The Big Web Show

Latest Episodes:

Episode 146: Know Your Web Design History – Glenn Davis of Project Cool, Cool Site of the Day, and The Web Standards Project Aug 03, 2016

Show notes

Glenn Davis is the creator of Cool Site of the Day; cofounder of Project Cool; and cofounder, Executive Committee member, and essayist for The Web Standards Project, which he also hosted. Glenn was a leading force behind Liquid Design, an approach that predates Responsive Web Design by about 20 years. He taught everyone how to do “DHTML” via his Project Cool tutorials. In the Silicon Valley from 1994 through the early 2000s, Glenn was a huge creative force.

In a lively hour, Glenn and host Jeffrey Zeldman discuss life before the animated GIF; “perceived bandwidth;” building their first websites; getting from Gopher to the web; SLIP and PPP connections; discovering UNIX; the story behind Cool Site of the Day; the battle for standards in our browsers; the web then versus the web now; and much, much more.

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Episode 145: Search for Tomorrow – Redesigning a major recipe site with art director June Kim of Epicurious.com Jul 15, 2016

Show notes

Art director June Kim and host Jeffrey Zeldman discuss the newly launched, search-focused redesign of Epicurious.com. Approaching design through the lens of utility. Looking outside your own product category when researching for a redesign. Quick view and other functions. What Netflix has to do with a recipe site. The founding of Epicurious as a website in 1995. How Instagram, Pinterest, and mobile devices have changed the way people interact with web content. The view from the 33rd floor of One World Trade Center. Finding inspiration in unexpected places.

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Episode 144: Design For Real Life with Eric Meyer Apr 21, 2016

Show notes

Eric Meyer (@meyerweb), co-author of Design For Real Life, is Jeffrey Zeldman’s guest. Edge cases versus stress cases, identifying your assumptions, design pre-mortems, QA’ing for emotion, and more.

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Episode 143: Emotional Design with Aarron Walter Mar 30, 2016

Show notes

Aarron Walter and Jeffrey Zeldman discuss launching a design education initiative at InVision, building a UX practice at MailChimp, putting design at the heart of strategy, managing teams, the secret life of Walt Disney, and more. Aarron is the VP of Design Education at InVision. He founded the UX practice at MailChimp and is the author of Designing for Emotion and other books about design.

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Episode 142: Information Architecture is Still Very Much a Thing, with Abby Covert Jan 21, 2016

Show notes

Jeffrey Zeldman’s guest is Abby Covert, Information Architect; curator of IA Summit; co-founder of World IA Day; president of IA Institute; teacher in the Products of Design MFA program at New York’s School of Visual Arts; and author of How To Make Sense of Any Mess, a “brilliant introduction to information architecture” (Peter Morville) that is frequently purchased at Amazon with Don’t Make Me Think and The Design of Everyday Things, the two classics of usable design.

Discussed: why IA matters now more than ever, the difference between IA and content strategy (IA is building the vehicle, CS is putting fueling it and making sure it won’t run out of gas), writing and designing a book, building agreement among stakeholders, “not having opinions, not having ideas of one’s own,” IA’s origins in language and structure, the fun of the IA Summit, the creation and growth of World IA Day, the joy of teaching, and more.

Episode 141: CSS Grid Layout With Rachel Andrew Jan 11, 2016

Show notes

Rachel Andrew—longtime web developer and web standards champion, co-founder of the Perch CMS, and author of Get Ready For CSS Grid Layout—is Jeffrey Zeldman’s guest. Topics include working with CSS Grid Layout, how Grid enables designers to “do something different” with web layout, why designers need to start experimenting with Grid Layout now, how front-end design has morphed into an engineering discipline, learning HTML and CSS versus learning frameworks, and the magical self-reinventions of David Bowie, RIP.

Episode 140: Progressive Enhancement FTW with Aaron Gustafson Dec 04, 2015

Show notes

Longtime web developer, lecturer, and web standards evangelist Aaron Gustafson and host Jeffrey Zeldman discuss the newly published update to Aaron’s best-selling industry classic “love letter to the web,” Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences With Progressive Enhancement, 2nd Edition (New Riders, 2015).

Topics covered include: Aaron's superhero origin story as a creator of progressively enhanced websites and applications; "we’re not building things we haven't built on the web before;" "creating opportunities for people outside your comfort zone;" development in the world of Node.js; "every interface is a conversation;" "visual design is an enhancement;" "interaction is an enhancement;" nerding out over early web terminal interfaces; Microsoft, Opera, and more.

Save 35% off Aaron Gustafson’s Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences With Progressive Enhancement, 2nd Edition when you enter discount code AARON35 at checkout.

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Episode 139: Every Time We Touch—Josh Clark, author of “Designing For Touch” Nov 20, 2015

Show notes

Touch introduces physicality to designs that were once strictly virtual, and puts forth a new test: How does this design feel in the hand? Josh Clark’s new book, “Designing For Touch,” guides designers through this new touchscreen frontier, and is the launchpad for today’s Big Web Show discussion between author Clark and host Jeffrey Zeldman.

In a fast-paced, freewheeling conversation, Josh and Jeffrey discuss why game designers are some of our most talented and inspiring interaction designers; the economy of motion; perceptions of value when viewing objects on touchscreen versus desktop computer; teaching digital designers to think like industrial designers (and vice-versa); long press versus force touch; how and when to make gestures discoverable; and much more.

Episode 138: An Infrastructure For Websites, with Pantheon’s Josh Koenig Nov 13, 2015

Show notes

Josh Koenig, Co-Founder & Head of Product for Pantheon Website Management Platform, is Jeffrey Zeldman's guest in "An Infrastructure For Websites," Episode 138 of The Big Web Show ("Everything Web That Matters.")

Josh & Z discuss how the industry is evolving, how smartphones are driving web growth, integrating a pull request with a server, the connection of the web to real life (and the fact that it’s no longer a meaningful distinction), the idealism of the early web, why technology doesn't solve human problems, why truly revolutionary change occurs only when new technologies fade into the background, and a future in which the back-end grunt work of website creation is automated.

Josh Koenig is a Co-Founder and Head of Product for Pantheon, the website management platform for WordPress and Drupal. Prior to that he was a founder at Chapter Three, a web consultancy based in San Francisco. Josh has been involved in building the internet with Open Source and Free software for nearly two decades.

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Episode 137: The Law is an Ass: Digital Law & Web Design with Heather Burns Oct 23, 2015

Show notes

Digital law specialist Heather Burns is Jeffrey Zeldman’s guest. Heather is the author of The Web Designer’s Guide to the Consumer Rights Directive, a “recovering web designer,” and the founder of a monthly ebulletin with digital law and policy news you need to know.

She explains: “While I am not a lawyer, the legislators who create digital laws are not internet users, much less designers or developers. Therein lies the problem. I view my work on digital law and policy as an attempt to build a bridge between the two parties.”

Heather and Jeffrey discuss absurd and unjust laws governing transactions on the web, including the birth of the EU cookie law (all 27 versions of it), the slow pace of government versus lightning internet development, and why web design and development need consultative status and a seat at the table.

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