Writing ain’t religion

be intentional about your team's approach to writing

Choose a writing method that works for your team, content, and audience. Writing ain’t religion, friends. It’s okay to attend more than one church.  Let’s take content design, for instance. Content design is generally my top choice when: A) writing content that has to support as broad of an audience as possible, and/orB) making content … Read more

It’s a website, not a carnival.

If you’re a UX writer, content designer, or similar, you need to learn to resist the pressure to be clever, to be funny, to be creative, to “make it pop”, to “give it personality” — especially if you’re not sure that it’s appropriate for the experience. (It’s probably not.)

David Rakoff on writing

“[I]f seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can’t be the whole story. I didn’t always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.”

David Rakoff, Don’t Get Too Comfortable

Good interfaces are not, in fact, like jokes

Some of the most insidious design advice ends up sticking around because it sounds true. Or clever. Or both. I suppose this is true of all bad advice. One particular piece of true-sounding, clever-sounding, and ultimately dangerously-reductive advice that irks me is the trope that compares good interface design to a good joke. You might have seen it in this form: A user interface … Read more

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