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Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

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Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#61

Post by squidbeak »

mikepurvis wrote: post #42
vr46 wrote: post #18

I enjoyed Zeldman's A List Apart, and had no idea that he was so old at a time that we were all in our mid-twenties, I thought he was our cohort :D Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some…

That early 2000s CSS/design blogosphere was such an interesting place; I was just in high school at the time but loved following Dave Shea, Andy Budd, Doug Bowman, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson, and probably a whole bunch more I'm forgetting now.

A group who never seem to be mentioned in these threads are Jason Arber, Richard May and Rina Cheung. Pixelsurgeon was enormously influential in its day.

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#62

Post by WillAdams »

mjaniczek wrote: post #28

I'd love to see this sort of design history, but for old terminal/text-mode GUIs (TUIs?). I'm too young to have experienced it outside of the odd DOS cash desk at a grocery store. Does any book/website exist about these? VT220 library systems etc...

I believe it gets discussed a bit in some Cobol programming texts and ISTR it being discussed in _The Viewport Technician_:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4541460-the-viewport-tec...

Usually though it was a direct display of the program state for a given task, which was part of what made it so efficient --- the task needed to be simplified down into chunks which would fit on/make sense when viewed as text on a text screen viewport.

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#63

Post by squidbeak »

donatj wrote: post #47

I yearn for the early days when I could just "View Source" to see how something neat on a page worked. Now there's rarely anything neat, and when there is you can poke around with the inspector but it's likely buried deep in some obfuscated JS you'll never decipher.

It's still a pleasure to explore HTML and CSS on any creatively made site that isn't a js machine. Modern CSS is incredibly rich.

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#65

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

adregan wrote: post #53
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zeldman is dead*, and Nielsen is still running NNG. I don't think he's interested in getting into politics. Enough people hate on him, just for being the skunk at the graphic design picnic. * [EDIT] I’m wrong. Glad to be wrong. 'E's not dead. 'E's pining.

Zeldman is dead?! Did it happen in the last 24hrs? He posted on his site yesterday https://zeldman.com/

Maybe I’m wrong.

I would have sworn there was a big deal about his passing on this site, not long ago.

Happy to be wrong.

[EDIT] Yup. I’m wrong.

Glad to be.

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#66

Post by simonw »

donatj wrote: post #47

I yearn for the early days when I could just "View Source" to see how something neat on a page worked. Now there's rarely anything neat, and when there is you can poke around with the inspector but it's likely buried deep in some obfuscated JS you'll never decipher.

Did you poke around in that CSS Minecraft thing recently? One of the best view source experiences I've had in years: https://github.com/BenjaminAster/CSS-Minecraft/tree/main

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#67

Post by throw290525 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #36
DonHopkins wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which one is that? Let me guess: the one who's into blockchain now?

Zeldman is dead*, and Nielsen is still running NNG. I don't think he's interested in getting into politics. Enough people hate on him, just for being the skunk at the graphic design picnic. * [EDIT] I’m wrong. Glad to be wrong. 'E's not dead. 'E's pining.

[dead]

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#68

Post by throw290525 »

adregan wrote: post #53
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zeldman is dead*, and Nielsen is still running NNG. I don't think he's interested in getting into politics. Enough people hate on him, just for being the skunk at the graphic design picnic. * [EDIT] I’m wrong. Glad to be wrong. 'E's not dead. 'E's pining.

Zeldman is dead?! Did it happen in the last 24hrs? He posted on his site yesterday https://zeldman.com/

[dead]

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#70

Post by thesuitonym »

kristianc wrote: post #29
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a number of courses from the NNG Group, over the years, including from Nielsen and Tog (I don’t think Don Norman ever gave classes). It taught me great respect for usability. Designers hated Nielsen.

Yes, to be fair, Nielsen essentially has had the last laugh. Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism, and the full Flash intro page is a relic.

The full flash intro page is only a relic because Apple dropped support for Flash. Now, so many designers have a full page video that play, and prevent text from loading until every bit of bloated JavaScript finishing downloading and executing.

It's a different package, but it's the same junk.

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