A designer who writes.
I have blogged intermittently since the mid 90s. Thankfully, much of the early teenage angst is lost to time. This collects my writings from this site, an earlier personal website, and some newsletter projects over the years, in mostly chronological order. I also publish new writing here. I publish somewhat more formal writing about content strategy and design careers at Content Career Accelerator.
Things aren’t so bad in Minnesota as in other places, for which I’m grateful. I’m home, mostly, unless I’m going to the store or my girlfriend’s apartment, by foot or by bike, playing Frogger all the way trying to dodge other humans. Our respective offices went work-from-home only a week or so before the orders … continue
Lotta information to process these days. I’ve read more bits of scientific papers in the past few weeks than ever before. Doesn’t mean I know anything, though. I’ve stopped sharing what I think I’ve learned even with people close to me, at least until I hear it from multiple real experts. At least twice now … continue
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a perfectly simple, data-driven answer to that question? “Based on an analysis of 1,000 writing assignments, we’ve found that four reviewers are enough to catch 99.99% of style and usage errors.” Hooray, the answer is four! Have four people review your content and everything will be perfect! Except, no. … continue
As soon as something more formal than conversation starts taking place, many designers feel like they need to ask for a permission slip. You don’t. Never delegate understanding.
If you don’t articulate and assign the writing role, then either everyone is the writer, or no one is the writer. Neither situation is fun.
Went out to an event a few weekends ago, but did not actually get to attend the event, because I did not purchase tickets to the event and it was sold out when we got there. I was absolutely certain I had purchased the tickets. I remember looking at the site, I remember filling out … continue
Some habits come easier than others. I’m still working on “go to bed before midnight because you wake up at 6am no matter what, dummy”, but life is about the journey, you know?
Here, in no particular order — except the order in which they occurred to me — are seven things about which I worry.
The project managers turns to you and asks: “How long is it going to take to write this?” Hoo boy. It’s time to proceed very, very carefully.
My book advises designers to be intentional about the tools they choose and use to do the writing on their projects. For writing a book, a thing I’d never done before, I ran a few experiments to see if there was any good and smart tool I hadn’t tried before that would make it easier. … continue
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