When my mother was pregnant with my younger brother Pete, my father took her to see West Side Story in New York. My mom said every time the orchestra played, Pete kicked in her womb, keeping perfect time. Some people are born to play the drums. Pete played before he was born. He never stopped. […]
The post Valediction appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
The world is losing one of the greatest musicians, rhythmic theorists, and just lovely and decent human beings ever to exist.
The post About Pete appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
I love the smell of my neighbor’s weed in the morning. And afternoon. And evening. Seven days a week, God bless him. A grocery delivery guy dropping food at my apartment Thursday morning thought it was my weed and complimented me on the quality. Twenty-nine-and-a-half years sober. I still enjoy the smell.
The post Smells like victory appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
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, […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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