Jeffrey Zeldman Sign Quotations

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

Content informs design; design without content is decoration.

Good information architecture enables people to find and do what they came for. Great information architecture takes find out of the equation: the site behaves as the visitor expects. Poor or missing information architecture neuters content, design, and programming and devalues the site for its owners as well as the audience it was created to serve. It’s like a film with no director. The actors may be good, the sets may be lovely, but audiences will leave soon after the opening credits.

Whether the task is writing, design, or hanging a picture straight, it is obvious that we do our best work when healthy, rested, refreshed, alert, and eager to do the job for its own sake.

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration.

Good Web design is about the character of the content, not the character of the designer.

CSS is the design language of the web, and it is not as easy to use as it ought to be, and it can be confusing, especially if you are new to it.

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.

Business owners should think of designers as architects, not decorators.

With consumers buying two smartphones for every desktop computer they purchase, the demands, challenges and opportunities of the mobile space are reshaping our assumptions about design and user behaviour.

A good designer has technical knowledge - don't treat her like someone who's there to decide whether something should be pink or orange.

Don't worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop.

At one point, I was blogging prodigiously, in the late '90s; and I was getting, like, millions of pages because I was, like, one of the only people writing about web design, and I was always writing about web design.

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.