I have a weird relationship to work. My job is one of my making, so I should probably love it, right? And I do, because I get to write this, in the blazing sun, in Marseille, a light breeze coming in through the window, drinking sencha that I brought from Japan to Chicago to here. I’ll be here until March, waiting out another harsh winter back home.
Last year was hard on my relationship to the practice. I was mostly ignored or denigrated by an addressable market that clearly didn’t want to buy design, despite everyone saying that it did. I lost sight of how to communicate to a market that is mostly focused on the psychic sugar highs of “quick wins” and quantitative dashboards. Now I’m getting back to it. Deep rest is medicine. But I’m still hurting, questioning whether this is the correct relationship that I should be establishing to my work, trying to find greener pastures.
I’ll work at Draft until I die, of course, but who Draft works for is now quite open for debate. You understand design or you do not. You buy design because you want design, or you do not. It’s not my responsibility to make anyone want design, any more than I can make anyone want to run their businesses more ethically, or in a more customer-focused way.
The coming months will witness a deep reset for us. I’m excited to have a new job by the end of the year. I suspect it will look quite a bit like the old one, with one key difference.
This week, for paid members
- Since we all know that the only way to establish a correct relationship to one’s design practice is to have continuous, full support from the CEO of an organization, our first lesson of the year focuses on how to understand when this support is being given – and how to disengage from any structures that do not consciously support the practice of design going forward. Foundational stuff!
- And our first teardown of 2023 is for everyday carry brand CountyComm. Is what’s good for the government good for the general public? You will be unsurprised to discover the answer.
Want in? Join us now – named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.
Links
- Don’t overcategorize. A real banger from Baymard, talking about what happens when overly narrow product categories harm browsability.
- Writing about design.