I DREAMED I’d boarded a ship that was slowly making its way to an exotic vacation locale, somewhere on the other side of the world. I’d bought a giant new steamer trunk for the voyage. I thought I’d have a cabin to myself, but, below decks, the ship was like a passenger train, with row […]
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Vitreous humor lines the backs of our eyeballs. We are born with a full supply of the stuff, but as we age, it begins to dry out or evaporate or some damn thing—the ophthalmologist shining a beam into my eye wasn’t overly explicit on this point. Sometimes the stuff detaches and comes to the front […]
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Herewith, a scene from last night’s interview with legendary web & book designer (and Dean of The Cooper Union School of Art) Mike Essl, who shared his portfolio, career highlights, early web design history, and more. Fun! If you get a chance to meet, work with, or learn from Mike, take it. He’s brilliant, hilarious, […]
The post My Night With Essl appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
I was a teenage telemarketer. Reading from a script, I attempted to raise money for St. Jude’s Hospital for Leukemia-Stricken Children. I was fired after three days for departing from the script. We were supposed to hard-sell, no matter what the person on the other end of the line said. But when the people I […]
The post My First Job appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
Back when I was in advertising, one of my team’s clients was a well-known Irish Airline. They could only afford an 1/8th-page ad in the travel section of the paper. But my partners and I didn’t think creativity was dependent on budget. We were determined to deliver great ads for them—ads that would make a […]
The post Fear of getting noticed appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
The mail carrier used to think I was away from home, traveling. Nope, just scared to open the mailbox.
The post Walking Through Fear appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
When I think back to my college friends and me, what a beautiful bubble we lived in! Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t a fancy college—it was state school, and we were all from out of state. And we certainly weren’t rich kids: my friend J came from a Lower East Side single parent family, […]
The post Education is its own privilege appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
You may not know his name, but he played a huge part in creating the web you take for granted today. And he’s back—kind of.
The post He Built This City: The Return of Glenn Davis appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
All my life I’ve known I was “creative” and “different.” Only recently have I realized that I’m both neurodivergent and bisexual. In my youth, as I struggled with drugs, alcoholism, depression, and underemployment, it never crossed my mind that I was neurodivergent—not that the term existed then. Even after I was diagnosed with an Anxiety […]
The post I’m Here appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
One of these worlds is gone, and to the other, we will never return.
The post A Tale of Two Pools appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.