Selling Jeffrey Zeldman on Selling

Wed 11 Oct 200612:16 AM

Fall Ball

Sat 7 Oct 200603:10 PM

Though I follow it passionately, I don’t write a lot about baseball here. This is mostly owing to the fact that, in contrast to those others in the blogosphere who write both more eloquently and/or more precisely about the subject, I generally feel that anything I have to offer runs along the lines of ‘blowing smoke out of my ass.’ I came late and unexpectedly to this passion, and while I have a lot of opinions about it, I feel much more like a student of the game than a sage expert.

Which is why I hesitated, really, to write about the Yankees’s 6-0 loss last night to the Detroit Tigers in the American League Division Series. They’re down in this five-game set now, 2-1, and they must win the next two games or summarize another season as a dismally oversold failure.

Listen Up, Adobe

Mon 2 Oct 200611:36 PM

Several weeks ago, at his personal Web site Design by Fire, former Adobe employee Andrei Herasimchuk published an open letter to John Warnock, co-founder and spiritual father of Adobe Inc. In it, Herasimchuk proposed the idea of making a selection of Adobe’s highly popular typefaces — Caslon, Franklin Gothic, Helvetica Neue, and others — available to the public under an open source license. The idea would be to reshape — and improve — the typographic climate for Web designers through a newfound ubiquity of these generally well-regarded typefaces.

It’s a terrific concept that I fully support, but it’s probably best described as ‘a long shot’ in the grand scheme of things. It’s true that Adobe would generate a tremendous amount of good will by open sourcing a slate of very useful typefaces, but I think I have an even better idea for Adobe to totally hit a home run in the near term, and without compromising any of their existing businesses. Ready for my crazy idea? Here goes; make the next version of the company’s Creative Suite software not totally suck. Crazy, right?

Ripped from the Headlines

Fri 29 Sep 200609:22 AM

Selling Out and Selling More

Tue 26 Sep 200601:17 AM

The first batch of my Hel-Fucking-Vetica tee-shirts are just arriving in mailboxes today; if you ordered yours before last Thursday, you should be seeing it soon.

So far the shirt has been selling way beyond my expectations; I’m terribly grateful to everyone who’s shown their support or just liked the shirt enough to order one for themselves. As I mentioned, I printed just one-hundred and fifty of these tee-shirts; in just the first week, about a hundred of them had been sold to lucky buyers, and they’re still selling briskly. Supplies are limited, so you’d better act fast if you want yours.

AIGA Here and There

Wed 20 Sep 200601:36 AM

Just a reminder for those in the Baltimore/D.C. area: I’ll be giving a talk on Thursday night at Villa Julie College for the Baltimore chapter of AIGA. I’m going to cover a wide gamut of stuff from what happens at NYTimes.com to my extracurricular projects to my philosophy on design management to a quick tour of my thinking on using typographic grids online. It’s going to be fun; so if you can make it, please come up to introduce yourself.

In other — much bigger — AIGA news, I’m very pleased — ecstatic, actually — to announce that the one and only Jeffrey Zeldman will have a night of his own in mid-October for the New York chapter of AIGA as a part of our Small Talks series. Small Talks is a long-running tradition of the New York chapter, in which we invite a series of highly esteemed design figures to talk about subjects near and dear to their hearts in intimate settings. We purposefully limit the number of seats available to these events in order to allow the speakers to do their magic in as casual and friendly an environment as possible, so book your ticket early before they’re sold out.

Illustrate Me for August

Mon 18 Sep 200608:05 PM

Big and Fast and Slow

Mon 18 Sep 200612:40 AM

Things have been quiet here because my new iMac arrived at the end of last week. I’ve been diligently getting it set up so I can do some serious work with it; it’s kind of amazing how many little utilities, tweaks and additions to the operating system have become must-haves for me to get things done.

After owning laptops for so long — and after having spent nearly three years with a diminutive 12-in. PowerBook — working on a desktop takes some getting used to. Having such an emphatic statement of computing power displayed so prominently on my desktop is a new experience; this iMac is a beautiful thing of no particular shyness. It’s bright, bold and immense — I mean huge. Mousing up to the top right of my screen feels like an unnaturally long trip; it’s a little like reaching for a jar from the top shelf in my kitchen.