Jeff Croft

I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.

Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.

I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.

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Items tagged blueprint

  • Photo // 11.07.2008 // 8 AM // flickr

    Blueprint

  • Blog entry // 11.19.2007 // 8:13 PM // 58 Comments

    The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me

    If you’ve been paying attention, you know that a simple discussion about CSS frameworks has turned into quite a bit of a mess. This is in large part due to inadequacies in the way I presented my thoughts, and also in some part due to what can only be called hypersensitivity, snobbery, elitism, and flat-out ignorance on the part of a lot of CSS authors. Thankfully, someone much more level-headed than me and, quite frankly, a lot smarter than all of us, is here to save us all. He’s James Bennett, a Python and JavaScript programmer extraordinaire who also happens to be a solid CSS author. James wrote a freakin’ great piece called Let’s talk about frameworks (again), in which he explains a lot of things that the vast majority of web designer simply don’t understand.

    This concept of “frameworks” is pretty new to us designers and CSS authors. However, it’s not new to engineers. These guys have been dealing with frameworks, libraries, and snippets since the dawn of ages, it seems. James helps to explain why, from the perspective of a programmer — a very experienced, very expert-level one — frameworks are often developed, used, and published. He talks about the advantages and disadvantages of frameworks to developers, based on of many years of computer science and frameworks being built and used for almost every computer language ever created — years that us web designers simply almost never have (most of us are not programmers at all, and certainly not serious ones who have great experiences outside the realm of simple web scripting).

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  • Blog entry // 11.18.2007 // 3:36 PM // 64 Comments

    A follow up on CSS frameworks

    Wow. Less than 24 hours after my last post, there have been nearly 100 comments posted, and I’ve seemingly managed to piss off half the Internet. It seems some people took major offense to my thoughts, although no one has came forward to told me why (Andy Budd said on Twitter, “you’ve managed to tick off quite a few ‘limeys’ with your post,” but he didn’t answer when I asked why.

    Of all the topics I’ve ever written about, I would have thought CSS frameworks would be one of the most non-controversial. Apparently, not so. I thought I’d follow up by trying to detail what I’ve learned after a century of commentary on the past in question.

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  • Blog entry // 11.17.2007 // 4:46 PM // 190 Comments

    What’s not to love about CSS frameworks?

    Over the past several weeks, I’ve been bombarded (in e-mail, in person, and over IM) with questions about CSS frameworks. I guess I wrote the book on this topic (and contributed, if inadvertently, to one of the most notable CSS frameworks out there), so it’s completely understandable people would come to me with these questions. The question almost always sounds something like this:

    “I’ve read what you’ve written about CSS frameworks, and it sounds great…but [insert name of a usually-British CSS guru here] said they were bad. What do you think about what they have to say?”

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  • Blog entry // 08.09.2007 // 9:26 PM // 123 Comments

    The myth of content and presentation separation

    One of the hallmark attributes of web standards-based design is the concept that proper use of semantic (X)HTML and CSS completely abstracts the presentation of a site from its content. One key real-world benefit of this separation is that come redesign time, one only needs to change or replace the CSS stylesheet, and needn’t lay so much as a finger upon the hallowed grounds we call markup. I’m here to say that this mantra isn’t much more than a fairy tale.

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