HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Accessibility. Progressive enhancement instead of graceful degradation. (Structured) content first. The more our industry and the technology we’re asked to support changes, the more these basics of the web standards movement remain exactly the same as they ever were.

Remove web standards from our platforms and history, and there is no iPhone, and therefore no competing Android. No frictionless on-the-go ecommerce; no check-ins; no sharing on Facebook or Twitter from 30,000 feet up. Lose web standards and you lose HTML5 and a billion smartphones that support it.

If the print aesthetic had won—if the technologies supporting that aesthetic, slice-and-dice table layouts and Flash, had continued to reign supreme—our web use would almost certainly still be limited to the desktop, and web content would very likely be constrained to the whims and abilities of a single, aging desktop browser. With no competition, there’d be no reason for that browser’s manufacturers to update it, and no need to improve its standards support, as the browser’s behavior would be taken as a defacto standard. As a result, there would be no HTML5, no CSS3, no point in innovating standard technologies.

Betting on HTML never looked like the smart move. There were times during the 1990s when I felt like a chump for plodding away with CSS and HTML when more powerful and better supported tools were available. Most of my fellow designers were using Flash and table layouts to create beautiful, powerful sites with full typographic control while I struggled to bring rudimentary typography to Netscape and Microsoft’s browsers, and to convince Happy Cog’s earliest clients that accessible, standards-based, user-focused design was in their customers’ and their best interest. Thank goodness enough of them agreed. Those clients—and yours, if you too supported accessible standards-based design before it was cool—are the true heroes of the standards movement.

That movement would not have succeeded without the support of thousands of designers and developers like you. You are the heroes of yesterday and tomorrow. How we move forward is up to you.

So as you use HTML5 and CSS3 (maybe even going so far as to contribute to their final shape), and as you progressively enhance and responsively design a web of services (not just content) for everything from phones to Frigidaires, take a moment out of your busy day. Put on the blue cap. You’ve earned it.

It doesn’t take too many experiences like this to realize that content is not just a writer’s problem, it is a design problem. As good advertising comes from the product, and good filmmaking begins with a riveting story, good web design starts with content. If you don’t believe me, try designing a universal template.

On the web, design is almost always in the service of content. And yet our designs are often hostile to content. Try to read a Roger Ebert review on your smartphone. For that matter, try to read it on your desktop computer. The creators of Mr. Ebert’s site have lathered it with so many layers of navigation, so many options, so much SEO-inspired linkage, that actually reading the review is far from the treat it should be. It’s as if a master chef crafted the perfect meal, only to have it served by a careless waiter in a chipped, dirty plastic bowl.

If our designs don’t serve content, users will find ways to get the content anyway. Used by millions, apps like Instapaper and Readability now deliver great reading experiences when the designer forgets to.

Of course, users have always had the ability to tailor their web reading experience: a custom style sheet here, a non-default font setting there. But these days, it’s not just those with special needs or quirky personalities who are changing our designs on the fly. It’s ordinary users who care about content.

And just as, for every user viewing our pixel-perfect masterpiece in the “right” browser and at the screen dimensions we envisioned, there has always been someone else trying to use it in an older browser or crummy kiosk, now more and more of our users are engaging with our content—or trying to—via smartphone and netbook. These users don’t have time—or screen real estate—to patiently wade through all the crap we’ve poured into the interface against our better judgement merely because the stakeholders requested it. These users want content. If we don’t deliver it, Flipboard—or someone else’s site—will.

Responsive design, mobile-first responsive design, and content strategy for adaptive design have made important inroads but there’s lots more work to be done. For one thing, there’s the dilemma of who pays for content. Our designs have trained users to ignore ads, so we make ever more annoying ads to try to grab those eyeballs back. To the extent that we succeed, we create more customers for Instapaper and Readability, where those ads are removed.

Responsive ads address the technical and visual aspects of the problem—or might if someone were working on them—but they don’t deliver the key metric, which is attention. How can we simultaneously satisfy the reader by allowing them to focus on content in a clutter-free environment, yet also satisfy the advertiser who is tired of paying to be ignored? What are you doing to help readers focus on the message they came to read—and your client or boss wants to deliver?

Patience and Fortitude got the people through the Depression, and they are also the qualities most needed by anyone in the business of persuasion, which is everyone reading this page. If you don’t believe you’re in the business of persuasion—if you think you write code or arrange pixels and the selling magically takes care of itself—then you should get out of this business, because your work will always be compromised, and you will grow to hate the craft you now love and despise yourself and your teammates.

Every one of us is a champion of the end-user and an advocate for the value of what we do. If we are not advocates, we cannot be great coders, great designers, or great exemplars of whichever noun best describes your position in the digital experience ecosystem. The toughest thing about being a champion, as any champ will tell you, is that you don’t just win a belt once and call it a day. You have to keep winning, fighting every punk who comes along to challenge you. What challengers are to boxers, negative, unhelpful ideas are to user experience advocates like us. We have to keep knocking them out. Unlike boxers, we have to do it kindly, and with a smile.

Persuasion never sleeps

I became a better web designer and consultant when I started evangelizing web standards, and I don’t mean that the knowledge of web standards increased my skills and therefore my value, although that is also true. I mean I got better at the art of persuasion and I discovered that persuasion, like rust, never sleeps. Between 1998 and 2001, we were relentless (and patient and fortitudinous) in delivering our message that complete and accurate browser implementations of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript were essential to the health and growth of the web. It’s a message we delivered to one browser engineer and one web developer at a time. Each time we delivered the message to a new pair of ears and eyes, we behaved as if it were the first time. We were like stage actors bringing freshness and discovery to a role they’ve performed a thousand times, only we weren’t acting. Each time we delivered the message to a new person, there was something genuinely new about it. I’m told that successful prostitutes have a similar gift for making the transaction feel special.

After browser makers finally climbed aboard the web standards train, we had to persuade web designers that it was okay to stop using table layouts, quit forking their scripts, and cease designing sites that were “best viewed with” anything other than “a web browser.” This was another Sisyphean task, requiring fresh stores of patience and fortitude. I can’t tell you how many times a developer said to me, “Do you know how much I get paid for knowing the seven ways to code a web page?” Each time I replied, “If you could code it one way, the standard way, you could use that extra money for photography or illustration or professional help with the written content.” And each time I said some variation of those words, it was like I’d just thought of that angle, and was giving my new best friend the inside track.

What goes around

Today I don’t spend much time selling engineers, designers, or clients on the value of semantic markup, progressive enhancement, and the other now-familiar elements of standards-based design. But those polished persuasive skills, and the patience and fortitude they rode in on, get used every day, even if I spend most of my time in meetings just listening and nodding. Eventually it becomes a Jedi thing. The persuasion lives in your eyes. They sparkle when a team member says the right thing.

How do you spell persuasion, and how do you keep it fresh?

By the time I met Marvin, he and I were toiling at Campbell-Mithun-Esty. He had been brought in to radically upgrade the financially successful but talent-challenged agency’s creative product. I was there because it was the first job I could get in New York.

Marvin was gentle. He never told you how stale your ideas were or how disappointed he was in you for not working harder. He made you believe you were the future, not only of the place, but of the profession.

Besides his warmth, what I remember most is a piece of advice he gave me: “If you’re not a creative director by the time you’re 40, get out of the business.”

I worked for all kinds of creative directors before I became one. Most were tough and many were silent. Sal DeVito would give you an assignment in the morning. Then, you and your partner would spend the next ten hours sketching and writing, probably on park benches because there weren’t enough desks at the agency. As night fell, you would humbly and silently present your stack of sketches to the master.

Sal would flip through them, stone-faced, quickly discarding anything remotely resembling an idea he had seen before—and he’d seen everything. Once in a while, he might stop for an instant and ponder a particular layout. You wouldn’t dare move a muscle or betray your faint hope that the ad in question might perhaps be found worthy. We’d watch his eyes. There! Just there! Was that the briefest flicker of amusement or approval? Was he, if only for an instant, considering accepting your work?

Like sex for men, it was over in a moment. The ad would join its brothers in the reject pile.

After days of this, Sal might buy something. A buy was when he stopped leafing through your work like a housewife rejecting lettuces, let his hands linger on the ad for a second or two, and allowed a thin smile to flicker on his lips. Did I say housewife? It was more like working for a Clint Eastwood character. Wait, did I just second-guess my own metaphor? See, I’m still submitting my work to Sal and I’m still afraid of his judgment.

During the dot-com boom they were handing out creative director titles like crack, but I avoided getting one until 1999. Five months into the gig, I quit to start Happy Cog. I left because I wanted authority over the work, and I was the kind of guy who could only get that working for himself. Or so I thought.

Once you become a creative director, you realize that authority is an illusion. You’re a negotiator between the client’s taste, the designer’s ego, and the user’s need. You succeed when all three are satisfied.

I sometimes fantasize about becoming a Sal-DeVito-style creative director but my personality is more like Marvin Honig’s. A Jeffrey-Zeldman-style creative director is one who wins the right client, assembles the right team, offers the right initial insight or two, and then interferes as little as possible. I think of myself as a motive wind that gives the little sailboats a gentle first push.

The problem with the little sailboats is, if you later have one teeny suggestion to offer, they will likely say no and tell you why your idea is stupid. Then you go off and ponder. First, you figure out if they were right. They often were. Next, if they were wrong, you figure out whether it matters. If it’s about your ego, it doesn’t matter; if it’s about the work, it does.

That’s how I do things in my little zone, but each of our creative directors has their own style. No matter how you may approach creative direction, remember, it’s always about the user. It’s never about you. You are the thing it is the most not about. If you think being a creative director is about power, quit now, because this job will bum you out so much. To the rest of you, cheers!

That’s why even the dinkiest American convenience store offers a broad assortment of breath mint disk brands, and nobody cares which they buy. Interest in the category requires a change of form factor plus a benefit: sugar-free Tic Tac, curiously strong Altoids. A product that wants my loyalty as a consumer must offer a difference I can actually experience—and it must be a good experience.

What’s true for low-interest disposable consumer goods is even more true for websites and web applications. As creators, it’s our job to fashion experiences that gently tug at the heart or lightly tickle the pleasure centers, lingering in the mind and quietly demanding reengagement. Good enough is not good enough, unless we want our web products to sit on the cyber-shelf, gathering digital dust.

Most of us know our site or app must be “special” simply to survive, but how should it be special? Should it be special like a 3D IMAX summer blockbuster? In a word, no. The era of the blockbuster website, if it ever existed, has surely passed. Viewed through today’s eyes, a site that calls excessive attention to its creators’ skills is like an oversized, gold-plated vanity press book of rhyming couplets. Or maybe it’s more like a penis extension in a men’s prison. Either way, although it may be impressive, it’s something nobody needs.

My favorite metaphor for what I’m trying to create when my team and I begin to plan a website is the apartment I’ve lived in since 2007. I still remember the realtor showing it. It was roomy and got a lot of natural light for an apartment in New York City. But what seduced me were the floor and ceiling—the former of beautiful hardwood, the latter with moldings. Okay, the moldings are applied, but still. I might have seen nicer apartments but I’d never lived in one. As soon as I noticed those little touches, I imagined myself living in the place, and I subsequently made it my business to move in, securing a mortgage the day the global economy crashed—but I digress.

My apartment’s lovable details surround me as I write this, and while I’m not conscious of them most of the time, they persist at the edges of my perception, like a gently strummed guitar. From time to time I even notice them. But I only notice for a moment, and then I’m back in my life. And that’s the point. Engaging sites and apps have that extra something that commands our loyalty without demanding our constant attention. It isn’t a showy opulence, and it isn’t a technology—bragging that your site is built with HTML5 and expecting users to care is like Certs hawking Retsyn. So how do we set our sites and apps apart? What ways of thinking and working lead to the details and touches that aren’t just special, but are special in a way people care about, and to which the right customers will respond?

And now, Cognition. The agency launched by a blog finally has a proper one of its own. Here, various friendly folk of Happy Cog will share ideas, experiments, rants, and dreams at greater-than-Twitter but less-than-A-List-Apart length. Just what the web needs, another design blog.

Speaking of experiments, there’s our comments section. Everybody knows inline blog comments are going the way of the BBS and Gopher sites of yore. We’re not ready to say “comments are dead” (we’ll leave that for Wired Magazine’s next cover story) but we have noticed the smell, and we’re doing something about it.

Kids today are more likely to respond to a blog post on Twitter than in the article’s comments section; so we’ve collocated our comments on Twitter. Share a tweet-length response here, and, with your permission, it will go there. If you are moved to respond with more than 140 characters, post the response on your website, and it will show up here. Clever, these Americans.

So that’s Cognition, and I’ll spare you the obligatory definition, if not the obligatory link. Knowing is all, and those who don’t know, blog. Happy Cognition, and thanks for listening.