Fortunately or unfortunately I haven’t been that involved with the design community for the past couple of months besides what I notice in my newsreader. Last year I wrote a post about the movers and shakers in our industry and thought it would be cool to see who you thought is making the most noise now.
Gone are the days of Shea, Bowman, Zeldman and Cederholm. In their places are who, who, who and who?
What I find interesting is how many people have entered the standards community field causing us to have less and less “leaders” and simply more speakers. I don’t know if we need leaders anymore since the path was pretty well-laid out by Zeldman, but it would be nice to have a place to go where we know good things would happen. Sort of like how ALA was a while ago.
Here is my short list of who I see as the innovators today and it’s no small coincidence they are part of the 9rules Network:
- Particle Tree: If most websites could accomplish in two years what these guys have done in two months everyone would be happy. I am going to take a risk now and call them the next 37signals (but better).
- Jonathan Snook: Simply a web dev genius developing right before my eyes. In a sense I like to refer to him as the web renaissance man because he does it all and he does it damn well.
- Mark Boulton: From articles on Grid Systems to deep thoughts on Typography is there anyone else in our community today that sounds more like they know what they are talking about than Mark?
No doubt I have missed a few, but those are the five that stood out immediately. Who do you have on the list? And please note this has nothing to do with the (fabled) A-List as none of these sites would be considered on it.
Originally posted on August 2, 2005 @ 2:06 am