27 Mar 2004 | Vitaliy said...

YEY! :D

27 Mar 2004 | Mike said...

It looks really nice, I'm super impressed.

I guess all those late night emails Jeffrey sent me paid off :)

28 Mar 2004 | robotika said...

i'll start off by saying I am a fan of zeldman's work, and i appreciate everything he's doing, but... wow, am i the only one who thinks drop shadows and rounded buttons look dated? people like zeldman should be pushing css into new arenas, make it the cutting edge, but instead it seems like almost every css site i see looks like it was done in 1998. no wonder people are slow to jump on the css bandwagon, they must look at half the sites and think "i'm not stepping back in time for this". surely the best way to make people want to use web standards/css is by giving the world sites that you can't easily do with tables and a warezed copy of photoshop (one reason flash become so huge). i'm only new to css based sites, but when i see the masters producing work like this, it makes me wonder where it's heading. 1995?

28 Mar 2004 | Javier Cabrera said...

Robotika, i agree. The new design is not very "guru" like zeldman pretend.
I see better layouts in CSS Zen Garden o CSS Vault.

Zeldman its being old :-)

28 Mar 2004 | apartness said...

CSS Zen Garden is a fine arts site. Happy Cog is a business site. Apples and oranges.

CSS Zen Garden's purpose is to expand the vocabulary of CSS-based visual design on the web. Happy Cog's purpose is to showcase the company's services to potential clients in an easy-to-use, brand-appropriate context. Both sites fulfill their very different objectives.

If you look under the hood of either site, you'll see semantic markup and sophisticated CSS.

If you're going to Happy Cog to be visually blown away by a "guru", that expectation is coming from you, not from Happy Cog. The site is not pitched at you, it's pitched at clients. The design is appropriate to the task, and, in our opinion, it does its job pleasantly and unobtrusively.

Design is not all about flash and zoom and blowing people away. Design is about identity and audience.

But surely you know this. After all, you're reading 37signals's Signal vs. Noise.

28 Mar 2004 | Bryan said...

If you're going to Happy Cog to be visually blown away by a "guru", that expectation is coming from you, not from Happy Cog. The site is not pitched at you, it's pitched at clients. The design is appropriate to the task, and, in our opinion, it does its job pleasantly and unobtrusively.

Expertly put. Design is all about context.

28 Mar 2004 | Martin said...

Robotika, I guess I sort of agree, but out of curiousity, could you give some pointers as to what layout style you think would be hipper?

29 Mar 2004 | robotika said...

Sure Happy Cog is a nice enough business site, but with the hype it's been getting on all the web standards sites/blogs, i expected to be impressed. maybe that is my mistake, but when something gets that much hype, you can't help but expect something amazing. the last thing we need is everyone patting each other on the back for producing work that is mediocre. it's not happening yet, but i get the feeling we're heading there. so many of the big css based sites are ugly (not mentioning names, but i'm sure some people must know what i'm talking about).

The reason i posted is i got to thinking (wondering) why the uptake to web standards has been so slow, and Happy Cog is the perfect example. You show that to any web developer/designer, and most will say "so what? i can do that with tables..without all the cross browser problems and learning curve". if the masters are using new methods to produce outdated techniques, well who is seriously gonna want to jump on the bandwagon. seems like it's only the code nerds.

Like I said, what Zeldman is doing is great, and I agree with what the web standards movement is trying to achieve, but none of the big guns in web standards have the sites to push web standards into the mainstream. At the end of the day, accessability and semantic markup isn't gonna do it. Saying that, rounded buttons and drop shadows isn't going to do it either. Maybe with the next generation browsers and css3 we might see it hit the mainstream, but at the moment it's moving incredibly slow.

i hope i'm not coming across as arrogant as i'm not saying i can do better, but i'm not at the forefront of the movement either. i'm just concerned with the direction it's all heading. people need to stop using these template looking 3 column liquid layouts and start experimenting. squint your eyes and load up cssvault. i bet 60% of the sites will all look the same.

what layout style you think would be hipper?

well, the sites got me wanting to do css were
http://www.fishmarketing.net
http://destroydrop.com
and
http://www.definitivejux.net

it's that sort of work that will make css based sites popular. here's to hope we get to see a lot more work of that quality in the very near future.

29 Mar 2004 | Sunny said...

Robotika,

Again, you are missing the point. The context, the audience of the sites you mention are entirely different from clients of Happy Cog.

Frankly the redesign of Happy Cog accomplishes their redesign goals entirely. Its simpler to use, less cluttered, more focused on projects and clients!

Its refereshing to see that when there has been all this talk about metrics, simplicity, here is a redesign that delivers.

29 Mar 2004 | apartness said...

Robotika:

You raise a valid issue one I've raised myself in other contexts. Some designers, for some projects, will want to take web layouts where they have never been taken before. Many of those designers probably do need to see avante-garde layouts done with CSS if they are to take a more active interest in the W3Cs presentation language. But the avante-garde layout examples are out there: you yourself cited the best-known example, CSS Zen Garden, which does that very job of saying look what is possible!

But that is not Happy Cogs job. Happy Cogs job is to engage potential clients: specifically, larger organizations looking for human-friendly, audience- and brand-appropriate sites that are easy to understand and use, enjoyable to look at, and coded to W3C specs in order to load faster, last longer, and work better for more people and more Internet devices.

Web standards are not Happy Cogs reason for being; they are simply part of the package. Radically alternative layouts are not what our clients are looking for; they are looking for better layouts than what they have, certainly, but they do not come to us for avante-garde visual experiments. They come for clarity, simplicity, transparent usability, well-organized (and edited) content, and appropriate design (not fussy overdesign). You might as well complain that 37signals.com doesnt do a good enough job of selling Flash ActionScript as gripe that Happy Cogs site a business site doesnt vibe like an art school experiment.

Now, a year or so ago, I had much the same feeling as youre expressing. I thought WaSP should do more to engage visual designers, as it had already engaged browser makers, tool makers, developers, and markup geeks. WaSP steering committee member Dori Smith and I came up with the idea of asking the community to redesign webstandards.org, pushing it in radically new directions. We would choose the most interesting designs submitted, and use an ALA-type style switcher to let visitors change from one layout to the next.

It never happened, for various reasons, and shortly after that discussion I retired from webstandards.org (not because of any problem, just because it was time to move on). But six months later, Dave Shea independently came up with the same idea and made it happen at CSS Zen Garden. The community responded brilliantly, and the kind of work youre looking for may be found there.

As to the core of your argument, I think youre mapping your desires what excites and motivates you onto mainstream web developers, designers, and site managers who do not share your feeling. I work with and talk to many of these people, and have lectured to and written books for many more of them. They are not necessarily looking for avante-garde, boundary-busting layout techniques. If their same tried-and-true layout approaches can be made less markup-intensive, more accessible, easier to update, and faster-loading, and can work on more browsers and devices, those benefits are more than enough to motivate many, many professionals to learn about and use web standards.

If you look around, youll see that more and more mainstream sites are adopting web standards, and youll also notice that many of these sites dont reinvent the wheel visually, they simply do what they know works and is easy for their visitors to understand. Your argument is correct for you and for a minority of visual boundary-pushers, but not for the masses whose views youre claiming to represent. Just my opinion, of course.

29 Mar 2004 | Javier Cabrera said...

Then change your slogan to: "We make what all other webdesign firms, but our designs validate in xhtml and css... but basicly we do the same."

(its a joke..i know.. dont kill me)

;-) ok, i got the point. It's our fault for expect too much of it.

Sorry my english, im from Argentina.

29 Mar 2004 | Simon said...

Zeldman is too modest. Have you viewed source? There are almost no tags, there's more meta data than body tags on some pages. All the design is CSS. If that's not being a guru it is at very least being a designer who insists on best practices, which is probably a label Zeldman would prefer. I agree the design doesnt look like it was done by a 22 year old. It looks like the work of a mature designer who works on major accounts, which it is.

30 Mar 2004 | simon says said...

major accounts? nope. good man with good intentions, though. web standards is a thing of the past. browser wars are done. people don't care. windows xp and ie rule now. period. whine all you want.

30 Mar 2004 | Javier Cabrera said...

"design doesnt look like it was done by a 22 year old. It looks like the work of a mature designer who works on major accounts, which it is."

I hate "fans". I have exactly 22 years old and i work for majors accounts. So? I dont say that the new design sucks, i only say that i was expecting something bigger from a man who is like "god of design and standards" for a lot of people.

I dont like, but it dosent suck.

So, if you have 22 years old, you are a "freaky" designer with empty pokets, and if you have 40 years old, you are a huge designer with full pockets and nobody can think different from you? it is just a matter of age? please!!!... you dont have a clue of what are you talking about if that what you think!

I DONT like tha new design. That's my opinion. Perhaps i was expecting too much, but what i can say. I dont like it. and i dont care the fact that zeldman wrote an excelent book or if he works for coca-cola or for the vatican, i dont care, it dosent make a difference for me.

I have my own opinion, my freedom to not think that because a man have a success all the things that he made from now on, are perfect. I have view. And my view says that i don't like that design. Its just my opinion, other people thinks different.

I love all you, god bless Argentina.
Javier Cabrera
www.geekonline.com.ar

01 Apr 2004 | dan dan the fast drumming man said...

he's wasting his time then. The site uses a redirector that google won't pick up.

01 Apr 2004 | JF said...

Those comments from that guy should be deleted.

Gosh, we wish MovableType made this easy, but they don't. Guess we'll have to wait for MT 3.0 in order to get this comment spam stuff under control. And, yes, we've tried the MT-Blacklist plug-in, but it keeps giving us errors. Ugh.