50 years ago today.
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zeldman
@zeldman@front-end.social
mastodon 4.7.3Ava’s dad. OG blogger/web designer. Automattician. Author, “Designing With Web Standards” and “Taking Your Talent to the Web.” Publisher, A LIST APART and A BOOK APART. Emeritus: Happy Cog™, An Event Apart, School of Visual Arts MFA IXD faculty, and The Web Standards Project.
2509 Followers
365 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 18, 2022
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Someone online referred to “Pedolf” and I knew instantly whom they meant. And so do you.
“Treat every platform as temporary, because it is. Archive out of love—for the things we’ve made, the conversations we’ve had, the small, stubborn act of leaving a mark.”
https://zeldman.com/2026/07/06/memories-cant-wait-or-how-i-learned-to-keep-worrying-about-the-web/ #OpenWeb #StateOfTheWeb #IndieWeb
Drawn with a finger on a screen the size of a 3x5 card. Neat! Nifty! Nice! Notes Art: explorations in iPhone notes by Chris Silverman.
Corporate autopsies on the brands you trust. Who bought them, who gutted them, and what's still worth buying. h/t Erika Hall.
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/
Read it for free: Accessibility For Everyone by Laura Kalbag.
h/t Sarah Norris.
“The work itself is the same as it always was. What changed is that Google is no longer the only surface worth the effort.”
https://joost.blog/future-of-the-website/
“We need to stop pretending that ‘the cloud’ is a place. It’s not a place. It’s a promise—and promises are only as good as the entity making them.”
https://zeldman.com/2026/07/06/memories-cant-wait-or-how-i-learned-to-keep-worrying-about-the-web/
Luke Wroblewski’s brilliant and screamingly influential A Book Apart book, “Mobile First,” is now available for free reading online.
“A.I. represents perhaps the most personalized sales pitch ever foisted on the passive American consumer—a vision of a near-total takeover of the country’s economic, social and cognitive lives by tools engineered by just five companies, run by five particular people, several of whom are widely described as sociopaths.”
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s slop farm no more.
Your writing needs a permanent home—a domain that you own and control. Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived....
https://zeldman.com/2026/07/29/a-permanent-home/
Own your own personalized pixel portrait, hand-crafted by real human artists just for you.
“For years, users have been trained on the buffet model: pay a monthly fee, consume wildly, and assume the robot is basically free. But AI is not free. It is a meter running in a basement full of expensive chips.
“One possible outcome is simple: token billing arrives, users notice the true cost, usage falls, and the valuations start looking less like genius and more like group hypnosis with a term sheet. 1/2
Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement.
https://zeldman.com/2026/04/15/the-courage-to-stop/#HumanWritingInAITimes #brevity #WriteBetter #LessButBetter #KillYourDarlings
Happy 20 April.
In design and writing, details are a form of respect.
https://pedraum.com/2026/04/06/brown-mms-theory-of-design/ #typography #craft #DesignAsUX #WritingAsUX #GodIsInTheDetails #SoftwareDesign #writing #design #LessButBetter
Grotesque as the smashing of the Jesus statue in that Lebanese village was, I'm far more horrified by the IDF's murder of children.
Long before standards bodies agreed on how to encode diverse scripts and symbols, computers used incompatible character sets.
Understanding how modern systems evolved from ASCII to Unicode—and what UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 mean—helps any developer, writer, or interested reader grasp the complexity hidden inside what looks like ordinary text.
https://tiniacoleyba.com/blog/unicode-utf8-ascii-encodings/ #WebStandards #ASCII #Unicode #basics
Dark patterns galore—with receipts. That Privacy Guy: Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop.
https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/
#privacy #ai #anthropic #claude #antipatterns #ClaudeDekstop
h/t José Ramón Padrón
Handwritten notes in the time of AI note takers
The best project management tool is still a pen, plus the discipline to notice what the machine cannot. Wisdom from Lucas Radke.
We have a duty to stay informed and act, but not to absorb so much bad news that we're paralyzed or joyless.
Boosted by @octothorpe@mastodon.online
Designers are good people. Some designs exclude people anyway. Alan Dalton explains why—too much to remember—and offers a practical fix: accessibility personas that help you recognize problems while you’re designing, not after. Homework included.
Good designers, bad websites: a proposal by Alan Dalton
https://alistapart.com/article/good-designers-bad-websites-a-proposal/ #ux #a11y #accessibility #personas #alistapart #uxui #design #webdesign #productdesign
Murdering children is not a distraction.
The ten font families in the list share something important in common: an explicitly human touch, not machine-made or prompt-produced, but born from human minds and crafted by human hands.
https://ilovetypography.com/2025/12/19/10-must-have-fonts-for-2026/
#typefaces
MF DOOM's Operation: Doomsday came to the surface 27 years ago today, on April 20, 1999.
What does a head of typography do?
Tim Brown discusses the craft and practice of typography, driving type toward a future vision, and the instrumental playlists that help him focus.
https://adobe.design/stories/our-people/what-does-a-head-of-typography-do-tim-brown #typography #design #designers #interviews
Saluting the inimitable genius of Gary Taxali.
https://www.garytaxali.com/ #art #artist #artists #illustration #illustrators #cartoons #comix #talent #artwork #humanity #politics
The government’s argument “ignores how and why Google users turn on location history: Google repeatedly prompts users to turn on the service, often warning that devices will not ‘work correctly’ otherwise, while not disclosing in that prompt how frequently users’ location information would be recorded, how precise it would be, or how it might be given to the government.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/29/supreme-court-geofence-warrants-case-decision
New zine by Tess Needham: Human Creativity in the Age of AI. Download, print and fold.
Maybe I’m special. Or unlucky. But things that supposedly work intuitively for most users tend to fail spectacularly for me.
Genocide, and I know Jesus would agree, is the real blasphemy.
Mere days before their contract elapsed, 34,000+ doormen and residential workers have called off a pending NYC-wide strike.
“It’s an incredibly good deal for both sides, it’s a win-win,” says union president Manny Pastreich.
“We’re not designing interfaces anymore. We’re designing how interfaces are created.”
@jc-design@medium.com h/t Elizabeth Pizzuti
Nutty ’n new: a serenely silly app store for WordPress Desktop Mode.
“ODD is a love letter to the part of computing that made you fall in love with computing in the first place—the part where you spent three hours picking a desktop background and zero hours doing your homework.”
https://odd.regionallyfamous.com/ #FunWithWordPress #WordPress
20 Years Later: Little Brother, “The Minstrel Show” https://longreads.com/2025/09/11/little-brother-minstrel-show-20/ #HanifAbdurraqib, #Hip-hop, #Music, #MusicCriticism, #NorthCarolina, #Rap
“Not even Mussolini (or his German duplicate) attempted to dominate Christianity as is being attempted now. They had intentions, certainly. But they knew there was a decorum to respect—not out of virtue, but of strategic necessity.” 1/2
“Typography is an act of service.”
Typography Is Not About You. Neither Is Your Product.
https://susanhobbs.blog/2026/04/14/typography-is-not-about-you-neither-is-your-product/ #typography #design #usability #productdesign
The Verge: “It’s a make-or-break year for Anthropic and OpenAI, which are facing more pressure than ever to make more cash than they burn.”
“Acting against Musk's abusive apps might put Apple and Google out of favour with an erratic, power-tripping administration which in turn could impact short-term business prospects. Their stated principles are incompatible with maximizing shareholder value under competitive authoritarianism.”
Trailblazers, trumpets and the theremin: 10 soundtracks that changed the way we listen to movies
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/apr/06/10-soundtracks-that-changed-the-way-we-listen-to-movies-star-wars-space-odyssey#soundtracks #composing #music #FilmScores
Sundowning idiot blowhard says what?
Over three days in Mumbai, WordCamp Asia 2026 brought together contribution, learning, and community. From Contributor Day through the closing keynote, the event balanced hands-on work with bigger conversations about publishing, technology, education, and the open web.
https://wordpress.org/news/2026/04/celebrating-wcasia-2026/ #WordCamp
Just for you: a fresh installment of My Glamorous Life.
https://zeldman.com/2026/04/17/petes-presence/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social
Spotted ;) at Creative Market, Soulvibes is a handmade linocut typeface.
https://crmrkt.com/VAjaV1 #typefaces #fonts #DisplayTypefaces
Boosted by @tchambers@indieweb.social
“Across many demos, I saw the same evolution: command line, markdown files, HTML, rich browser experiences. Agents and humans are converging on a shared visual surface: pointing, annotating, dragging, and previewing, instead of describing things in pure prose.”
https://data.blog/2026/06/19/two-weeks-at-ai-enablement-nyc/
Presenting this year’s Type Directors Club 72 winners.
https://tdc.org/winner-archive/?work-year=2026 #typefaces #typedesign #design #typography