In All Reality - I can’t be a rockstar…so I do this instead.

Jeffrey Zeldman is a bit of a living legend in the web community. He’s been in the game since the beginning, when the Web was still young and no one knew anything about it. “Content” wasn’t a word anyone used, and there certainly wasn’t any talking about separation of presentation layers. Animated GIFs were king, and CSS hadn’t even been invented yet. In short, “web standards” didn’t exist and everyone was free to take their own arbitrary approach to making a home on the net. Zeldman was a trailblazer in that intimidating frontier, serving as a force of organization in that beginning firmament and helping to shape it into the the Web we know and (for the most part) love today.

Zeldman recently redesigned his website. His site has never been over-the-top, it’s always had a large focus on his content and writing, with the bare minimums everywhere else – always appealing, never obnoxious. So, I went there with an expectation of reserved greatness. What I saw left me… nonplussed. There wasn’t anything wrong with it per se, it just lacked… something. Zeldman was touting it as back to basics, but I received it as moving toward mundane.

And then I noticed the comments. Dozens of people with the typical trollish statements of “Wow! This is awesome! Thanks!” and just as many responding with quips of “Simple and easy to read” and praises for its minimalistic nature. More still dropped in some line showing their devotion to Mr. Zeldman by referencing that they owned his books or that they’ve “loved everything you’ve done.” It hit me: I don’t like this. Jeffrey Zeldman, scion of all that is good in web design and content presentation has made something that is, even despite my subjectivity toward his previous work, really not very good. I was amazed, and here were all these members of my peer group praising the work – largely it seemed because of who had done it and not what had been done.

We see work that has been done, work that we appreciate for its innovation, its aesthetics, its rock-solid professionalism, and we inscribe that in our minds and hold its creator(s) up as a source of inspiration. But eventually we grow in our own skills, trends change, and we discover that we don’t have to blindly go with what we’ve been told is good. Eventually through our perseverance and striving to become better at what we do, we achieve a place among our peers where our judgments can become more objective and our opinions worth something. We move from staring with starry-eyes up at a gleaming figure to being able to look across and share a handshake. And eventually we move higher, and find our next role model to guide us on our climb to improvement.

I’m not Jeff Zeldman. I’m nowhere near as successful as he is, and I know that he has more experience in almost every facet of our shared profession. But I think I’ve reached a point in my career where I can start looking elsewhere for my inspiration, and working to blaze my own trail forward.