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In Defense of Font Size Widgets
“You don’t get to decide which platform or device your customers use to access your content: they do.”—Karen McGrane, Content Strategy for Mobile “When a person tells you that you hurt them, you don’t...
View ArticleTo Save Real News
IN a world where newspapers are dying and half the public believes fake news, what online news experiences need is design that is branded, authoritative, and above all, readable: Branded, because we...
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Authoritative, Readable, Branded: Report from Poynter Design Challenge, Part 2
THIS year’s Poynter Digital Newspaper Design Challenge was an attempt by several designers and pundits, working and thinking in parallel, to save real news via design. In Part 1 of my report from...
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Big Web Show ? 159: If You Can’t Stand the Heatmaps, Stay Out of the...
NICK Disabato (@nickd) and I discuss heat maps, conversion rates, design specialization, writing for the web, Jakob Nielsen, and the early days of blogging in Episode ? 159 of The Big Web Show –...
View ArticleWhy don’t nonprofit sites convert?
Living in New York and working in media, I talk to nonprofit organizations a lot. Big or small, they all say the same. No matter how much work they put into their apps and websites, they just don’t get...
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Beyond Engagement: the content performance quotient
Recently, Josh Clark, Gerry McGovern and I have been questioning our industry’s pursuit of “engagement.” Engagement is what all our clients want all the time. It’s the ? 1 goal cited in kickoff...
View ArticleHealthcare in America
I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a great doctor and good health insurance. A boring generic healthcare company bought my longterm doctor’s group practice a few months ago. First thing they did was...
View ArticleDesign Kickoff Meetings
Posted here for posterity: Design kickoff meetings are like first dates that prepare you for an exciting relationship with a person who doesn’t exist.— zeldman (@zeldman) November 13, 2019 Design...
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The Web We Lost: Luke Dorny Redesign
Like 90s hip-hop, The Web We Lost retains a near-mystical hold on the hearts and minds of those who were lucky enough to be part of it. Luke Dorny’s recent, lovingly hand-carved redesign of his...
View ArticleSaving Your Web Workflows with Prototyping
Our static tools and linear workflows aren’t the right fit for the flexible, diverse reality of today’s Web. Making prototyping a central element of your workflows will radically change how you...
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Amplifying voices
Some of the interviewees of the Technically Speaking podcast. New episodes of Harrison Wheeler’s Technically Speaking podcast are coming, and Technically Speaking will run live interviews at San...
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My Night With Essl
Mike Essl and I discuss his portfolio on Night 2 of An Event Apart Online Together Fall Summit. Herewith, a scene from last night’s interview with legendary web & book designer (and Dean of The...
View ArticleA faster horse
“The user is never wrong” means, when a user snags on a part of your UX that doesn’t work for her, she’s not making a mistake, she’s doing you a favor. To benefit from this favor, you must pay...
View ArticleFly, my designers, fly!
Designers can either become drivers of business within their organizations, or they can create the businesses they want to drive. We’re entering an era of design entrepreneurship, in which some...
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In search of a digital town square
Ever since an infantile fascist billionaire (hereafter, the IFB) decided to turn Twitter over to the racially hostile anti-science set, folks who previously used that network daily to discuss and...
View Article“Where the people are”
It’s nearly twenty years ago, now, children. Facebook had only recently burst the bounds of Harvard Yard. Twitter had just slipped the bonds of the digital underground. But web geeks like me still saw...
View ArticleCAPTCHA excludes disabled web users
What’s widely used, no longer particularly effective, and makes web content inaccessible to many people with disabilities? It’s our old friend CAPTCHA! In a group note dated 16 December 2021, the W3C...
View ArticleThis Web of Ours, Revisited
ONE MONTH and 24 years ago, in “Where Have All the Designers Gone?” (my HTMHell design column for Adobe of March 20, 2000), I discussed the deepening rift between aesthetically focused web designers...
View ArticleWeb Design Inspiration
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...
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Of Books and Conferences Past
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...
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