So, the links are pretty grim this week. Sometimes they’re useful, sometimes they’re grim, sometimes they’re both. This week you get grim. I’m almost sorry; blame the vibe weather.
Design loves to feel bad about itself, and we respond to getting fired by moping. I don’t do much of that here, not only because we’re doing great, but because moping does not do anything actual.
In my progressive circles, when we face a setback – and we have faced many, many setbacks over the past two decades – there is a process that we follow. First, we grieve. Then, we plan. Finally, we act.
Grieving without action is not resistance. It allows us to internalize the pain of a setback while creating the psychic conditions for future action. It is our first impulse to grieve, but it must not be the last. We are often rudderless in the face of grief. We forget to act. We must remind ourselves to act. Action takes work.
What, then, does resistance look like within the structural collapse of contemporary design? Because honestly, if you write another self-pitying Medium article about how design is at an “existential moment,” I think I’m going to scream. I’m tired of design going through a reckoning. We’ve had more than enough time to grieve. I want design to recognize their own inherent power and act.
Here’s what I’m doing to resist the structural collapse of design within our current apocalypse:
- Firming up my contracts. Design is only as good as the agreements we make before it begins. I’m reviewing all of my contracts with my legal team to ensure that my IP rights are enforced and we get paid on time. This is evergreen.
- Describing my boundaries ahead of time. We all have boundaries, and we exist in an industry that loves to violate them. It’s important for us to get conscious about what our boundaries are with respect to work-life balance, burnout, and critique before work begins. If buyers refuse to hire you because you have healthy boundaries, good. Fuck them.
- Saying “no” in a way that reduces the perception of harm to the other party. Someone recently asked me to do twice the work in half the time. Rather than push back in a way that shows they’re exceeding my own boundaries (which they are, to be clear), I made it more about the quality of work and reduction of risk on their part. They said “okay” and signed the contract.
I don’t know if any of these things will work for you, but at least I’m suggesting something during a time when people are broadly doing nothing. If this resonates, I might do a brief public chat in a couple of weeks about the creation of boundaries in value-based design practices. No selling, just spaceholding & action. Would this be something you might want to attend? Hit reply & let me know.
For those of you who like to care for & feed me, I wrote a care & feeding guide.
This week, for paid members
- This week’s paid lesson is about modal popover test results, showing two key experiments Draft has run lately that prove that removing them improves key business metrics. Stuff that makes you money? We love to see it!
- Our design of the week pushes the buy box to new frontiers. Where is the incentive?
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Links
- Designers don’t know how to signal as those who can design, and so apparently “90%” of designers are unhireable. It’s not clear to me where they got that figure, but I broadly agree with the argument that a structural disengagement from value creation & leveraged power has caused design to mostly collapse.
- Good designers execute.
- This is correct, and a large reason why the industry remains toxically masculine as of press time. Related.