Jeffrey Zeldman

Marketing is not bragging, and touting one's wares is not evil. The baker in the medieval town square must holler, 'Fresh rolls!' if he hopes to feed the townfolk.

There is a difference between being arrogant about yourself as a person and being confident that your work has some value. The first is unattractive; the second is healthy and natural.

I worry about every newspaper. I worry about the financial undertaking, and I worry that somehow the loss of the sale of the paper version will affect their ability to have journalists and editors and producers. We really need those.

My daughter loves stories about my childhood, and we both love discussing women's issues. She's a wise and mature ten-year-old.

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.

The less concerned with aesthetics and usability these friends and family members are, the more easily they navigate sites and applications I can't make head nor hair of. Like the ex-girlfriend who mastered Ebay.

Put simply, if an interface is poorly designed, I will not see the data I looked for, even if it is right there on the page.

Thanks to budget shortfalls and format wars, our traditional media, literature, and arts are perishing faster than ever before. Nothing conceived by the human mind, except Heaven and nuclear winter, is eternal.

Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

On the traditional computer keyboard, I'm a super-fast touch typist. I mastered touch typing in high school.

My first typewriter cost me $75. I can't tell you how many hours it took me to earn that money, or how proud I was of that object. I wrote my first books on it. They will never be published, but that's all right.

I wanted to be a writer and an artist. Learning to type as quickly as I could think was a needed skill and part of my long self-directed apprenticeship.

I'm not against Flash, and I love the work that people such as Joshua Davis do.

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

Dropbox, with its emphasis on good old-fashioned hierarchies, is superb at automatically saving one original of each photo I take, whether shot with a phone or a fancy camera. No loops, no duplicates, no confusion.

To my way of thinking, passive management of file assets is okay for screwing around with iPads, where we're mainly watching TV on Netflix or obsessive-compulsively checking the popularity of our Instagram uploads.

Dropbox sweats the user experience details as commendably as it masters the considerable engineering challenges required to reliably sync files everywhere a user may need them.

Somebody has to pay our editors, writers, journalists, designers, developers, and all the other specialists whose passion and tears go into every chunk of worthwhile web content.

The web's strength lies precisely in its unique position as the world's first universal platform.