If Hemingway were still alive, then he’d be learning about Substack.

11 min readDec 9, 2020

Other people’s opinions don’t make you money. Taking a clear stance, knowing there will be lots of readers who disagree with you, will make you more money from an article than you could ever imagine.

And here’s something we can also do right now to make this easier for all of us; stop deifying “thought leaders” who are doing a craptastic job of leading, especially when they are being bullies. If you see an established leader engaging in gaslighting, being abusive, shutting down a conversation, or using their following to attack someone who simply disagrees with them — call them out. If that doesn’t result in their taking responsibility, stop following them, stop encouraging them by buying their courses and books, don’t attend conferences where they speak, and block or mute them online. We not only have to encourage high standards for our work but also how we interact with each other. No one should get a pass just because of their career accomplishments. Besides, there are enough great and selfless leaders in this space to follow that we can more than afford to shed the bad ones without missing a beat.

I read that thread and found it to be one of the most honest and true things I’ve ever read about the work we do in a long time. And yet, it got minimal traction because the algorithm isn’t built to bring you the good, only what’s popular. But these are the types of posts that everyone should get to read. So when you stumble across contributions like this from people you don’t know, amplify them, share them, and follow the person. This is how the algorithms that drive what you see get better.

I am not too fussed about myself, although I used to be. I fell for the personal brand trash that is hurled at innocent people all over social media. I became paranoid about trolls and negative opinions. Then, for about a year, I stopped reading comments. It healed me. Now I read comments and consider them rather than let them ruin my writing.

I am currently creating a platform to dive deeply into many of these topics in a way that hopefully participants feel welcome and safe enough to keep the discussions going. I have an upcoming limited podcast series and publication called “Far from the Valley” now in production that will be focused squarely on looking at these issues in-depth.

And we can’t continue to view candor about what’s not working as some sort of threat that will diminish our industry’s standing. We have to stop being apologists for the dysfunctional way we work. There’s this underlying idea that if we air our dirty laundry, businesses will decide that we don’t actually know what we’re doing and stop hiring us. Let me disabuse you of that notion. Business folks don’t actually care what designers talk about amongst themselves. I mean, let’s be honest, they barely listen to us even when we’re speaking directly to them.

I am dedicating every episode to these topics while emphasizing equity, ethics, and inclusive design. But let me state emphatically; I am not the expert, and I have no intention of trying to own these conversations. I am pulling in the voices of those who are dedicating themselves to doing this work to highlight their knowledge in a way that allows us to all learn and grow together. As I approach my last few years in design, my hope in doing this is to leave our industry a slightly better place than I found it. If you’re interested in getting an update when this project launches, you can sign up here.

Accessibility in the broadest sense is the goal to ensure that products support a user’s needed accommodations and preferences. It is outcome-focused and often defined by specific standards, whereas inclusive design is process-oriented and considered throughout the design lifecycle from day one. A fully inclusive process should lead to fully accessible products, but just accounting and designing for accessibility does not mean your design is fully inclusive.So what now, you ask? How do we address these issues? Well, the first step is agreeing that they are, in fact, issues. Then it’s time to roll up our sleeves and do something.By getting over myself, I could focus on the business aspect of writing. This time I bought back, and it allowed me to learn about all the tools a writer has to earn a living. Get over yourself as a writer to make money.

Inclusive Design is design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference. — Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD U in Toronto

The whole point of the data engineering exercise is to make the data available to the data scientists, data analysts, and business people. Without proper testing, any project is at risk of catastrophic failure. Manual testing of data is highly inefficient and, honestly, it isn’t doable at scale.

Here’s another thing we can do every day — amplify those who are saying the right and true things, especially women and BIPOC. Take, for example, this tweet thread I came across by Karen VanHouten:
Where we are as an industry is as exciting as it is painful. We have an opportunity to shape the growth phase we’re in and make the field so much better for those who come after us. None of us can, nor should, do this alone. Together we can create an inclusive and supportive community that models the values we want to see in the world. We just have to consistently do the work… a lot of work.An email address is the first step to make money as a writer. Unprofessional writers who didn’t study literature are taught this dumb technique right up front: ask for an email address so you can stay in touch with a reader.It’s time to give you some practical tips to make money. I am an unprofessional writer. Many of the writers around me make a minimum of 6-figures from their work. I don’t say that to brag. I say that because I’ve been able to ask them how they did it. The advice is always the same.
We’ve normalized this. The business says anyone outside the “primary” set of personas is an edge case. So those representing other demographics — race, age, ethnicity, and ability — well, they fall off the radar to hopefully be included in later releases. I even put this topic last on my list to drive home that point. These issues were not even on the radar for far too many of you before this last incredibly tumultuous year. This is why the “percentage of potential users” is a shit way to prioritize features when building software. We can no longer allow ourselves to determine whether to make a design fully inclusive based solely on the number of people affected.

I also highly recommend the book by Kelly Small that I quoted above, “The Conscious Creative.” It is full of practical ways we can all contribute to advancing ethical practice in our industry.

Inclusive Design should just be Design. Careful consideration of all the various types of folks who will use what we make and accommodating their needs should already be how we work on every project, every time. But it’s not. Why isn’t it? Because despite how much we talk about it, most of us have no clue how to really conduct the necessary activities and methods in a way that will fit into our existing workflows, nor are we being encouraged to find out by those we work for (and remember, we’ve been conditioned not to fail — see point #4). So we defer learning how to incorporate it into practice for another time on another day, just as we do with ethics. Every time we do this, what we’re really saying is that it’s fine to release a product that may not work for a significant portion of the population — real people who are already being shortchanged daily by the design of everyday things. It’s well beyond time that we stop letting this be the norm.

If Hemingway were still alive, then he’d be learning about Substack.

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