All posts by apartness

“King of Web Standards”—Bloomberg Businessweek. Principal Designer and Creative Director, Automattic. Founder & Publisher, A List Apart Magazine. Co-founder, An Event Apart UX and front-end design conference with Eric Meyer. Publisher and co-founder with Jason Santa Maria of A Book Apart—brief books for web and interaction designers. Have written two books, notably the foundational web standards text, Designing With Web Standards, currently in a 3rd Edition co-authored with Ethan Marcotte. It has been translated into 15 languages, including Italian, Chinese, Hungarian, Polish and Portuguese. Faculty member on the MFA, Interaction Design program at School of Visual Arts, New York. Host of The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”). In 2012, was the first designer inducted in the SXSW Interactive Hall of Fame. But what I really want to do is direct.

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Automattic DesignCreative LeadershipDesign Stories

The Beauty Trap in Design

My primary responsibility as a UX designer and creative director is to get inside the mind of the client and their customer. To think like they do, anticipating stumbling blocks they may encounter even if a trained professional web designer would sail briskly through.

/ October 25, 2019
Automattic DesignComputational DesignCreative Leadership

Accessibility Standards: Defining What Success Means

Announcing the first pass at Team 51 accessibility standards. Spread the love.

/ June 4, 2019
Automattic DesignCreative LeadershipDesign Stories

You got this.

Through the rosy lens of memory, learning HTML and Photoshop back in the day was a breeze. Now I’m learning new tech, and it’s hard. Maybe you’re in the same boat.

/ May 22, 2019
Creative LeadershipDesign StoriesEmpathy Challenge

Money and tech

From optimistically conceived origins and message statements about making the world a better place, too many websites and startups have become the leading edge of bias and trauma, especially for marginalized and at-risk groups.

How have so many of our digital services and social networks become a garbage fire of lies, distortions, hate speech, tribalism, snake oil, and privacy violations?

/ April 15, 2019