Jeffrey Zeldman is a web designer, author and speaker on web design. He founded the web design studio Happy Cog, and has maintained a blog, Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report, on the topic of web design since 1995. His most recent book is titled Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition (with Ethan Marcotte). Zeldman co-founded The Web Standards Project (WaSP), a group of professional website designers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the standards promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He is also the co-founder, with Eric Meyer, of An Event Apart, a design conference "for people who make websites." He is the co-host, with Dan Benjamin, of The Big Web Show, a podcast about the web and online publishing.
Zeldman is held to be one of a vanguard of proficient visual designers who have adopted and promoted the use of standards-based, cross-browser solutions to web design problems. In particular, he has sought to destroy the myth that accessible websites have to be ugly or apparently “undesigned.” His books and websites have helped promote a general improvement in the technical, visual design, usability and accessibility of websites, through the use of XHTML code and CSS.
Zeldman has blogged and published independent web content since 1995. In 1998, he began the e-zine A List Apart, which focuses on best practices in web design and development, and co-founded The Web Standards Project, which persuaded Netscape and Microsoft to support the same standards in their web browsers. Once browsers supported standards, A List Apart taught designers to use them. Zeldman's book Designing With Web Standards brought standards awareness to a new international audience.
In 2007, 2008 and 2009, A List Apart conducted surveys of web designers, creating one of the first public pictures of the profession as it is practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.
Former or current employees of Happy Cog helped develop "sIFR", the Flash based text replacement commonly used by his team to execute custom fonts on a website.