Know your web design history.

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Pitching isn’t bragging.

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Cooling my heels at the drugstore.

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Less, but better? Not this week.

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New tunes from an old maker.

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FIRST, the disclaimers: Some of my favorite writers—folks who are as anti-fascist and pro-democracy as they come—publish on Substack, but I read and recommend their work less and less frequently, because Substack has a Nazi problem. To wit: Awkward: Substack’s Nazi Problem Substack call themselves a platform rather than a publication, a classic web conundrum. […]

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Posted today for no particular reason.

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It’s no secret that newspapers across the country exist in a fragile ecosystem. Automattic has long supported journalism and local media with investments in publications and platforms like Longreads, The Atavist, and Newspack. We believe that local news still matters—and now more than ever. That’s why we’re sponsoring Local News Day on April 9, 2026. — Support Journalism with […]

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“The word ‘computer’ only really slid over to mean ‘a machine’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, once we started building mechanical and then electronic devices to do that work instead [of people]. We did not name the machines after some abstract idea. We named them after the humans they were replacing.”

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Good UX is what companies do when they have to. A company that has your stuff locked away doesn’t have to.

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Once more for the folks in the back. Calibri is easier than Times New Roman for folks with certain visual disabilities to read. That’s why the Biden Administration chose Calibri for their digital communications: to include more people and make life just a wee bit easier for the disabled. And who in their right mind could […]

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Or, the ins and outs of building and losing a large social media follower account. First, the data: Follower counts are accurate as of 7 December, 2025. My Twitter audience wasn’t a pop or movie star following count. But for a web designer and occasional writer of books, a Twitter base of 350K people was a […]

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They say AI will replace the web as we know it, and this time they mean it. Here follows a short list of previous times they also meant it, starting way back in 1997. Wired: March 1, 1997: “You can kiss your web browser goodbye” – Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, The Big Story. Inspired by […]

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Fam and I are visiting my 96-year-old Uncle George tonight. We love him. His complicated and somewhat meandering stories have been music to my daughter’s ears since she fell asleep in a cab at age six listening to him lament his wife’s death. George is my late mother’s only sibling, and the only survivor of […]

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My father was an engineer who designed robots. When I first learned what he did, I imagined the Robot from “Lost in Space,” and asked him to make me one. When I turned 13, I realized that the pick-and-place robots he designed replaced assembly-line workers, and asked how he, who’d been a socialist in his impoverished […]

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Working in tech means being comfortable with change and uncertainty. Successfully working in tech means not letting change and uncertainty paralyze you. Forge ahead on the best information you have, and be prepared to change direction as needed.

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We must stop thinking of failure as an end of something, and learn to see it as a natural part of progress. The first incarnation of a new idea may die, but the best ideas will find new lives. Behind every successful launch, there are 100 interesting failures. 

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My beloved veterinarian’s office apparently moved to a new office location without informing customers. They also changed phone systems. The new phone system doesn’t work, and they didn’t leave a forwarding message on the old phone system. You call, leave a message, never hear back, and never learn what’s become of the business. Our oldest […]

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At Automattic, we know our time is finite and precious. Here are the questions we ask ourselves before agreeing to any meeting:

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“And in their place came acceptance.” Staying relevant in your profession as you age and technology changes.

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Starting today, file suits to prevent biased gerrymandering. Fight harder for the right to vote than the GOP has fought to suppress the votes of Americans MAGA dislikes. Craft a Democratic party platform focused on equal rights, equal justice, fair wages, and affordable housing. Win the Midterms, shifting the balance of power in congress. Upon […]

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My doctor sends me to Brooklyn for an abdominal aortic aneurysm screening. As instructed, I fast for six hours beforehand. I don’t even brush my teeth, for fear of swallowing toothpaste and screwing up the test. I wear a Covid-era face mask to avoid breathing on anyone. The journey takes me to Boro Hall, a […]

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Nat Tarnoff covers the basics.

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I encounter broken systems like this almost every week. And probably, so do you.

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Instead of screaming, I turned on the faucet.

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This is a test. This is only a test. I’m using WordLand to write this post to my website. It’s a new, open source, stripped-down writer’s tool for bloggers. ## An H2 subhead, my liege. WordLand supports Markdown, I understand. It also supports direct bolding and links, of course. An overview of the features is […]

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A refreshing dip into what we’ve learned about web typography over the past 20+ years.

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I asked Claude to write about the career of my father, the inventor Maurice Zeldman, as if I had written it myself. Here, with no edits from me, is what it came up with:

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The first website my colleagues and I created was for “Batman Forever” (1995, d. Joel Schumacher), starring Val Kilmer. That website changed my life and career. I never saw “Top Gun,” but Val Kilmer made a brilliant Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors.” Rest in peace.

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The whole 90 minutes, my brain’s shrieking, “You’re having a panic attack!”

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