Frank Chimero is publishing again and his is a fresh voice crying in the wilderness.

What are we even doing?

the automated scale of the application process—candidates firing off applications by the hundreds, companies screening by the thousands—and the result is a highly inefficient market that wastes everyone’s time.

Frank nails lots of stuff in here:

Candidates polish résumés and present curated versions of their abilities, listing outcomes and impact statistics with dubious accuracy and provenance. Companies do the same, putting culture and mission front and center while hiding systematic dysfunctions and looming existential risks.

And that’s just the job market stuff!

He has opinions on product too, like how the only thing that matters is what you make. KPIs, sales numbers, up-and-to-the-right charts, etc., they’re all trailing indicators of what you make and give to people. Frank calls these “outputs”:

outputs (code, design, the products themselves) are the load-bearing work—the actual prerequisites for the outcomes desired. Focusing on outcomes while ignoring outputs means hiding in abstractions and absolving oneself of accountability...The safest, smartest path is also the most mundane: keep the main thing the main thing. Outcomes matter, but output literally comes first. Outputs are the business to everyone outside it—what customers see, buy, and use.

The meta-work of the work — lines of code written, tickets closed, documents written — is just a place to hide and dodge the reality of your outputs (the things the meta-work is supposed to be in service of).

The meta-work won’t get you where you think you’re going:

The climb may feel like progress, but at the end you’ll find yourself at the top of a mountain of lemons, perhaps not of your own making, but almost certainly of your own doing.

Damn it’s good to hear Frank’s voice.

A tremendous read. Deep and thoughtful, as always from Frank. A few excerpts I loved.

First, on the non-commercialness of libraries:

a library is one of the few remaining places that cares more about you than your wallet. It means that a person can be a person there: not a customer, not a user, not an economic agent, not a pair of eyes to monetize, but a citizen and community-member, a reader and a thinker, a mind and—God, I am going to say it—a soul.

The web, or at least part of it, has this ethos in it (love the suggested correlation of “public lands” and “open protocols”):

the web is a boundless and shared estate, and we only later learned how to commercialize it. The commercial endeavors that now dominate our digital experience sit on public land, or, should I say, open protocols.

But the public library web is drown out by the outsized commercial influences:

the web is a marketplace and a commonwealth, so we have both commerce and culture; it’s just that the non-commercial bits of the web get more difficult to see in comparison to the outsized presence of the commercial web and all that caters to it. It’s a visibility problem that’s an inadvertent consequence of values

Color sits in a continuum—ok, sure—a spectrum, dictated by scientific fact, registered through personal experience, and ossified with shared cultural framing. That sounds fancy, but in short: “Red” is a vague term that is solid in the middle and hazy at its edges. Fights over redness always happen at the boundary of orange-red and red-orange, because the edges of definition are determined by all the stuff that makes other people fascinating, annoying, and real: their perception, their labels, their culture, their location.

Frank at it again with his words. This time talking about color, but also words:

The tech industry is where words go to die. It’s a tragic bit of irony: tech work is all abstractions, and those abstractions can only be considered and revised through precise language. But we are slobs and so poor at wielding language.

Great reminder from Frank about “the marrow of life”:

the marrow of life lives beyond novelty in the unexceptional. I say this a lot: “the simple things are worth doing well, because they happen every day.” It is my mantra because I am the king of forgetting it. Any goodness that comes to me during the time of Covid will be by attending to what happens each day. The dishes pile up and the dishes get washed. They pile up and get washed. Isn’t that remarkable? It’s today and then today, then today, and today and today.

An interesting observation on how our digitally-saturated lives continue to favor and connect to physical world representations. Of dust we truly art I suppose:

It’s so interesting that we designers are all using these mockup templates to sell work through. Big agencies do it. Individual practices (like me) use the same files. Yet nothing ever gets physically produced. The work stays digital, but we need the mystique of physical production to get the kind of alignment necessary for clients to say yes. Nobody ever fell in love with a logo by seeing it mocked up in an email signature. We still emotionally favor the material world even if our branding strategies and marketing budgets shit-canned it ages ago.

Frank talks about his process of selecting a typeface for his blog.

No matter how much one plans, a designer will crawl through their mental rolodex of fonts and see what feels right to their eye. Post-rationalization is an open secret in the design industry, but with personal work, there is no one to impress with rigor. One can go on intuition. The eye knows.

“Post rationalization is an open secret in the design industry.” Love this line. It’s funny because Frank says it’s an open secret but I can’t actually remember ever seeing it written down anywhere.

A great analysis of choosing type and making creative decisions.

you can also pick by gut or chance once you’re certain you have a solid pool to choose from. Reasons can be arbitrary, and you need to leave room for whim. I once chose a typeface because I liked the 7. Sometimes one can overthink things.

I raise all this to show the natural limits of intent...Best to take those first big steps in the right direction, whittle down the options, and commit to what feels right to you. No choice is bulletproof, and no amount of evidence is ever going to completely clarify or validate a choice. This is what makes these choices creative.

Most design content has become poor quality, surface-level content marketing that does more damage than good, because it offers over-simplified, misinformed perspectives dressed up as guidance. One hardly gets the sensation of lived experience and professional acumen in the words.

Love that articulation. Love all of Frank’s words. Looking forward to following this little project he’s started.

An interesting look at the effects of UI design. What do you think culture would look like if we reversed these UIs? Praise required words while negativity was easily accessible via a single interaction? Who knows. Could be different. But also humans are humans and it could be the same.

First, a look at Facebook’s UI:

one negative reply literally takes up more visual space than tens of thousands of undifferentiated likes.

Then Twitter’s:

The arrangement is even worse on Twitter. Liking stays attached to the original tweet and makes most positive interactions static. Negative reactions must be written as tweets, creating more material for the machine. These negative tweets can spread through retweets and further replies. This means negativity grows in number and presence, because most positivity on the service is silent and immobilized.

Positivity is “silent and immobilized’. What an fascinating assessment—and the result of this?

like can’t go anywhere, but a compliment can go a long way. Passive positivity isn’t enough; active positivity is needed to counterbalance whatever sort of collective conversations and attention we point at social media. Otherwise, we are left with the skewed, inaccurate, and dangerous nature of what’s been built: an environment where most positivity is small, vague, and immobile, and negativity is large, precise, and spreadable.

As always, great thoughts from Frank. Everything in this article is great. I could’ve copy/pasted the entire article, but instead I tried to practice some constraint and only copy/paste the stuff that really stuck out to me (honestly though, it’s all good, go read it). Emphases are mine.

On feedback being an art:

clients, co-workers, and bosses aren’t practiced in analyzing design, and designers, while well-versed in giving feedback, are often less experienced in how to productively receive it. Feedback should be a liberal art for everyone.

On gut reactions:

One particularly tricky aspect of criticizing design is that a lot of the work is meant to be quickly read (like logos) or intuitively understood (like interfaces and websites). Does this validate gut reactions or hot takes? I’m uncertain, but it can shift power towards the people who are the least invested in the process.

On design ridicule:

Any defining characteristic of the work will probably be the subject of ridicule.

On the need for specificity:

Praise is meaningless without specificity...A robust feedback process must be specific in its praise, because succeeding is enhancing good choices as well as fixing mistakes.

And a great quote from Michel Foucault on “scintillating” design criticism:

Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. […] It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

I just really liked this comment in particular and wanted to make note of it:

A person is not a brain driving a meat robot; it all runs together. If work is stymied, ask: are you eating clean? Getting enough sleep? Did your heart pump more than a sloth today? Start with your body, not your work methods. Trust me.

This is a couple years old now, but I found Frank’s “lessons learned” insightful:

1. Life isn’t a story.
2. A lot of things don’t need to be intellectualized: “because I want to” is often a good enough reason.
3. Empathy is first an act of imagination.
4. Don’t take business advice from people with bad personal lives.
5. There are two ways to look at your life: what happened to you or what you did.
6. Resources don’t replace will.
7. Lazy trumps smart.
8. Everybody wants to give advice and no one wants to take it.
9. We only deserve what we can take care of.
10. Clearly labeling other people’s petty grievances as bullshit is a fast track to well-being and fewer complaints of your own.
11. Money is circulated. Time is spent.
12. You can punch back.
13. Social media gets less annoying if you’re willing to say to people, “Who the hell do you think you are?”
14. Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is optional.
15. Who you are has more to do with how you act and what you love than what you have or say.
16. It’s more complicated than that.
17. Everything good I have came from honesty, good intentions, and low expectations.
18. Stick with the attentive ones.
19. Find a way to forgive your mistakes.
20. You’ll never know enough. Oh well.

I have to admit, when I first started reading this and the author was framing some important questions, I felt like I was going to barf a little when it seemed he was going to give a definitive answer for each (like almost every article on the internet it seems). But then he didn't. It was so refreshing. It reminded me how little things like that make me love Frank’s writing. The question he frames: is going off on your own worth it?

Well, I am here to offer a resounding maybe.

Frank is always marrying paradoxes, which is what makes great writing in my opinion. Like this other part:

How can we be independent together?

Independent together? Resounding maybe? Jumbo shrimp? These are great paradoxes stacked against each other and in proving contraries you find the truth. As Frank points out later in his article “independence is always supported by interdependence."

Now about employment:

Many people presume that employment is the opposite of independence, and that endlessly irritates me. It’s so short-sighted. History shows a long record of artists who did “normal” work to support their creative practice.

He points out many of the famous artists and writers whose work that is now famous today were “side projects” from their daily employment.

There’s one other important benefit to the unrelated day job: when it comes to your art, you don’t have to take any shit from anybody. You can honor any creative impulse because your paycheck is never on the line. Go nuts, make crazy shit. What’s more independent than that.

That’s one reason I’ve personally never liked contract work on the side, or even writing tutorials now. I feel like I have to finish all those things and sometimes I just don't want to. I want to explore as far as I want to go and stop when I want. A day job affords me that because my side projects can be whatever I want whenever I want. I never thought of that, but that is freedom.

Along these lines there is also great quote for this Krista Tippet:

I worry about our focus on meaningful work. I think that’s possible for some of us, but I don’t want us to locate the meaningfulness of our lives in our work. I think that was a 20th-Century trap. I’m very committed and fond of the language of vocation, which I think became narrowly tied to our job titles in the 20th Century. Our vocations or callings as human beings may be located in our job descriptions, but they may also be located in how we are present to whatever it is we do

That last line is fantastic: finding meaning and a calling might be found in being present in whatever we do, be that our job, parenting, or just being a friend. As Frank goes on to comment, “meaning comes from a way of being”:

When Campbell told us to follow our bliss, he wasn’t telling everyone to chase their dreams until they became careers. He said it as a call for people to pursue a vocation as Krista Tippett has defined it. Vocation is as much about who you are and how you are as it is about what you do. Bliss is an attitude, a disposition, so meaning comes from a way of being and is not a consequence of producing work. You make the art, the art does not make you.

One last great point:

I mistake the work’s flaws for my own. Perhaps that’s something many of us have in common. The way to approach this issue is clear: we must acknowledge we are involved in our unsteadiness, but believe we are only part of its reason. If we allow room in our work for serendipity to occur, that same space must also be reserved for misfortune. We are the cause of neither.

It’s human nature: I over-value where I have influence. Since I am a designer, this frequently means placing too much emphasis on how things look and work rather than the direction they are pointed. But reflecting on the other side of the issue is also interesting: I find that the more input I have in the content and strategy of the project, the less burden I place on the aesthetics. Perhaps this is because I believe the aesthetic of the work should be an extension of its objectives, so if you get the strategy right, the look follows. Since I like to tackle problems sideways, I must risk being plain and rely on direct visuals to keep the work comprehensible.

And this next part is good:

I am for a design that’s like vanilla ice cream: simple and sweet, plain without being austere. It should be a base for more indulgent experiences on the occasions they are needed, like adding chocolate chips and cookie dough. Yet these special occasions are rare. A good vanilla ice cream is usually enough. I don’t wish to be dogmatic—every approach has its place, but sometimes plainness needs defending in a world starved for attention and wildly focused on individuality. Here is a reminder: the surest way forward is usually a plain approach done with close attention to detail. You can refine the normal into the sophisticated by pursuing clarity and consistency. Attentiveness turns the normal artful

More:

the longer we spend in contact with the products of design, the more their willful attempts at individualism irritate us.

The danger of redesigning your brand to current trends:

Many believe that normalcy and consistency breads monotony, but what about the trap of an overly accentuated, hyper-specific identity? When the world changes around you, what do you do?

This is often true of personal portfolios that strive to be different, but in reality, when you're sorting through tons of resumes you're looking for the content before the individuality. The individuality are like fireworks, they may catch your attention for a second, but once that attention is grabbed, if the content is confusing, hard to read, hard to digest, you've failed.

All contain the aching desire to be noticed when instead they should focus on being useful.

This was written back when iOS 7 was first introduced to the world. I read it then and made this note. In the years since, I’ve always done a “spring cleaning” of my notes and this one always persisted. I think Frank captures perfectly a description of my job the last three years.

Every time I read this quote, it feels more and more relevant. Likely because “Experience gives a person the eyes to imagine their small choices in aggregate.”

Part of being a good designer is having a hatred for inconsistencies, so I take the interface’s unevenness to mean a hurried timeline, rather than an unawareness of the inconsistencies. Working on multiple screens, apps, and userflows means that certain aspects of the whole system will fall out of sync with each other as the later parts’ lessons override previous choices. The last step of most design processes is to take the lessons learned along the way and apply those best practices to the niggling incongruencies that have inevitably sprung up. This last step usually gets cut under tight deadlines, because the work is technically “done,” but just not “right.” Unfortunately, this kind of consistency is usually seen as a design indulgence that can be postponed. “We’ll iterate,” designers are usually told, but everyone knows you loose a bit of the luster of a tight first impression.