Quotes from Jeffrey Zeldman

Advertisers don't want to be ignored, and they are drunk on our data, which is what Google and other large networks are really selling. The ads are almost a by-product; what companies really want to know is what antiperspirant a woman of 25-34 is most likely to purchase after watching 'House of Cards.'

Wildly successful sites such as Flickr, Twitter and Facebook offer genuinely portable social experiences, on and off the desktop. You don't even have to go to Facebook or Twitter to experience Facebook and Twitter content or to share third-party web content with your Twitter and Facebook friends.

Thanks to budget shortfalls and format wars, our traditional media, literature, and arts are perishing faster than ever before. Nothing conceived by the human mind, except Heaven and nuclear winter, is eternal.

My daughter loves stories about my childhood, and we both love discussing women's issues. She's a wise and mature ten-year-old.

There could be no filmmaking without industrywide agreement on frame rates, lenses, and audio recording equipment.

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

Usability is like love. You have to care, you have to listen, and you have to be willing to change. You'll make mistakes along the way, but that's where growth and forgiveness come in.

Somebody has to pay our editors, writers, journalists, designers, developers, and all the other specialists whose passion and tears go into every chunk of worthwhile web content.

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.

I wanted to be a writer and an artist. Learning to type as quickly as I could think was a needed skill and part of my long self-directed apprenticeship.

I was in love with HTML and certain that the whole world was about to learn it, ushering in a new era of DIY media, free expression, peace and democracy and human rights worldwide. That part didn't work out so well, although the kids prefer YouTube to TV, so that's something.

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.

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.

On the traditional computer keyboard, I'm a super-fast touch typist. I mastered touch typing in high school.

There is a difference between being arrogant about yourself as a person and being confident that your work has some value. The first is unattractive; the second is healthy and natural.

For my daughter I would suffer through a thousand divorces, a million uncomfortable phone calls, a trillion emotionally fraught text messages.

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.

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 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 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.

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

Don't worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop.

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.

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.