.0. I thought, ‘Man, is this ugly,’ and then, ‘I can’t make it any worse’.”
And so began a journey that would lead to the formation of an organisation that got browsers to conform to Web standards; a respected design company; an online magazine for Web designers; and a personal site that’s since attracted 16 million visitors.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. What originally encouraged Jeff’s love of design? “My dad is an engineer and was also a painter and sculptor. He taught me to draw and gave me art books filled with images I tried to copy. My mom was a pianist and taught me to play and love music,” explains Jeff. He went on to study film, music, and English at Indiana University, designing his own major in film. After some years of further study, the writing of some ‘unpublishable’ novels, performances with punk bands, occasional journalism, and the composition and production of soundtracks for dance companies and low-budget films, Jeff began to gravitate towards New York City.
“I couldn’t live on what I was earning, so I drifted into advertising,” recalls Jeff. He remained there for fifteen years, learning the importance of having a concept, and how to sell it to clients. “I discovered how to be clear, fast and specific; to know who I was talking to, and what mattered to them,” says Jeff. “I became aware that the marriage of images and words gives birth to something larger than those things alone. This knowledge and experience remained essential when I became a Web designer.”
WEB DESIGN FOREVER
The turning point came in 1995. The agency Jeff worked for handled the Warner Brothers account, and was asked whether a Web site could be created for Batman Forever. “We lied and said we could, and then we did,” says Jeff. “The site was a hit—half the people using the web in 1995 visited it—and I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up.”
Whatever ‘growing up’ Jeff thought he had to do, it happened quickly. His personal site was soon online, as was Happy Cog, Jeff’s Web design and consulting agency. “I have a partner, Brian Alvey, who’s responsible for backend work, and we work with others as we need them,” explains Jeff. He attributes Happy Cog’s survival in part to staying lean: “We also ran lean during the boom time, though, because small, highly focused teams do the best work. I hated the anal specialisation of a few years ago—our people can design, write, and code.”
Dealing with projects and clients is mostly common sense, according to Jeff: “It’s basic stuff: treat the client with respect as a partner, don’t ask them to design (that’s not what they're good at), but do ask them everything relevant about their users and their business, and do keep talking all through the process to minimize unwelcome surprises.” Wherever possible, Jeff advocates finding great clients, because they permit you to do great work: “We talk to clients for a while before taking on projects. Only then can we determine whether we’ll be able to work together. I’d rather ‘waste’ two weeks discovering that I don’t want to work with someone than commit my company to several months of hell.”
When creating sites, Jeff finds inspiration in many places: “There are so many great designers and art directors working today that I couldn’t possibly pick a favorite. Recently I’ve been marveling at the art direction in films like Far From Heaven, Punch Drunk Love, Talk to Her, and Gangs of New York. These have directors that are incredibly sensitive to color and composition and how those elements help tell a story.”
If a single CD had to be picked, Jeff’s choice would be Eno’s Music for Films—“it changed the way many people understood what ‘music’ was”—and his favorite place remains New York City, his home. With regards to the Web, he most often visits daily personal periodicals that combine original thinking with a subtly appropriate user interface. “I’m not a fan of ‘passive’ sites, where you just sit and marvel at the intense layers of design work. Sites work best when they’re fast, lightweight and within my control. If I want to be immersed in a creative experience over which I have no control, I’ll go see a film.”
THE PATH TO SUCCESS
Ultimately, Jeff finds most inspiration in a client’s product and those who will use it. “Borrowed interest—where there’s nothing to say, so celebrities or graphic styles are imposed to cover for there being nothing to offer—doesn’t work in advertising, where people are barely paying attention,” says Jeff. “It fails even more spectacularly on the Web, where the audience is engaged by definition—after all, they choose to visit your site.”
In order to create a successful site, Jeff suggests asking, “Who is the audience, what is the brand, and how can that brand speak honestly to that audience?” If you can’t find inspiration in the answers, something is wrong with the product, and you may as well drop the assignment, because you’ll never make anything great of it. “Subsequently, the brand, voice, structure, visuals, and the way the site functions should all work together—the parts should add up to a whole.”
Of course, all Zeldman-originated sites are standards compliant. While Photoshop, Illustrator and Studio MX are wheeled out for design work, all mark-up and coding is created by hand in PageSpinner, because, according to Jeff, “it’s cleaner, lighter, more structural and more accessible that way”. He goes on to explain that designing with standards usually means lower page weights: “This means sites that are more accessible to people using slow dial-up connections. For that matter, your site will work for a millionaire who happens to be blind or physically impaired, and accessible to Google, which means it will score better in search engine rankings. Call it doing for yourself by doing unto others…”
He concedes that there are some instances where high-bandwidth design is appropriate: “Not every site is for everyone on the planet—a high-bandwidth site for a haute New York retailer isn’t showing grotesque insensitivity to the needs of an Indonesian farmer. That Indonesian farmer isn’t going to shop at Barneys New York”.
TO HELL WITH BAD BROWSERS
Ultimately, though, access for all, via open standards, has always been at the heart of Jeff’s involvement with the Web design industry. In 1998, he was a founding member of the Web Standards Project (WaSP). “With version 4.0 browsers, you had to code several versions of your site, which massively increased costs, and the situation was continually getting worse,” explains Jeff. “Meanwhile, perfectly good open standards existed—HTML, XML, CSS, ECMAScript, the DOM, and so on. It was clear that these were the only way out of the increasingly wasteful production cycle.”
Over time, the organization hammered Netscape and Microsoft until they agreed to fully support core baseline standards in their browsers that they’d actually helped to create anyway. “We used varied methods: petitions were circulated; mailing lists were formed; and bug lists were published, effectively providing free consulting to browser developers,” remembers Jeff. By 2000, meaningful (if imperfect) standards support was in all modern browsers, but the design community was still using obsolete methods. Therefore, February 2001 saw the birth of the browser upgrade campaign and the push of CSS-based layouts. “Todd Fahrner, Tantek Çelik and I redesigned A List Apart using CSS layout and hiding the site’s look and feel from non-compliant browsers,” says Jeff. “Between this and the upgrade campaign, we sparked a chain reaction. Independent sites and blogs started switching to CSS layout and XHTML, then some of the .govs and .edus, and finally commercial sites, such as wired.com and ESPN.com got in on the act.”
Jeff left WaSP in 2003, primarily because too many people equated him with the group: “This wasn’t good for WaSP because it falsely equated Web standards—which is a huge idea—with the personality of one guy, namely me. If I said something stupid, WaSP took the hit. Plus it wasn’t fair to other steering committee members, who’d contributed so much the group’s success. So I buzzed off. It was a relief!”
A more visible change to Jeff’s working life also occurred in 2003: the public redesign of
www.zeldman.com. This unusual method was chosen for several reasons: to engage the audience, who essentially became part of the redesign team; to document experimentation with leaner, more structural mark-up; and because it’s the opposite of what he does for a living. “I usually plan the user flow, create multiple looks and feels, and modify them several times before the client sees anything. I then change them some more, test the usability, and do all the other things Web design and development teams do,” explains Jeff. “It was a relief to do the opposite: stumble around in front of the site’s audience, to trust them to trust me, and to not be an expert and ‘know it all’.”
Engaging the audience and sharing ideas is vital to Jeff: “I encourage people to steal my CSS, JavaScript, mark-up, and do something better with it—and they often do!” The logical conclusion of such thinking evolved into Jeff’s latest book, Designing with Web standards, which also explores the
www.zeldman.com redesign more fully. Unlike most Web design books, it targets a wide range of people. “It’s informative to designers who’ve been using CSS and XML for years, but just as useful to those who’ve not yet started using standards,” claims Jeff. Clients and project managers should also find useful the book’s no-nonsense, succinct, and often witty approach to ‘ending the costly spiral of obsolescence, where each new browser or Internet device means a whole new coding cycle’.
The book begins by showing why sites built the old way cost so much, why they often fail, and how they don’t work cross-browser and platform. It explains what designing with Web standards means, and how simple, effective, and affordable it can be. The remainder of the book is geared at designers and developers, showing how to work with standards and create a transitional site and a CSS-based one.
“The history of our medium has been to solve today’s problems at tomorrow’s expense,” says Jeff. “Designing With Web Standards shows that the build-now, pay-later approach is no longer productive or necessary, and lays to rest the notion that designing with standards means leaving some users behind. In fact, it most often means just the opposite.”
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Unsurprisingly, Jeff’s main concern for the Web’s future regards standards: “Not everyone is an expert designer, so the tools they use, including commercial content management systems, should always create valid, compliant sites by default.”
On the software front, he’s hoping Microsoft will rethink its policy regarding Internet Explorer: “I’d like to see a standalone Internet Explorer 7 for Windows that’s as standards-compliant as Mozilla, Safari, and Opera 7. At the very least they could port Çelik’s Tasman rendering engine to Windows, finally providing Windows users with Text Zoom, which was pioneered in Explorer for Mac and is in all modern browsers except IE for Windows.”
Jeff’s other wishes include Windows activating Cleartype anti-aliasing by default, so users can have a better experience when reading text, because many Windows don’t even know it’s there, and the return of Internet Explorer on the Mac, which is now only bundled with MSN.
As for the technology itself, Jeff reckons the W3C has created a decent roadmap regarding the next decade’s Web technologies, but beyond that it’s anyone’s guess. He concludes: “Whatever the Web becomes technologically, I trust it will remain a low-cost, two-way, democratic medium where ideas, honesty, and interaction are the paramount values.”
RESOURCES
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents
Jeff’s personal site, containing a plethora of information about all things Web design and more. The Daily Report, online since 1995, offers Jeff’s witty take on what’s happening in the design industry.
www.zeldman.com
A List Apart
Irregular but essential online magazine for Web designers, containing so many useful articles that it almost wants to make you hug your monitor. Jeff’s the Creative Director.
www.alistapart.com
Happy Cog
Zeldman’s commercial arm—a Web design company with clients including Warner Brothers, Fox and AOL.
www.happycog.com
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