I'm surprised https://alistapart.com wasn't mentioned.
That’s by Jeffrey Zeldman
Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
111–120 of 204 posts
Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
#112I 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.
All those guys. Also, the daily visits to lnkedup.com k10k.net, designiskinky.com, newstoday.com were so influential and informative to me (wow, just did an archive.org lookup of some of those and got a nostalgic chill - https://web.archive.org/web/20050303092717if_/http://www.lin...).
Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
And UIs that are neither beautiful nor function (looking at you Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and many other "Enterprise" applications). If any of these were functional, most users wouldn't care about the visual appeal. NN were correct, but apparently their message didn't reach that particular sphere of web application developers.
If an 'Enterprise' applications website were functional people would be able to navigate to assistance when using the app. Therefore costing money in competent support techs or improving the product itself, neither of which are as easy as just being anti-competitive and monopolistic
I was referring to the web applications themselves, rather than the marketing, documentation, or support websites. In large vendors, those tend to come from a different part of the organisation, so are often superior to the products themselves.
The productivity drain of a poor UI is largely felt by the customers' employees, while the vendor benefits from sales of professional services and premium support contracts.
Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> Did I hit a nerve?
You're choosing to deflect and patronize, but not provide any further credibility to your unwarranted comparison. That speaks for itself.
> Don't you have some NFTs to shill at Denny's Applebee's Max?
You have no idea who I am or what I support, not everyone is a little caricature in your mind. This kind of negative attitude has no place in this forum.
Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen has designers hating him, and users matter much more than designers, so I think he came out way ahead. Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design! https://asktog.com/atc/about-bruce-tognazzini/ Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented…
> the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus Funny enough, this was actually removed in the early versions of OS X: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/1999/12/macos-x-dp2/#:~:text... But today it seems to be back.
He was (still is, I believe) NOT a fan of the Dock: https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
#116Lovely window into the history.
Sometimes I wonder how I (or generally people of that time) would react to seeing the modern web. At least — the 'good' modern web and design. Awe? Confusion? Understanding that this is the future in the very same way that we understand that 'that' was the past?
Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
#117I 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…
Wow - just visited A List Apart for the first time in some years and it looks vastly different. Also, there is a post on the home page from a year ago tomorrow that has a new tag on it. Times have changed I guess.
Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
#118I'd've put Celement Mok on this list as well ...
Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back then, it felt like he was one of the rare few people who was actually focused on serving the needs of the user. Those were the days when too many sites thought it was a good idea to show a Flash splash screen before entering a site, and designers seemed to have a grudge against text that was big enough for a normal person to read.
Teenage me thought there was NOTHING cooler than a flashy splash page and those micro bitmap fonts a la "silkscreen". Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.
8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately.
I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you could fit more, larger text onscreen) and less beautiful (it rendered differently with font smoothing).
IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
#120Every time I work on a website's UI/UX I have that image of Zeldman staring at me from "Designing with web standards"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/df/Designi...
