Jeffrey Zeldman - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Jeffrey Zeldman is an entrepreneur, web designer, author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

, podcaster and speaker on web design

Web design

Web design is the process of planning and creating a website. Text, images, digital media and interactive elements are used by web designers to produce the page seen on the web browser...

. He is the founder of the web design studio Happy Cog

Happy Cog

Happy Cog is an American interaction design studio headquartered in New York City with offices in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Austin.Happy Cog’s influence is widespread due to Founder Jeffrey Zeldman’s well known work on establishing a set of web standards between all browser companies...

and the web design e-zine A List Apart, and cofounder of A Book Apart with Jason Santa Maria and Mandy Brown, and An Event Apart, with Eric Meyer. A passionate web publisher, he has maintained his blog

Blog

A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

, Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report, on the topic of web design since 1995. His most recent book is titled Designing with Web Standards 3rd Edition (with Ethan Marcotte). He also co-hosts The Big Web Show, an award-winning podcast on the web and online publishing, with Dan Benjamin on the 5by5.tv network.

Zeldman is held to be one of a vanguard of proficient visual designers who have adopted and promoted the use of standards-based, cross-browser solutions to web design problems. He co-founded The Web Standards Project (WaSP), a group of professional website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

designers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the standards promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium

World Wide Web Consortium

The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...

(W3C), who persuaded Netscape

Netscape

Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...

and Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

to support the same standards in their web browsers . In particular, he has sought to destroy the myth that accessible websites have to be ugly or apparently “undesigned.” His books and websites have helped promote a general improvement in the technical, visual design, usability and accessibility

Accessibility

Accessibility is a general term used to describe the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many people as possible. Accessibility can be viewed as the "ability to access" and benefit from some system or entity...

of websites, through the use of XHTML

XHTML

XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....

code and CSS

CSS

-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...

Web publications

Zeldman has blogged and published independent web content since 1995. In 1998, he began the e-zine A List Apart

A List Apart

A List Apart is a webzine for web designers. It covers various topics of interest and advocates the use of web standards in the design process. Regular articles are written by contributing authors who are not part of the editorial team....

, which focuses on best practices and innovations in web design and front-end development. Zeldman used A List Apart as an evangelical platform, showing designers how to use web standards to achieve accessible, search-engine-friendly sites that cost less to produce and work better across platforms. Since 2007, A List Apart has conducted surveys of web designers, creating one of the first public pictures of the profession as it is practised in the U.S. and worldwide.

Print publications

Zeldman's book Designing with Web Standards

Designing with Web Standards

Designing with Web Standards is a web development book by Jeffrey Zeldman . Zeldman co-founded in 1998 and served as its director during the formative years when the Project was petitioning browser makers to support standards...

brought standards awareness to a new international audience. It has been translated into 13 languages and has been updated twice. The latest edition, Designing with Web Standards 3rd Edition, co-written with Ethan Marcotte, describes semantic markup, the separation of presentation from structure and behavior, the benefits of standards-based design, and covers topics including HTML5, CSS layout, working around support problems in old versions of Internet Explorer, accessibility, adaptive and responsive design, horizontal and vertical grids in web layout, selling accessibility and standards to reluctant clients and colleagues, designer/developer collaboration workflows, and more.

In 2010, Zeldman expanded his publishing empire beyond web magazines with the creation of A Book Apart, publisher of "brief books for people who make websites." These books are designed to be a quick read (as from New York to Chicago by jet) and to thoroughly communicate advanced topics in web design with a strong point of view. A Book Apart publications to date include HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith, CSS3 For Web Designers by Dan Cederholm, The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane, and Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte.

Design Agency

In 1999, Zeldman founded Happy Cog

Happy Cog

, a web and interaction design studio specializing in user- and content-focused design powered by web standards. With offices in New York, Philadelphia, and Austin, and total staff under 50, the studio is considered a leading-edge boutique. Clients include Zappos, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history...

, Mozilla Foundation

Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...

, AIGA

Aiga

‘Aiga is a word in the Samoan language which means 'family.' The aiga is the family unit of Samoan society and differs from the Western sense in that it consists more than just a mother, father and children. The Samoan family, also referred to as an 'extended family' is based on the culture's...

, Thompson-Reuters, Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, Georgetown University

Georgetown University

Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...

, Groupon

Groupon

Groupon is a deal-of-the-day website that features discounted gift certificates usable at local or national companies. Groupon was launched in November 2008, the first market for Groupon was Chicago, followed soon thereafter by Boston, New York City, and Toronto...

, Wordpress

WordPress

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system . It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1...

, and W3C. The studio also creates products and launched a hosting business (Happy Cog Hosting) in 2010. That same year, Happy Cog was voted "Design Agency of the Year" in the .net Awards sponsored by .net magazine.

Web Design Conference

In 2005, Zeldman and Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer

Eric A. Meyer is an American web design consultant and author. He is best known for his advocacy work on behalf of web standards, most notably Cascading Style Sheets , a technique for managing how HTML is displayed...

founded An Event Apart, "the design conference for people who make websites." An Event Apart is an "intensely educational two-day learning session for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design" followed by an optional day-long workshop on such topics as mobile web design, advanced accessible web design, HTML5, and CSS3. The conference currently takes place in seven cities annually. Cities and speakers vary. Speakers, in addition to offering informative content, must have made major contributions to web design or development in order to qualify to speak at the event.

Innovations

Zeldman and Happy Cog were early advocates of standards-based web design and many of their current and former employees have greatly contributed to initiatives that have improved accessibility and usability on the Web, including:

The development of "sIFR", the Flash based text replacement formerly used by his team to execute custom fonts on a website.
The development of "real type on the web" via CSS and services including Typekit
Typekit
Typekit is a service launched in September, 2009 by Small Batch, Inc. which, via JavaScript and a subscription service, allows webmasters and designers to embed non-standard, non-system-specific fonts into online documents. It uses the recently implemented @font-face CSS property and is available...

.
Have popularized such ideas as CSS layout, responsive design, and style switching. The latter was an early 2000 innovation which paved the way for later third-party innovations including CSS Zen Garden
CSS Zen Garden
The CSS Zen Garden is a World Wide Web development resource. The goal of the site is to showcase what is possible with CSS-based design. Style sheets contributed by graphic designers from around the world are used to change the visual presentation of a single HTML file, producing hundreds of...

and Readability
Readability
Readability is the ease in which text can be read and understood. Various factors to measure readability have been used, such as "speed of perception," "perceptibility at a distance," "perceptibility in peripheral vision," "visibility," "the reflex blink technique," "rate of work" , "eye...

.

Personal information

Zeldman was married to Carrie Bickner, author of the Rogue Librarian blog and Web Design on a Shoestring. They have one daughter.

Books authored

Taking Your Talent to the Web: Making the Transition from Graphic Design to Web Design (ISBN 0-7357-1073-2)
Designing with Web Standards (ISBN 0-7357-1201-8; second edition, ISBN 0-3213-8555-1; third edition, ISBN 0-3216-1695-2)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.