Jeffrey Zeldman Quotes

I was really just a hard-core geek, if you will, in 1996, and was building websites as a hobby. I started doing a lot of web design and development and built my first website on the now-defunct GeoCities platform.

Real web designers write code. Always have, always will.

Macs are not intuitive. It's intuitive to the person who created it. It's not intuitive to me.

I'd like to be able to design as easily as if I was using Photoshop. I'd like to be able to create a multicolumn layout and control source order without having to do advanced mathematics or hire Eric Meyer or Dan Cederholm to figure out the CSS, because I can't.

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.

For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.

Keep it simple, stupid. Good game design shouldn't keep you looking at the manual but should have enough depth where you feel like you bring something new to the game every time you play.

Video games and YouTube.com are creatively booming, even though Web design, as demonstrated by the ugly clutter of most major news sites, is in the pits.

Good design is also an act of communication between the designer and the user, except that all the communication has to come about by the appearance of the device itself. The device must explain itself.

The design should make the product speak to you.

Design should be easy in the sense that every step should be obviously and clearly identifiable. Simplify elements to make change simple so you can manage the technical risk.

My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.

I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound - indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.

Things that are ultimately complex must have a simple end user experience if they are to be successful.

Websites are kind of useless. There's so much great web content and design out there, but the ways in which they are being experienced are not being maximized.

Because the competitive landscape of the web is such that the site which looks and works best gets the most traffic, developers and designers put a premium on the presentation of that content and let structural markup take a back seat.

If you don't have an emotionally engaging design for a device, no one will care about it.

A Web site that promotes flow is like a gourmet meal. You start off with the appetizers, move on to the salads and entrees, and build toward dessert. Unfortunately, most sites are built like a cafeteria. You pick whatever you want. That sounds good at first, but soon it doesn't matter what you choose to do. Everything is bland and the same.

Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex. The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated.

I did an early version of my site where it was virtually impossible to get through it, just as a statement about the web. But after a few laughs and some angry e-mails, I realized it wasn't doing me much good. I think the web has become more about the final product, not what it takes to get to it.

I am always looking for ways to move technology away from being over-featured. Moving to Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s meant I grew up as a designer in an environment where technology is a tool and not a means to an end. I believe that design should be driven by ideas, not style.

We've tried to simplify the site because some people found it too difficult to use and were intimidated by it.