Jeffrey Zeldman Quotes

Author Image

Jeffrey Zeldman

Profession : Businessman

Birth : January 12, 1955

Business owners should think of designers as architects, not decorators.

Jeffrey Zeldman

A good designer has technical knowledge - don't treat her like someone who's there to decide whether something should be pink or orange.

Jeffrey Zeldman

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.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Validation is easy - you run your site through a validator, and it's either valid or it isn't. The rest of the stuff, such as whether my logo or the biggest headline should be the h1 in my HTML, isn't so easy and is subject to interpretation.

Jeffrey Zeldman

I'm not against Flash, and I love the work that people such as Joshua Davis do.

Jeffrey Zeldman

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.

Jeffrey Zeldman

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.

Jeffrey Zeldman

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

Jeffrey Zeldman

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.

Jeffrey Zeldman

When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Now, not every blog post or 'Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet' piece deserves to live forever. But there's gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

Jeffrey Zeldman

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.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Put simply, if an interface is poorly designed, I will not see the data I looked for, even if it is right there on the page.

Jeffrey Zeldman

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.

Jeffrey Zeldman

I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.

Jeffrey Zeldman

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

Jeffrey Zeldman

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

Jeffrey Zeldman

I worry about every newspaper. I worry about the financial undertaking, and I worry that somehow the loss of the sale of the paper version will affect their ability to have journalists and editors and producers. We really need those.

Jeffrey Zeldman

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.

Jeffrey Zeldman