Dubbed King of Web Standards by Business Week, Jeffrey Zeldman was one of the first designers, bloggers, and independent publishers on the web, and one of the first web design teachers. In 1998, he co-founded and designed—and from 1999 to 2002 he directed—The Web Standards Project, a grassroots coalition that helped bring HTML, CSS, and JavaScript standards to our browsers.

Jeffrey founded and is executive creative director of Happy Cog™, a high-end web design agency with studios in New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, named “Design Agency of the Year” in the 2010 .net Awards. He publishes the industry-leading magazine A List Apart “for people who make websites;” has written two books, notably the foundational web standards text, Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition with Ethan Marcotte. His Taking Your Talent to the Web, rated five stars at Amazon.com since the day it was published, is now a free downloadable book (PDF, 9.5 MB).

Jeffrey co-founded the multi-city web design conference An Event Apart with Eric Meyer; the consistently sold-out event is widely considered a leading-edge educational forum for people who make websites. Jeffrey also co-hosts The Big Web Show with Dan Benjamin (“Video Podcast of the Year,” 2010 .net Awards); is the publisher of the new “A Book Apart” series of short books for people who make websites, including the best-selling HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith and CSS3 For Web Designers by Dan Cederholm; and is a faculty member on the MFA, Interaction Design program at School of Visual Arts.

Jeffrey serves on the Advisory Boards of SXSW Interactive and Rosenfeld Media (Emeritus) and is a co-founder of The Deck advertising network. Before becoming a web designer, he worked as a composer and musician; as a writer for The Washington Post and City Paper; and as an advertising creative at DeVito/Verdi and elsewhere. He lives in New York City with his daughter Ava.

Additional information is available at Wikipedia, Happy Cog, Google, Amazon, Facebook, A List Apart, &c.

* Photo by Tony Quartarolo