JEFFREY ZELDMAN, born in New York City in 1955, studied music, film and English at Indiana University before earning a master's degree from the University of Virginia. He worked in music composition, journalism and advertising until 1995, when the Web began taking over his professional life.

Zeldman is an internationally known lecturer, web designer, book author, chief architect of the web standards movement and the creator of some of the web’s best-known brands. His personal site has welcomed over 25 million visitors and is a daily industry read. For nearly a decade, he has helped shape the medium’s zeitgeist in the areas of content, design, publishing and technology.

Zeldman is the publisher and creative director of A List Apart, an influential magazine “For People Who Make Websites,” and the founder of Happy Cog Studios.

He is the author of Designing With Web Standards (New Riders: 2003), Taking Your Talent to the Web (New Riders: 2001), and numerous articles for A List Apart, Adobe.com, Creativity Magazine, Digital Web Magazine, Macworld, PDN-Pix and other publications. Designing With Web Standards is available at Amazon, where it ranked #4 in Amazon Editor’s Picks and #7 in Amazon Customer’s Picks in an annual roundup of Amazon’s Best Books of 2003.

In 1998, Zeldman co-founded The Web Standards Project (WaSP), a grassroots coalition of web designers and developers that helped end the Browser Wars by persuading Microsoft and Netscape to support the same technologies in their browsers. Zeldman designed the original WaSP brand and crafted some of its most effective strategies and editorials. He led the Project between 2000 and 2002, retiring in 2003, and is probably the best-known web standards evangelist in the world.

Zeldman has been a juror for the Communication Arts Interactive Festival, the Art Directors Club of New York, the Seattle Show, the 5K, the May 5 Reboot, the Addy Awards, and the Radio Mercury Awards, and is an Advisory Board member of the Meet the Makers, SXSW Interactive, and i3Forum conferences.

He has lectured to groups including the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), The Columbia University Libraries, Los Alamos National Laboratories, The New York Public Library, The Public Library Association, and The New York State Forum for Information Resource Management, and at conferences and events including Builder, CMP, Digital Design World, Seybold, SXSW Interactive, Museums and the Web, Web Design World, and Webvisions, among others.