An interview with Jeffrey Zeldman: art, love, web standards and George Clooney

We are delighted to publish an interview with Standards Samurai Jeffrey Zeldman of Zeldman.com, AListApart and the Web Standards Project. Zeldman discusses the human aspects of Standards and their adoption (or lack of adoption), why the W3C should listen to the Web Professional community a little more, the difficulties of being constantly mistaken for George Clooney, and gets all romantic.

What's your favourite building, film, piece of music, type of pizza?

Rockefeller Center, North by Northwest, Music for Films, black olives and fresh garlic.

DMXzone is based in Holland, and Orange is the Dutch national color! What's the deal with orange?

(Editor's note: Zeldman's web design shop and book are all orange and, until recently, so was his personal site)

Don't forget, the original 1998 WaSP site was also orange (http://archive.webstandards.org/index0901.html). That orange came from my city-boy sense of a wasp's coloration. It was a brand thing - WaSP was an easy mnemonic and the site was designed to stick that little bug in your head.

I liked that color area so much I started working it into my personal site. When I launched my web agency (http://www.happycog.com/) it was originally purple, but over time it too migrated to the land of happy citrus flavor.

The personal site (www.zeldman.com) is no longer orange, at least not in the default user style sheet view. It's a bleached-back pale peach: the ghost of orange past. However, the ancient Home button at the bottom of every page of the site retains a flat orange background, and that Home button is pretty well known as a brand. So when we decided to do an author-driven book cover, we went with that established orange brand image.

What is about the Web a medium that fascinates/ drives you?

This will sound like bollocks, but it truly is an undiscovered country. We are constantly learning new things and formulating rules based on what we've learned & only to learn a bit later that our understanding and its resulting rules was an oversimplification.

The Web is democratic. Anyone can publish on it, and can potentially reach an audience. The financial barriers are much higher in other media, and in many of those media there are also huge technological barriers. You may have a great movie idea, but your chances of seeing that vision fulfilled are almost nil. Even Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese have to fight to get their movies made the way they want them. But nobody can stop you from creating a website, and nobody can make you design it a certain way, or restrict the kind of content you wish to publish.

"Nobody can stop you from creating a website, and nobody can make you design it a certain way, or restrict the kind of content you wish to publish."

You're very relaxed about telling people about *you* on your web site, and you used to be a musician (which I've always felt to be one of the most personal of art forms). Is this why you're the acceptable face of techie/ w3c hieroglyphics to so many web designers - the fact that they see you as open, human and predominantly artistic?

I'd approach your question this way instead. There are people who create web technologies.  They speak in ways that make sense to their fellow geeks but are not particularly accessible to designers. Nor are they necessarily motivated by the things designers care about.  Then there are people who write about design and technology but don't necessarily practice design or use technology, except as it relates to what they're writing.

I'm a designer. I'm also able to articulate ideas. This is helpful when presenting work to clients, but it's also useful in sharing knowledge with other members of the design community. In the case of WaSP and ALA and this new book, the knowledge I was sharing was about web standards. Not deep technical stuff or theoretical stuff - that's the province of the geeks who create these technologies - and not what you'd get from a professional writer who dabbled a little in design or technology. I have the concerns of a designer, I've seen how standards solve design problems, and I write about that. Does that make sense? (ed: yes! Thanks.)