After listening to Hillman Curtis speak twice today, (once for the opening keynote, and another for a session on design process) I now have nothing but respect for him, and gratitude for the inspiration he provided through what he had to say and how he said it. A complete reversal in my opinion of the man and his work. His recently released book, MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer, is one I’ll have to acquire soon. continued

I just returned home from Meet The Makers, a one-day gig here in San Francisco for (in the words of the organizers) creative people in a technical world. The small crowd included creative/design directors, web/interaction designers, IAs, founders, CTOs, Principals, and CEOs. Lots of people who make the Web happen. continued

I’ve also been in touch about the redesign and working closely with Eric Meyer for the past few months. He’s been a tremendous source of encouragement and inspiration along the way. He powerfully adds:

“… the really important stuff all happened behind the scenes. Using no tables to lay out the page, but instead applying CSS to XHTML, the site is a stunning example of how standards can be made to work today.”

Wow, even as I write this, an engineer just yelled across the room that that article about the redesign is currently the number one topic on BlogDex, and rapidly climbing on Daypop (both index thousands of weblogs and report back the most popular topics of the day). Hail to the bloggers of the world — they actually get it because they’ve been doing it.

Just after wrapping up my last post, I started looking around to see if any buzz about the WN launch had hit the Web yet. Ahem… I don’t think this one will sneak under too many radars. Jeffrey Zeldman just dedicated a huge amount of space to the redesign in today’s Daily Report. In a perfect answer to the “what’s the big deal?” questions I just asked, he writes: continued

When Eric Meyer visited last week, we pressed him for a quote or two about the Wired News redesign. I was blown away with what he sent back. While his comments were intended for the press release and the story our Editor is writing, I asked him if I could reuse the quotes here, to which he agreed. I think his comments will get edited down for the release. But to me, they’re worth including in their entirety here: continued

Eric Meyer came to the Bay Area this week to take care of business at Netscape’s headquarters in Mountain View. So while Eric was in town, he and I set up a time to meet each other and talk about the Wired News redesign. He came by our office this morning and we went over everything from high-level concerns of mine, to specific details of the markup and CSS. He even helped fix a couple of minor issues that happened to jump out at us while we were reviewing the site. We headed over to MoMo’s afterwards to grab lunch.

It was an honor (and a lot of fun) to spend just a few hours with Eric. He knows the CSS spec and browser rendering discrepancies better than I know the information on my own business card. He’s incredibly smart, very knowledgeable, and friendly to boot.

I now have three of the books he’s written about CSS, and I really like his writing style. The way he writes makes complex concepts easy to understand. He breaks ideas down into logical pieces, identifies and defines terms you should understand as you need them, and manages to do it all in a friendly, familiar tone that makes reading technical descriptions a pleasure. Whether you’re just a beginner and know very little about CSS, or you’ve been turning to CSS for a while now to make your life a lot easier, having a Meyer book nearby is a great reference and teaching tool for the details you can’t remember or understand.

I sent a note yesterday to Eric Meyer (considered the expert on CSS, and author of many of the books I’ve been referencing about the subject) and to Jeffrey Zeldman (co-founder of The Web Standards Project and creative director of A List Apart). It was a long message, and I mean, long. The purpose of the message was to let them know in advance what we’re doing with the Wired News redesign I mentioned here yesterday, and to guage their interest in knowing and seeing more. continued