But design work is so much healthier/better when you stop telling yourself that you’re changing lives. Websites can just be…websites! And your front end framework or side project doesn’t need to reshape human civilization for it to be worth while. Once you relieve yourself of that pressure it’s so much easier to be happy and to do good, useful work. (I am still struggling with this, leave me alone.)

But one of my favorite bits of advice, which I feel like it applies to every writer and not just folks writing slide decks, is the bit where Russell talks about removing titles from your slide decks. Just don’t do it, he says. A title is a distraction, a preamble to your idea. Just have a single sentence on your slide without the waffling.

When I’m feeling low (often) or whenever the world feels unstable (extremely often) it’s so very nice to return to a few kind words about my work.

The website of Robin Rendle, a designer and writer from the UK.

When it comes to design: forget the database, pretend it isn’t there.

The website of Robin Rendle, a designer and writer from the UK.

This particular shapeness of twitter mostly pushed me off of it some time ago and whenever I return it always feels like I’m the wrong shape. I don’t really know what to do there anymore; I can’t capture my voice, my dumb jokes, my weirdness in a way that’s satisfying to me. But, right here on this very website I somehow can. Reminds me of how Ryan used to note how odd it is that dating apps. box us all into the same shape, seemingly for the same “legibility” a timeline can afford.

I think Anna hints at something here that I’ve struggled to describe, the way that blogs were somewhat hidden and when you discovered them it was like finding a treasure map; something intentionally obscured from view.

Having that utopian vision of the world is important though. And being optimistic about making enormous change is important, too. But I’m learning that the truly wise folks hold that vision in their minds whilst making tiny incremental progress in that direction every single day. Tiny steps is how you solve everything; from a bad design, to a confusing codebase, to a dysfunctional society.

All those things aren’t how we measure success—we only think of the big things like falling in love, finding a great job, making a beautiful thing. But cleaning the dishes and doing laundry is what really stands in the way of the big things and us.

Here in America we would rather a business swoop in to save the day, instead of look closely at ourselves and the qualities that the virus has latched onto. The qualities that are in such short supply today; trust, honesty, courage.

Perhaps our motto as designers should then be this: Do no harm. Make things clear. And show us the future.

That’s a clunky way of saying “when something is different, make it look different.” The best designers, in my opinion, take this to heart and don’t use too many variants to make those differences as clear as possible.

The website of Robin Rendle, a designer and writer from the UK.

But at the very least it’s honest and somewhat vulnerable to admit that screenshotting choice quotes is not as important as being critical of my own behavior. My own mistakes.

A book is a flexible mirror of the mind. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all blend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.

This might be mistaken for sentimentality, but this feeling has little to do with the hallucinogenic loveliness of print. It’s about ownership. It’s about remembering where you were, and perhaps who you were, when you read something.