Stick out your tongue
While employed at a famous New York advertising agency twenty years ago, a partner and I created a TV commercial touting an over-the-counter medicine client’s revolutionary new cold and flu remedy for...
View ArticleAn e-mail from Chip Kidd
I’ll never forget the day Chip Kidd sent me an e-mail. Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys, the book that does for design school what Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust did for Hollywood. I wrote...
View ArticleA modest proposal
It is illegal to make false claims in a TV or radio commercial unless you are running for political office. If you’re selling toothpaste, your claims must be vetted by legal and medical professionals....
View ArticleOn Board
If you enjoy A List Apart and zeldman.com, please doff your chapeau in the direction of our sponsor, the 37signals Job Board. Everyone knows 37signals, inventors of Ruby on Rails and creators of...
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Bangadelphia
Philadelphia is a happening little city, the cradle of liberty, and the site of Happy Cog East. It’s also a city that gets unfairly overlooked—like a beauty whose sisters are supermodels. But I have a...
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Ad Heaven
Gender advertisements of the 1970s are but one category and decade among hundreds available to blow your mind at the Vintage Ad Browser. You can even search by color, which works remarkably well....
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Blur
Presumably in order to avoid having to pay the child model and secure a release, Google deliberately blurred the Gap Kid model’s face on the giant outdoor Gap Kids poster before uploading this photo...
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The Great Salami Caper
In the late 1980s, while making efforts to move to New York City, I came up with the winning ad campaign for Hebrew National Kosher Salami. Only I didn’t win. Hebrew National held a contest to see if...
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We Didn’t Stop The Fire.
OUR LIBRARY IS BURNING. Copyright extension has banished millions of books to the scrapheap. Digital permanence is a tragically laughable ideal to anyone who remembers the VHS format wars or tries to...
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An Event Apart SXSW Interactive 2011 Guidebook – back cover ad
This ad appeared on the back cover of the SXSW Interactive 2011 guide, given to all 20,000 attendees of SXSWi in March, 2011. An Event Apart SXSW Interactive 2011 ad on Flickr
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Deck Ad Deal: Champagne Eyeballs on a Beer Budget
CALLING ALL STARTUPS. Got a product or service that appeals to the digitally with-it? Put your message in front of millions of web-smart, design-savvy individuals via the premier network for reaching...
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Click It
HERE’S A WEBSITE one of my students designed when she was in Seventh Grade. (She’s 27 now.) Notice that Angelfire still sells ads on it. Wonder how well they perform.
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This Week In The Death of Publishing & The Web
FAST COMPANY writes: Apple, like Facebook, has entered into a standoff with the publishing industry and the open, if for-profit, web. And it’s being done under the aegis of design: choose a better...
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Publishing v. Performance—or, The Soul of the Web
MY SOUL is in twain. Two principles on which clued-in web folk heartily agree are coming more and more often into conflict—a conflict most recently thrust into relief by discussions around the...
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Ad Blocking and the Future of the Web
YOUR site may soon be collateral damage in a war between Silicon Valley superpowers. By including ad blocking in iOS9, Apple isn’t trying to take down your site or mine—just like the drone program...
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Ad Blocking Phase II
THE WORLD has finally caught up with Been, Inc. Three years ago, this tiny start-up company shared my studio space in New York. Their product idea was remarkably original: instead of passively...
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Helvetica With Curves—And Other Updated Classics
Title card from ‘Designing With Web Standards in 2016,’ An Event Apart presentation by Jeffrey Zeldman. Text is set in Forma, an upcoming face from Font Bureau. NOT UNLIKE what Mattel has done with...
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Ten Years Ago on the Web
2006 DOESN’T seem forever ago until I remember that we were tracking IE7 bugs, worrying about the RSS feed validator, and viewing Drupal as an accessibility-and-web-standards-positive platform, at the...
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Private Parts: unlikely advocate fights for online privacy, anonymity
MESMERIZED as we have been by the spectacle of the flaming garbage scow of U.S. election news, it would have been easy to miss this other narrative. But in the past few days, just as Google, AT&T,...
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