A designer is first and foremost a human being.

Before you are a designer, you are a human being. Like every other human being on the planet, you are part of the social contract. We share a planet. By choosing to be a designer you are choosing to impact the people who come in contact with your work, you can either help or hurt them with your actions. The effect of what you put into the fabric of society should always be a key consideration in your work.

Every human being on this planet is obligated to do our best to leave this planet in better shape than we found it. Designers don’t get to opt out.

When you do work that depends on a need for income disparity or class distinctions to succeed you are failing your job as a citizen, and therefore as a designer.

A designer is responsible for the work they put into the world.

Design is a discipline of action. You are responsible for what you put into the world. It has your name on it. And while it is certainly impossible to predict how any of your work may be used, it shouldn’t be a surprise when work that is meant to hurt someone fulfills its mission. We cannot be surprised when a gun we designed kills someone. We cannot be surprised when a database we designed to catalog immigrants gets those immigrants deported. When we knowingly produce work that is intended to harm, we are abdicating our responsibility. When we ignorantly produce work that harms others because we didn’t consider the full ramifications of that work, we are doubly guilty.

The work you bring into the world is your legacy. It will outlive you. And it will speak for you.

A designer values impact over form.

We need to fear the consequences of our work more than we love the cleverness of our ideas.

Design does not exist in a vacuum. Society is the biggest system we can impact and everything you do is a part of that system, good and bad. Ultimately we must judge the value of our work based on that impact, rather than any aesthetic considerations. An object that is designed to harm people cannot be said to be well-designed, no matter how aesthetically pleasing it might be, because to design it well is to design it to harm others. Nothing a totalitarian regime designs is well-designed because it has been designed by a totalitarian regime.

A broken gun is better designed than a working gun.

A designer owes the people who hire them not just their labor, but their counsel.

When you are hired to design something, you are hired for your expertise. Your job is not just to produce that work but to evaluate the impact of that work. Your job is to relay the impact of that work to your client or employer. And should that impact be negative, it is your job to relay that to your client along with a way, if possible, to eliminate the negative impact of the work. If it’s impossible to eliminate the negative impact of the work, it’s your job to stop it from seeing the light of day. In other words, you’re not hired to just dig a ditch, but to evaluate the economic, sociological, and ecological impact of that ditch. If the ditch fails those tests, it’s your job to destroy the shovels.

A designer uses their expertise in the service of others without being a servant. Saying no is a design skill. Asking why is a design skill. Rolling your eyes is not. Asking ourselves why we are making something is an infinitely better question than asking ourselves whether we can make it.

A designer welcomes criticism.

No code of ethics should protect your work from criticism, be it from clients, the public, or other designers. Instead, you should encourage criticism in order to create better work in the future. If your work is so fragile that it can’t withstand criticism it shouldn’t exist. The time to kick the tires on your work comes before those tires hit the road. And be open to that criticism coming from anywhere.

The role of criticism, when given appropriately, is to evaluate and improve work. Criticism is a gift. It makes good work better. It keeps bad work from seeing the light of day.

Criticism should be asked for and welcomed at every step of the design process. You can’t fix a cake once it’s been baked. But you can increase the chances your project is successful by getting feedback early and often. It’s your responsibility to ask for criticism.

A designer strives to know their audience.

Design is the intentional solution to a problem within a set of constraints. To know whether you are properly solving those problems you need to meet the people who are having them. And if you are part of a team, your team should strive to reflect those people. The more a team can reflect the audience it is solving for, the more thoroughly it can solve those problems. That team can come at a problem from different points-of-view, from different backgrounds, from different sets of needs and experiences. A team with a single point of view will never understand the constraints they need to design for as well as a team with multiple points of view.

What about empathy? Empathy is a pretty word for exclusion. If you want to know how women would use something you’re designing get a woman on the team that’s designing it.

A designer does not believe in edge cases.

When you decide who you’re designing for, you’re making an implicit statement about who you’re not designing for. For years we referred to people who weren’t crucial to our products’ success as “edge cases”. We were marginalizing people. And we were making a decision that there were people in the world whose problems weren’t worth solving.

Facebook now claims to have two billion users. 1% of two billion people, which most products would consider an edge case, is twenty million people. Those are the people at the margins.

“When you call something an edge case, you’re really just defining the limits of what you care about.” — Eric Meyer

These are the trans people who get caught on the edges of “real names” projects. These are the single moms who get caught on the edges of “both parents must sign” permission slips. These are the elderly immigrants who show up to vote and can’t get ballots in their native tongues.

They are not edge cases. They are human beings, and we owe them our best work.

A designer is part of a professional community.

You are part of a professional community and the way you do your job and handle yourself professionally affects everyone in that community. Just as a rising tide affects all boats, taking a shit in the pool affects all swimmers. If you are dishonest with a client or employer, the designer behind you will pay the price. If you work for free, the designer behind you will be expected to do the same. If you do not hold your ground on doing bad work, the designer behind you will have to work twice as hard to make up for it.

While a designer has an ethical obligation to earn a living to the best of their abilities and opportunities, doing it at the expense of others who share the craft is a disservice to us all. Never throw another designer under the bus to advance your own agenda. This includes public redesigns of someone else’s work, spec work, unsolicited work, and plagiarism.

A designer seeks to build the community, not divide it.

A designer welcomes a diverse and competitive field.

Throughout their entire career, a designer seeks to learn. That means confronting what they do not know. That means listening to other people’s experiences. That means welcoming and encouraging people who come from diverse backgrounds, diverse cultures. That means making space at the table for people who society has historically kept down. We must make space for traditionally marginalized voices to be heard in the profession. Diversity leads to better outcomes and solutions. Diversity leads to better design.

“You’ll never go wrong when you work with someone smarter than you.” — Tibor Kalman

A designer keeps their ego in check, knows when to shut up and listen, is aware of their own biases and welcomes having them checked, and fights to make room for those who have been silenced.

A designer takes time for self-reflection.

No one wakes up one day designing to throw their ethics out the window. It happens slowly, one slippery slope at a time. It’s a series of small decisions that might even seem fine at the time, and before you know it you’re designing filtering UI for the Walmart online gun shop.

Take the time for self-reflection every few months. Evaluate the decisions you’ve made recently. Are you staying true to who you are? Or are you slowly moving your ethical goal posts a few yards at a time with each raise or stock option award?

Have you veered off course? Correct it. Is your workplace an unethical hellmouth? Get another one.

Your job is a choice. Please do it right.

Mike Monteiro is a nice guy or a total asshole depending on your opinion. He is also the Design Director at Mule Design. And the author of Design Is a Job and You’re My Favorite Client.

Thanks to Ross Floate, John Hanawalt, Greg Storey, Kio Stark, and Sean Bonner for helping with this piece. BTW, I’ll probably keep updating this as people come up with things I forgot.

A Designer’s Code of Ethics was originally published in Dear Design Student on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let me just put this here. Because I need a little bit of hope, and maybe you do too.

Because every time my phone vibrates I expect find out that we’ve launched a nuke, either into Southeast Asia, the Middle East, or a reporter’s house. I expect that one branch of our government has declared war on another branch, or that members of the same branch are fat-shaming each other. I expect that an active gunman is mowing down children in a playground. I expect that US Senators are physically expelling Americans in wheelchairs from the Capitol. I expect these things because these things are actually happening. Things that would’ve freaked us out just five months ago are now barely worth taking note of. Because the next mess is hauling its way toward us just behind it.

And as mornings become more difficult to face, and the desire to find out how close we are to the bottom becomes stronger than the desire to keep fighting a daily barrage of disillusion in the rest of humankind, and SSRIs become the newest flavor of M&Ms, I wonder if maybe we need to be reminded of what it might look like if we made it through this shit show.

What if, despite all odds, we get through this?

It’s said that in good times we crank out novels of dystopian futures to keep us humble. Perhaps the inverse also needs to be true. Perhaps we should clear out a little corner of the dumpster-on-fire and pen some fan fiction to give us a smidge hope.

What if, despite all odds, we get through this? What if, against all odds, we pulled out of this nosedive while there was still the chance, the opportunity, the responsibility to fix whatever was left.

What should we do?

Let’s fix tech

The service economy, where tech is putting the majority of its time and money, is built on income disparity. We create services for people to drive us around, to pick up our clothes, to sort our mail, and all of these services require the availability of two things: people who have and people who have not. The whole tech sector is based on exploitation of the lower class.

How did we get here? We got here because once the internet turned into a business it was taken over by the people who run the business world. Rich white boys with business degrees who’ve relied on poor people to cook and clean for them their entire lives. You build what you know.

If we achieved income parity, the tech sector would collapse! You can’t build an economy on the need for a class structure and then act surprised when it results in a class structure. Is this the kind of system you want to be supporting with the short amount of time you have on earth? Imagine if we put our time and energy into creating the infrastructure for an economy that actually leveled the playing field. An economy that served those who needed help the most first and foremost.

Isn’t this socialism? Yes. Deal with it. But we’ve seen where the service economy leads. And we’ve seen where excluding everyone who isn’t a rich white boy gets us. It’s time to open the gates. The people solving the problems need to look like the world. They need to come from every corner of the world. And if you’re investing your time and money in solving problems, it’s time to start valuing how your work is affecting the world around you more than how your own personal wealth.

The Kids are Socialists Because Capitalism is Dickslapping the Planet

We have more cognitive resources, computing power, and data available to us now than at any other time in human history. And we’re using it to get poor people to do our laundry. Imagine taking all this intelligence, all this money, all this energy, and dedicating it to coming up with a plan that begins to make the world work better for everyone! And you’re included in that everyone. Is it hippie dippy pollyanna? Sure, but it’s my fan fiction.

Let’s fix education

A country that purposely undereducates its electorate in order to stay in power loses the right to call itself a democracy.

And the education system, which has historically underserved women and minorities, doesn’t get to look out on a graduating engineering class that’s 95% male and come to the conclusion that women aren’t interested in engineering. You can’t simultaneously cause a problem and use the results as justification believing the problem doesn’t exist.

For decades we’ve been increasing the cost of higher education to levels that exclude lower-class kids (of all races and genders) from attending college. And those that do manage to attend are saddled with so much debt that it dictates the degrees they’re willing to get. (We’ve basically made humanities degrees extinct.) And the result has been a pipeline of self-perpetuating caucasian chicken nugget sludge.

This is by design. We’ve created an undereducated electorate that we can bully with fear and anger. Democracies don’t do that.

Imagine prioritizing education enough as a country that we shifted our tax dollars to guarantee that anyone who wanted that education could get it. For free. SF State is doing it. New York and Rhode Island as well. This has never been about lack of money, but about priorities.

Let’s destroy bro culture

When you show the world your product team looks like the photo below, you’re telling everyone who doesn’t look like this that they can’t be on a product team. The prerequisite for being on this team isn’t a skill set, or a level of education — it’s a cock.

Evan Reiser on Twitter

Twitter product team in Cannes. We just finished the last of our 200+ meetings for the week! Amazing work by an amazing team!

We need women and minorities in positions of leadership. And we need to deal with the educational system so that we increase the diversity of people available to interview.

Then we need to deal with a bro culture that dismisses people on the basis of fit, which is nothing but a code word for misogyny and racism. Meritocracy? Don’t even. That lie’s been exposed too much recently. Not just by the good women we’ve kept down, but by the mediocrity that we’ve elevated to the top.

Imagine building teams that actually reflected the communities we’re serving? Imagine having a trans person in the room when you propose a “real names” initiative? Imagine having someone who’s been stalked in the room when you suggest adding places of employment to dating profiles. Heck, imagine having a woman in the room when you craft a health-care bill! That’s right, we don’t get to make fun of Congress’ shit when ours stinks just as bad.

It’s time for designers to become grownups. We need a code of ethics and we need to get licensed.

Let’s fix UX design culture

The days of the wild west are over. When I started doing interaction design, I didn’t have a degree. Because no one was teaching it. It was a brand new field. We figured out how to build the internet by building it. And it was great.

But those days are over.

The stuff we’re designing now is deeply enmeshed in the social fabric of our lives. We’re designing things that put people in strangers’ cars, that control devices in our homes, that administer medication. We design privacy settings that have deep repercussions in the ethical walls we’ve had to create for our messy, messy, wonderful lives.

When I started designing things on the internet, if you fucked up you got a broken link. Now if you fuck up, you mess up someone’s life. And as much as I love doing my job, I’m beginning to think it’s insane that I don’t need a license to do this shit! I have no training in it!

And as our work gets more complicated, the ethical concerns about what we’re doing get bigger and nastier. (Look no further than all the shit we went through with Uber.) And I’m out there talking to a lot of designers. I’m genuinely scared at the amount of them who don’t see ethics as a part of the craft. This needs to change.

A doctor who gets busted working unethically loses their license. Can’t practice medicine anymore. Same with lawyers. It’s time for designers to become grownups. We need a code of ethics and we need to get licensed. I’ll be writing more about this in the weeks to come.

Ethics can’t be a side hustle

Let’s get there

This is some of the stuff we need to fix. There’s so, so, so much more. But this is the stuff that I think I can have a hand in trying to fix in my own field. And maybe, just maybe if we get through this current hell we can get a chance to tackle some of these.

…unless maybe, dealing with this shit now is how we can ensure we get through it. Maybe.

Mike Monteiro is a nice guy or a total asshole depending on your opinion. He is also the Design Director at Mule Design. And the author of Design Is a Job and You’re My Favorite Client.

What if we get through this? was originally published in Dear Design Student on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Q: I need something to read on my summer vacation. I’d love to get a book that will give me a creative edge. What should I get?

I have a couple ideas about what books may already be tempting you, so let’s start there.

Do NOT get any book that promises a shortcut to the top. You can identify these books by their tenure on bestseller lists, ability to tap your deepest insecurities, and snappy titles like Creative Confidence, Grit, Pivot, Mindset, Flourish, Focus, and Sprint. The best ones started out as articles in The New Yorker. Look for them there. Do NOT get that doorstopper from Taschen that’s at the top of your wish list. It is unreadable, it exceeds the load capacity of your current coffee table, and it will make you feel uncreative and small. For the money, you could buy every book that’s mentioned later in this post and a hip bookshelf to put them on.

If you really want a leg-up on the competition, get a novel! That’s right, get yourself a book-length prose narrative that has a minimum of pictures, no listicles, and is completely fictional. Here’s why:

We don’t spend enough time with people who are different from us. Our families, friends, and coworkers tend to mirror our own demographic profile. Because our society is still largely segregated, we rarely bump into people who are demographically diverse. And deliberately connecting with folks from other countries, races, religions, sexualities, and tax brackets is something many of us find difficult.

Social media companies claim to make the world more open and connected. In the dial-up days, this was actually true. Many of us first experienced social media in the form of AOL chat rooms—unpoliced online conversations with random strangers. Now, thanks to algorithms that serve up more of what we “like,” our social media experiences are much less varied. We are trapped in agreeable echo chambers. My own echo chamber has been swamped by scoldy posts about how awful social media echo chambers are for civil society. When designers get stuck in echo chambers, it’s not just bad for society, it’s bad for business. As we lull ourselves into believing that every thinking person thinks like us, we lose our ability to empathize. Designers without empathy are no longer designers.

When designers get stuck in echo chambers, it’s not just bad for society, it’s bad for business.

Fortunately, studies show that reading literary fiction enhances empathy. In the Washington Post last summer, cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley compared reading to being in a flight simulator: “‘You experience a lot of situations in a short span of time,’ he said, far more so than if we went about our lives waiting for those experiences to come to us.” Reading fiction is a cheap, convenient, and engaging way to dive into worlds that are different from our own.

Unfortunately, it’s tempting to confuse reading with a number of other activities:

Buying. Just as joining a gym isn’t the same as working out, buying books isn’t the same as reading them. Designers are an acquisitive tribe. We fill our totes with high concept riso-printed chapbooks. We back tasty Kickstarter campaigns for reissues of 1970s-era graphic standards manuals. We love to hate Amazon and love to love Amazon Prime. We obsessively arrange our books on coffee tables, and organize them by color on ceiling-high bookshelves. Loving books isn’t the same as reading them, and treating them as knickknacks is a shallow love indeed.

Looking. Why do we buy all these books? Mostly to look at them. We crave quick hits of visual stimulus, so we buy picture books for grownups—enormous compilations of art and design. These books contain words, essays even, but they are not for reading. They are too heavy, too shiny. Their words are too small, pictures too big. We can’t not look.

“Designers are visual people! Let us look!” you say. “Aim higher,” I say.

Don’t just be visual, be creative. Compare the experience of looking at a picture of a river to that of reading the word “river.” In What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsund describes the latter and shows that reading is a truer path to creativity than looking:

River, the word, contains within it all rivers, which flow like tributaries into it. And this word contains not only all rivers, but more important all my rivers: every accessible experience of every river I’ve seen, swum in, fished, heard about, felt directly or been affected by in any other manner oblique, secondhand or otherwise. These ‘rivers’ are infinitely tessellating rills and affluents that feed fiction’s ability to spur the imagination. I read the word river and, with or without context, I’ll dip beneath its surface.

Scrolling. Reading on a screen is not reading. At the risk of convincing you that reading Medium isn’t reading, I’ll explain. Your screen is very bored right now. It would rather be doing just about anything. Retweeting Nugget Boy. Looking up driving directions. Delivering 😀😀😀 FROM MOM. Making in-app purchases. It aches to tell you the weather in Jakarta. It’s raining in Jakarta! Hell, secretly, it just wants to be a flashlight. Let it be a flashlight! You’re reading this post on the lit-up face of a $700 flashlight!!! Come to think of it, you’re getting a bit bored too.

The miracle of a book is that when you get bored, your only option is to keep reading.

Here are four terrific and very non-boring novels to help you get back into reading:

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

These intersecting stories center on a rocker turned record executive and a young woman who works for him. Throughout the book, Egan switches between narrative perspectives and styles, including a chapter in the form of a PowerPoint deck.

Designers love to hate PowerPoint, but we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s still the lingua franca of many clients. Goon Squad’s sad, funny, weird PowerPoint chapter is a gift, offering new narrative possibilities for the most dated creative tool:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

A pandemic wipes out 99% of the world’s population, and the survivors grapple with how and who to be after civilization’s collapse. The title comes from a story-within-the-story: a comic-book featuring Dr. Eleven, a physicist who lives on a space station after escaping an alien takeover of Earth.

Great designers are systems thinkers. Human civilization is our most important, and increasingly fragile, system. What makes it work? What causes it to break down? Mandel explores these questions in the context of a totally believable and totally transformed world:

Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

In this satire about race in America, an African-American urban farmer living on the outskirts of Los Angeles tries to put his town back on the map by resegregating it. His intervention, mostly in the form of posted signs and painted paths, lands him in front of the Supreme Court.

The narrator of The Sellout is not a graphic designer, but the book should be required reading for designers of wayfinding systems. It is an object lesson on design’s power to defend or upend the dominant culture:

I was surprised how many small-business people offered to pay me to display the NO WHITES ALLOWED sign…It wasn’t unusual to get calls from the proprietors asking Dr. Bonbon if they could keep the signs in the windows because they made their clientele feel special. “The customers love it. It’s like they belong to a private club that’s public!”

Speak: A Novel by Louisa Hall

A story about artificial intelligence, told from the perspective of five characters who are loosely connected across space and time. As Hall’s novel investigates the narrowing gap between humans and robots, it reveals the widening gap between humans.

AI is the hottest topic in tech, one that designers have to be thinking about. At Google I/O earlier this month, CEO Sundar Pinchai laid out his vision for an “AI-first world.” Speak offers readers a visceral understanding of the promise and peril of artificial intelligence:

And what if they took over? What if they relieved us of power? We tend to assume that sentient machines would be inevitably demonic. But what if they were responsible leaders? Could they do much worse than we’ve done? They would immediately institute a system of laws. The constitution would be algorithmic.

Not tempted by any of the above? Looking for something more pretentious? Try Infinite Jest. More agency-centric? Try And Then We Came to the End. More Finnish? Try Fair Play. More food? Try The Debt to Pleasure. More flacks? Try John Henry Days. More dot-com? Try The Golden Gate. There is a novel out there that will make you a better designer, and a better person. So stop clicking, tapping, dragging, swiping, and pinching, and start reading.

Rachel Berger is a graphic designer in Oakland. She is chair of Graphic Design at California College of the Arts. She holds an MFA from Yale.

Summer Reading was originally published in Dear Design Student on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a tardigrade. It can survive in the vacuum of space. The design process cannot. Still, many designers try to isolate themselves, using the label “creative” (as a noun) and their “creative process” as defenses against other people’s feedback. Some designers will go so far as to work for free to avoid input from others.

But design is by its nature collaborative. It’s about solving problems. Unless you’re solving problems for yourself, it requires at least two people: a designer and a person with a problem. (And if you are solving problems for yourself, how do you like the start-up life?)

Feedback is how we know our work is…well, working. Colleagues, clients, and users are all invaluable sources of insight for measuring how well our designs serve the people they’re intended to.

Not everyone who gives you feedback will be a designer (unless you go by Daniel Burka’s definition), and thank God. Unless we want to become an industry of Dribbble pornographers, we need the perspectives of the real life human beings our designs impact.

Unless we want to become an industry of Dribbble pornographers, we need the perspectives of the real life human beings our designs impact.

And while we hope our designs’ impact on others is beneficial, we need to be open to criticism when it’s not. That’s true whether the feedback is coming from a client, users, or the community at large. And it’s true whether the feedback is on the aesthetics of the design, the function, or the larger societal implications of it, such as when your design ends up excluding or marginalizing others. (Amélie Lamont and my friend Robyn Kanner both have excellent thoughts on the ways in which design further excludes the already marginalized — and many other topics.)

Tobias Van Schneider on Twitter

If you have 7 ppl who like what you do and 3 who hate it, focus on the 7. Don't waste your time convincing those 3 while risking to lose 7.

Being open to feedback isn’t just how we get better at our jobs, it’s how we get better as human fucking beings. So get your beards out of your ears designers, accept that feedback is an essential part of the job—nay, life—and get to work.

Where to get started.

Finding the Positive in Negative Feedback

Adjust your attitude toward receiving negative feedback.
Getting negative feedback doesn’t make you a bad designer; but learning how to get it can make you a better one.

Designing for Better Feedback

Improve the way you work to get the best feedback out of clients.
Encourage clients to frame their feedback around the project goals. Learn to present design based on what it does instead of how it looks.

Cut the Shit Sandwich

Help your clients help you with better feedback.
Giving design feedback can be daunting. No one teaches clients how to give design feedback. Give them the tools they need to provide you with the feedback you need.

Feedback is not an option. was originally published in Dear Design Student on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A long long time ago, a potential client knocked on the door. That’s how long ago it was; people still came by and knocked. When I opened the door he said, “I need to hire a designer. I’m a friend of your old client Bob. Bob gave me your name. He said you were a pain in the ass to deal with and I should listen to everything you say.”

We’ve never been happier.

We don’t trust people who want to like us. They tell you what you want to hear. They choose friendship over criticism. And they don’t make your work better. To us, a compliment doesn’t count unless it’s given begrudgingly by someone who’d rather kick our asses.

We named ourselves Mule. Mules are designed to work.

Hi. We’re in client services. And we design solutions to your problems. We’re stubborn about solving them. We see client services as a partnership of equals. You’re the expert at your thing and we’re the expert at our thing. We need to work together. We know you could’ve chosen to work with lots of other people. But you chose us. We take that responsibility seriously. You worked hard to get the budget for your project and we respect you enough to do the right thing. Even if it means arguing with you once in awhile. Because in the end, when the work we do together is successful, you’ll forget every single argument we had and you’ll send other people to us. And you’ll tell them, “they’re a pain in the ass to deal with and you should listen to everything they say.”

Below are some of the things we’ve learned over the years that guide us in doing good work.

To us, a compliment doesn’t count unless it’s given begrudgingly by someone who’d rather kick our asses.

Talk to people before you hire them!

You’re going to spend a few months with whoever you hire. You need to know you can work with these people. Don’t hamstring yourself with an idiotic RFP process that doesn’t allow you to talk to the people you’re going to hire. This is the future of your organization, not a raffle. Before we work together we need to know that we can work together too. We need to know that we respect each other. And most of all…

Don’t work with anyone you can’t argue with

Things get tense during a project. We’ll be looking at the ugliest parts of your organization together! We’re going to be exposing internal disagreements. It’s embarrassing. We’re going to have different ideas on how to achieve your goals. Things get heated, even when everyone is trying to be their professional best.

Arguing isn’t even a thing to be avoided! Sometimes it’s the best way to solve a problem.

We are not a vendor

Vendors refill the soda machine in your lobby. You tell them to put Cherry Coke in the machine and they put Cherry Coke in the machine. We’re a partner. You tell us to do something and we’re going to ask you why. We’re going to talk about how that maps to a goal or not. And if it doesn’t map to a goal, we’ll talk you out of it. We’re the experts at our thing. That’s why you hired us. You’re the experts at your thing. That’s why we’re working together. There needs to be trust and respect on both sides. We’re not doing it for you, we’re doing it with you.

Research is not negotiable

We can’t solve a problem until we understand it. That means we need to study it. That means we need to talk to your current customers, your potential customers, and we need to talk to your employees. Once we understand the problem together, then we can begin to design solutions for it. Every hour we spend on research saves us ten hours down the road. So no, you’re not saving any time by attempting to cut it. Just stop.

We don’t work for the people who write the checks

Your organization won’t succeed unless the people you’re communicating with understand what you’re saying. So they’re the people we listen to the most. You should listen to them as well. They’re the ones we’re all working for. Think of it this way: if you get it, you’re happy. If they get it? You’re rich. Which I’m told can also lead to happiness of a sort.

Trust the process

The truth is, when we start a project, we have absolutely no idea what to do. What we have is a process for finding out. A process which has worked time and time again. The design shops who walked into the pitch meeting with ideas are idiots. They have absolutely no idea if those ideas are right.

Theory is only interesting until you have history

If we do everything absolutely correctly, a project is maybe 80% right the day it launches. And it’s never the 80% you thought. We make educated decisions based on research. We believe in those decisions. Until the project launches. Then we believe in data. The day your work launches is the day your real work begins, because that’s the day you begin collecting actual evidence. And we’ll prepare you for that day.

Do everything to avoid the world’s shittiest conversation

No one likes difficult conversations, but there’s one conversation that sucks beyond all others. That’s the one where you call us about six months after your project launches. Telling us the project failed. And that your organization is closing shop. Or that you’ve been fired. Or that you’ve had to lay off staff. We never want to have that conversation. To date, we haven’t had to. That’s because we’re willing to have all the difficult conversations during the project that keep that conversation from happening. So if we’re working together and we’re being stubborn, or we won’t let go of something, or we refuse to give in, or we won’t let you have something you really want… it’s because we know it leads to the conversation neither of us want to have. We’d rather fight for your success, even if it means fighting you.

These days we do workshops, as well as client projects, because we want to help other designers learn the lessons we’ve learned over the years. So in turn, they can help more clients. We want to help both groups be as good as they can possibly be. Our goal, as always, remains to design a better, more just world. We’re here to level the playing field. And sometimes that takes a bulldozer.

Wanna work together?

Originally published at muledesign.com.

Lessons we accidentally learned while running a design shop was originally published in Dear Design Student on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How I learned the hardest design feedback to hear is often the best to receive.

We live in crazy times, friends. The surreal has become reality, and reality has to prove itself against alternative facts. So when I tell my fellow designers that negative feedback on your work is the best feedback you can get, I understand it sounds like I’ve gone full Kellyanne. But I am telling the truth (the truth truth), when I say negative feedback is good, and we should be seeking it out more from our colleagues, bosses, and clients.

Now if you’re imagining some masochistic scene where you hold up your designs and cry, “Tell me I’m bad at my job,” my DMs are open. But if that doesn’t sound like a good time, be assured getting negative feedback doesn’t have to be unpleasant. And if you find yourself on the giving end, negative feedback should never be mean.

Simply defined, negative feedback tells us our attempts toward a goal — in this case to solve a problem with design — are falling short (currently). What’s so painful about that?

Just kidding, being told your hard work missed the mark can be fucking awful; but if your design isn’t succeeding at its stated purpose, that feedback is for your own good. With the right mindset, getting it doesn’t have to be so bad either.

Right about now, you’ve started wondering what Mule is spiking our La Croix with. And I get it. I was once in your shoes. I hated negative feedback like Peter Thiel hates anyone who…isn’t Peter Thiel.

So why the change of heart? Did I start meditating? Find religion? Up my meds? No, hell no, and yes but later.

How I think about feedback changed early in my career when a client served my own ass to me cold.

I had just finished the first round of visual design on a home page for a social enterprise serving entrepreneurs in developing markets. I was working from wireframes the client’s in-house team had put together. I styled it after their existing collateral at their direction. I used only a single web-standard family because the client didn’t want to use any performance budget on web fonts.

I gave the client everything they asked for, and boy did they fucking hate it.

Their feedback came in an email that started with “I have to say this design isn’t working at all…” and then detailed — at length, great length — everything that wasn’t working. The information wasn’t being presented in the proper hierarchy. Using the style of their old collateral made them look more like a touchy-feely NGO than an enterprise platform. The single web-standard font wasn’t doing the page hierarchy or brand any favors. The solution didn’t feel “fresh” or “innovative” like the product.

The email went on (and on, and on). Oh, and it arrived 15 minutes before a scheduled in-person review of the feedback. In those 15 minutes, I cussed, I raged to my project manager who had forwarded the email, and I cussed more.

I was furious that I had designed this home page exactly to their constraints, and they were telling me the design was unsuccessful. But I couldn’t deny that by using their IA, art direction, and technical requirements without pushing back (which, spoiler alert, I haven’t done since), I had created a design that checked every box except “Actually serves the users’ and business’s goals.”

Once the butt hurt subsided, I could stop focusing on what the client said they wanted and instead put my energy and skills toward a successful design. Because I had accepted the negative feedback as a tool for getting us closer to our shared project goal instead of an attack on my abilities as a designer, we were able to turn that feedback review into a working session to set our new direction. And the next round of design was much more successful for it.

Since then, I have developed a practice (and it does take practice) of inviting negative feedback from clients, colleagues, and bosses. Asking them to kick the tires for me, especially if I feel a piece of the design riding a little low. I’ve learned to evaluate feedback on whether it will get my work to its stated goal instead of how gratifying it is to my self esteem. And I’ve done better work as a result.

Use feedback as a tool for evaluating how close to — or far from — your goal your design is.

It seems so simple: use feedback as a tool for evaluating how close to — or far from — your goal your design is. Negative feedback helps you close the gaps. (And, yeah, positive feedback helps you build on your strengths, but people don’t seem to have as much trouble with this one for some reason.) Yet, this seemingly simple principle of communication goes NYC transit levels of wrong every day in studios, in-house teams, and freelance relationships across the world.

(Giving and getting feedback goes horribly awry in personal relationships, too, but everyone knows designers don’t have those.)

What usually derails the feedback process? Designer ego, usually. Shocking, I know.

Designers will tell you the feedback they get is bad, and there is such thing as bad feedback. Feedback that is prescriptive, vague, irrelevant to the project goals, or given disrespectfully is bad. Most of the time, it is unintentionally so. Just like we have to learn how to receive feedback, no one’s born knowing how to give it. A lot of badly given negative feedback can be fixed with a conversation about what good feedback looks like.

But some people do view giving feedback as their chance to pee all over the design like a Russian hotel bed. Those people are assholes. (If this is you, and you want to start giving feedback that gets results instead of getting you called an asshole, giving feedback with the mindset we’ve been talking about is a great start.)

Evaluate feedback on whether it will get my work to its stated goal instead of how gratifying it is to my self esteem.

But most people aren’t assholes, and until you learn to embrace thoughtful, negative feedback, you won’t be able to tell the assholes from the people who genuinely want to—and will—help make your work better. And if in the meantime, you dismiss valuable insights because all feedback sounds like a personal attack to your ears, the asshole may be you.

The worst way to respond to feedback is by getting defensive. Cutting off the giver to tell them they’re wrong. Going on about how you already tried it their way, and it didn’t work. Explaining how “as a designer” you’ve gained special insights into all things ever touched by a font (this is especially dickish and self-sabotaging when a client is giving you feedback informed by their industry expertise). Even saying “thank you” or “interesting” can come off as defensive if you really mean “uh huh shut up.”

The worst way to respond to feedback is by getting defensive.

Not all the feedback you get will be right, and being open to it doesn’t always mean acting on what you hear. As a super talented problem-solver who makes design decisions for reasons, you should defend the choices you’ve made. But there’s a difference between defending your design and getting defensive. To do the former successfully, you have to fully consider the feedback you get, which means you have to listen to it. You should ask follow-up questions. Feedback is a dialogue, after all! (Oh, by the way, feedback is a dialogue.) And heck, you may even want to sleep on it before you decide how to address the feedback.

Designers make things. Making things can take a lot of time and energy. It’s natural to start seeing the outputs of our labor as a reflection of our worth as designers, but this is not the case. Our worth as designers is defined by our ability to solve problems, and solving problems takes trial, error, and iteration.

Designing things that don’t quite solve the problem at hand is a necessary first step to designing things that do. If a client or colleague tells you the design isn’t quite there yet, they are doing you a favor. They want you to succeed, and are helping you figure out how to get there.

Getting negative feedback doesn’t make you a bad designer; but learning how to get it can make you a better one.

Finding the positive in negative feedback. was originally published in Dear Design Student on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Inevitably, when I bring up the topic of designers working ethically, someone will reply with some flavor of “that’s nice, but I have rent to pay.” Feel free to substitute “rent” for student loans, childcare, medical costs and various other very real and very valid concerns. Along with what I’m guessing is a not-insignificant amount of designers who are filling in that blank with lifestyle to which I’ve grown accustomed.

Let’s deal with the first group, since I have close to zero fucks to give for the second group. Either way, this promises to be less than an enjoyable article for both groups. It will neither give you permission to work unethically, nor outline a set of situations where working unethically is acceptable. If you think those reasons exist, you’d be wrong.

The fallacy of success

Where does this idea that you have to be open to tossing your ethics out the window to be successful come from? That’s worth exploring a bit. Certainly, if we look around at the current landscape, we’ll find plenty of examples of people who behaved—or continue to behave—unethically and have done very well for themselves. From Travis Kalanick to Donald Trump, we see people who’ve broken the rules (pardon me — disrupted!), skirted regulation, and have generally behaved abominably towards others, to much success. In fact, it could be reasonably argued that in those particular cases, their success is due to their lack of ethics.

But if we look closely at those same individuals, we also see the price they’ve paid for their unethical success—the lack of trust, the constant vigilance, the scrutiny, and the eventual comeuppance. History won’t remember these people kindly, and for that matter, the present isn’t viewing them very kindly either.

Don’t ask how you’re going to pay your rent working ethically. Ask why you’re open to behaving unethically in the first place.

Are they successful? Yes. For now. And it’s that little for now that you have to add that should give you pause. Their success is a house built on sand. Can you be successful by throwing ethics out the window? Yes you can. You can also eat three burritos in one sitting. But in both situations, that act is coming back up on you and it won’t be pretty.

The fallacy of the road to success being paved by unethical work is just that, a fallacy. It’s not a road. It’s a dead end alley. It may provide a safe haven from the elements for a few minutes, but going from alley to alley to alley, hoping you don’t get stopped, is a horrible way to complete a journey.

The slippery slope

We’ve all been in spots where we’ve done things that were ethically questionable. We’re human beings. We’re messy. For example, I think we can all agree that stealing is wrong. Yet none of us would hesitate to steal the proverbial loaf of bread to keep our families from starving. The problem comes when theft goes from being an emergency method to stave off starvation to the primary means through which you earn your income.

Throughout your career, you’ll find yourself in spots where your only options might be doing a little work for one of the Travis Kalanicks of the world, or starving. By all means, don’t starve! Just be honest with yourself about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and for how long you’re going to do it. Because once you lose sight of that, the justifications start. (“I’m going to change things from the inside.” ) And realize if you keep making those decisions, they end up defining your career. The idea that you can work unethically, build up a reputation, and then swing that ship around into ethical waters is also a fallacy. By that point, you do indeed have a reputation, but not the one you wanted. You’ll find a bad reputation is the hardest thing in the world to change.

No one values the shame workers

Think of it from the point of view of the person asking you to do the work. They’re probably not totally unaware they’re asking you to do some shady shit. They’ve probably convinced themselves it’s a stop-gap. A temporary bit of shade to get the company back on track, perhaps. For example, I doubt Uber designed Greyball because they wanted to be evil. My guess is they imagined it was a necessarily small evil that helped them achieve a greater good. (You can justify anything if you try hard enough. Or just want to.) But in the end, everyone associated with that project is covered in shame. And your managers are probably looking at you the same way they looked at their Korean escorts when they were done with them. You were a means to an end they never want to see or think of again.

This is not the path to respect. And it is not the path to a long career. This is a path to a career doing short stints of shame work. (I’ll spare you the happy ending pun.) There are no happy endings. (Sorry, couldn’t do it.)

To create lipstick for honest whores is one thing, but to create deodorant for her pimp is another. — Victor Papanek

What the fuck man I just wanna design stuff

I get it. You like to make things. You became a designer because you enjoyed designing. I did too. But there’s more to this job than that. We work within a tight fragile ecosystem where our labor has repercussions. And you are lucky enough to be a designer at a time when design is taken seriously and when design has power. With that power comes responsibility. You are responsible for what you put into the world. And you are responsible for the effect your work has on the world. And right now designers (I define this term broadly, by the way. Perk up your ears developers and engineers.) are creating new inroads in all manner of things. We’re designing software for self-driving cars. We’re designing software that intimately touches peoples lives. We’re designing software that puts people in strangers’ cars. We’re designing databases that track immigrants for eventual deportation. Some of these things needs to be designed with the strictest ethics in mind. Some of these things don’t pass an ethical test and shouldn’t be designed at all!

So I get that you like making things. But making things at the expense of someone else’s freedom is fucked. Not putting what you’re designing through an ethical test is not only just lazy, it’s dangerous. Feigning ignorance that ethics is not part of your job as a designer is no longer valid. Knowing that it’s part of the job and ignoring it is criminal.

The real question

A better question than how you’re going to pay your rent working ethically might be why you are even open to behaving unethically? Look around at the other professionals you interact with on a daily basis. Your doctor. Your grocer. Your mechanic. Your congressperson! How would you react to knowing they’re entertaining doing their job unethically? Think of the ones you’d be appalled by. And the ones you expect it from. And your relationship to the people on both those lists. I don’t want designers on the same list you just put your congressperson on. I’d be honored to be on the same list as your butcher.

Mike Monteiro is a nice guy or a total asshole depending on your opinion. He is also the Design Director at Mule Design. And the author of Design Is a Job and You’re My Favorite Client.

Ethics and paying rent was originally published in Dear Design Student on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the last few months I’ve had a lot of designers ask me “Where can I do good work?”And they don’t mean “good” as in quality. They mean good as in “on the side of the angels.” They look at the world, they see a garbage fire, and they wanna help put it out. That’s commendable. If there’s been a shred of a silver lining lately, it’s been seeing so many people rally to activism. It gives me hope.

Where can you do good work? The answer is so obvious as to be painful. Right where you stand. That’s where you do good work.

Last night I found myself at a meetup for tech people wanting to help non-profits. It was a seriously commendable endeavor. I applaud the people who threw it, and the people who attended it, but since I’m about to dump ice water on their dreams I won’t mention their names. Because I’m sure everyone meant well. (And they’re certainly more commendable than people who ain’t doing shit.)

But here’s the thing. You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle. We need you to work ethically during that day job much more than we need you working with that non-profit.

You can’t buy ethics offsets for the terrible things you do at your day job.

As designers, developers, engineers, or whatever you call yourself these days, you need to realize that there is an ethical component to what we do. And it’s more important than ever to exercise that judgement. It’s not optional. It’s not something you adapt to the ethics, or lack thereof, of your employer, and it’s not something you can save for a side hustle.

Every Uber employee who touched Greyball, a tool meant to deceive people working for the public good, failed an ethics test. They were either told exactly what the tool would be used for, or they didn’t do their due diligence in finding out. But every designer who touched the tool failed an ethics test. Every engineer who touched the tool failed an ethics test. Every project manager who touched the tool failed an ethics test. Every one down the line failed an ethics test. And passing those tests during your day jobs are infinitely more important than helping a non-profit for a few hours a week.

How is this even a question? How is ethics in design (or tech) even debatable? Can you imagine any other industry debating whether they needed to consider ethics? Can you imagine doctors debating whether ethics are important? Actually, they do. They debate ethics every day. But they’re far beyond debating whether they’re important, and on to deliberating the more interesting fine points. Where, honestly, is where we need to be if we’re writing software for self-driving cars and smart vibrators.

Can you imagine a doctor not telling you about a dark spot they found on an x-ray because they didn’t want to upset you? Can you imagine an auto mechanic not telling you your brakes are shot because they didn’t want to deal with the problem, or telling you that your good brakes were shot so they could hustle you out of a few extra bucks? Both are unethical. And when other industries behave unethically we get upset. Yet, many of us seem to have no problem behaving unethically ourselves. We design databases for collecting information, without giving a second thought what that information will be used for.

As a community have we fallen to the level of debating the importance of ethics that’s usually reserved for politicians, bankers, hedge fund managers, pimps, and bookies?

If you want to do good work, and I really hope you do, start doing it at your day job. Start asking questions about what you’re building. Start asking questions about who benefits from what you’re building. Start asking questions about who gets hurt by what you’re building. And take a look at your team. Does it look like the audience you’re trying to reach? Especially if you’re building something in the social sphere, where trust and safety is paramount.

Ask your managers these questions as well. And if you’re not satisfied with their answers stop working. Designing something without understanding the ramifications of what it does is as unethical as designing something you know to be harmful.

But, won’t somebody else make it? I get this question a lot too. And the answer is yes. They might. And holy shit that can make you feel powerless. It really can. But here’s the thing. Just because the person next to you might be an asshole, that’s not a very good excuse for you to be one. I get that you don’t want to lose your job. I get that you have rent to pay. But earning your living at the expense of someone else’s livelihood is not a good way to live.

So rather than ask yourself “won’t somebody else make it?” ask yourself “what if me saying no is the inspiration for other people to stand up?” What if me saying no is the first step in a movement? What if me saying no is the first step to making things right?

We can debate whether tech or design are neutral in nature for weeks. And it’s a conversation I look forward to. But whether they are or not, I know that people are not. You cannot afford to be neutral. Right now, more than ever you need to reach down deep into your core, find your ethical strength, and bring it to your day job with you every day.

Then we can talk about helping non-profits in the evening. And hurry up, because they do need your help.

Ethics and paying rent

Mike Monteiro is a nice guy or a total asshole depending on your opinion. He is also the Design Director at Mule Design. And the author of Design Is a Job and You’re My Favorite Client.

Ethics can’t be a side hustle was originally published in Dear Design Student on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Q: I am freaking the fuck out that America just elected a fascist. I’m bouncing between wanting to fight and hiding under my bed. I’m just a designer, what can I do?

Hi. Take a deep breath. I’ve been breathing into a paper bag for three weeks myself. Let’s not white-wash (ha!) this. We are truly fucked. We’re standing at the very edge of the American experiment. I can’t blame you for not wanting to take that next step.

So let’s take stock: barring any last-minute Hail Marys such as vote audits, appealing to faithless electors, or praying that Congress actually gives a shit about conflicts of interest, Donald Trump is set to become the President of the United States. We should behave as if he’s going to do the things he’s said he’s going to do. There’s no secret liberal inside the orange jumpsuit. And while he may not be a fascist himself, he’s a needy narcissistic Zelig-like sociopath who needs to be loved and admired by those closest to him. And he’s chosen to surround himself with fascists.

In the next four years, civil rights in America will be under constant massive attack. As designers, we don’t get to opt out.

In the next four years, civil rights in America will be under constant massive attack. As designers, we don’t get to opt out. And since you’ve all been screaming about changing the world, now’s the time you realize it’s not done by disrupting viral video consumption delivery systems, but by actually getting involved in some of that civil shit.

Get healthy

First off — and I cannot stress this enough — get your shit together. Your mental health is important. If you’re not taking care of yourself, you’re in no position to take care of others. And right now, not taking care of yourself the most selfish act possible because we need you. So go to your therapist, get back on your meds, do some physical activity to get those endorphins going because we need you strong and we need you healthy.

And look, if you’re seriously freaking out, know that I totally understand why you would be, because this all sucks. Then know I love you. Then call this number: 1–800–273–8255. They will take care of you. If you need some help figuring all this out, but can wait a few days, you can find someone to talk to here. Please take this seriously.

Once you’re healthy, we can get to work.

Be a citizen first

Before we need you as a designer, we will need you as a citizen. As a citizen there are three things you can give: time, money, and haven. Give what you can of each.

The most important thing you can do is make phone calls. Call your representatives. Call your senators. Do not tell them about your feelings. They don’t care about your feelings. They care about your next vote. Tell them what they need to do to get it. Be relentless. Be the person who calls every day. You can make 5 calls a day and you’ll be in and out in under 15 minutes. And yes, I mean phone calls. That’s how these people work. A call is ten times more valuable than an email, or a petition. You all have phones. You’re probably reading this on one.

Look for the helpers

There are organizations out there busting their ass to keep the flame of democracy alive. Find them. They need your money to keep doing this. Give to the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, the Anti-Defamation League, the Trevor Project. There are so many more.

Help those still willing to speak truth to power. The media failed us in a big way, but there are enough thinkpieces about that already, and this is not that. But donate generously to the ones still standing proudly: Mother Jones—still fierce after so many years and stronger than ever, ProPublica—going deep into the data to expose corruption, The Washington Post—still standing tall. And, oh how I love adding Teen Vogue to this list. Because they’re kicking a lot of ass, and they’re talking directly to the next generation. The New York Times has already fallen.

If we’re going down, we’re going down as a community.

Mostly, though, as a citizen, look out for each other. And especially look out for people most likely to be the target of roving jackbooted deplorable thugs. There is more safety in numbers. We’re past the point of pretending not to see that hate crime happening on the bus. It’s happening. And it will keep happening until the people on the bus, or on a plane, or in the street, stand up to the haters. Here are four simple steps to stop all types of harassment. Is this putting your safety at risk? Yes. Is it increasing the overall safety? Yes. If we’re going down, we’re going down as a community.

There’s no wrong way to help

Some of us are fighters. Some of us are check writers. Some of us like to protest. Some of us are focused on vote audits. Some of us are preparing for four years of absolute terror. This is all good. And this is all necessary. Don’t tell someone they’re helping wrong just because they’re doing something you don’t agree with. (Unless you think it actually runs contrary to their goals. That’s called critique.)

If it gives people hope it’s worth doing. Hope is gonna be in some short supply in the next four years so let people generate it where they can. If you’re organizing a protest, but your friend Bob would rather sit at his desk and make phone calls, that’s cool. He’s doing his thing and you’re doing yours.

The amount of time we spend arguing with each other only subtracts from the amount of time we spend fighting fascists.

Go local

Fix yourself. Fix your house. Fix your street. Fix your neighborhood. Fix your city. Fix your state. Fix your country. That’s the order to work in. Start small and work up. This election was lost at the local level. We won it at the national level!

Get a grip on what’s going on in your local community and find out where you can help. Maybe it’s keeping your street free of swastika graffiti. Maybe it’s making sure the two Muslim kids down the street have a clear path to school and back every day. If you own a business, make sure everyone knows they’re welcome there. Put up signs. Make them visible. Make sure that any fascist walking into your place of business feels unwelcome.

This election was lost at the local level. We won it at the national level!

Who are your local elected officials? Where do they stand on things? When are their terms up? Local officials turn into state officials. State officials turn into national officials. (Unless of course, we keep electing idiots who run golf courses. Badly.) Weed the bad apples out locally so we never have to deal with them nationally.

And I can’t emphasize this enough. The shit on the ballot that actually affects you is that long winded badly worded local shit. (It’s designed that way on purpose, by the way.) That shit has an almost immediate effect on your community. And as a local voter in a smaller voting base your vote has a higher percentage of mattering. So read it, try to understand it. Someday you’ll be so far up in it you’ll be able to influence it.

Don’t work with fascists

We do not work with fascists. There is no reason to reach out to fascists. We don’t build bridges to fascism. We burn down the bridges that link them to us. These are people who think those who don’t look like them as subhumans. I have no desire to reach across the aisle to that deplorable vomitous shit.

If you help them you are advancing their agenda, and become no better than them.

Work ethically, now more than ever

More than ever we need to look at how we’re designing the world. We also need to look at who is designing it. Don’t look for much resistance from Silicon Valley, which is run by rich white boys, towards a government run by the rich white men they aspire to become. Take stock in who you’re working for, what they’re making, and who they’re hiring to make it.

We have serious problems to solve. Make sure you’re working at places that are interested in solving them. And if you’re working at large companies, especially companies in the social space, keep an eye out for how your products effect the marginalized. Work on ways to empower those who need empowering. And if you’re in the “news” business, maybe take a look at what kind of lies you’re spreading. (Yes, I’m talking about you Facebook.) Take a look at the words you’re using. Stop sugar-coating shit. Don’t say alt-right when you’re talking about Nazis, dammit. (Yes, I’m talking about you, New York Times.)

As designers, we need to fulfill our missions of being gatekeepers. Your job is to improve the world for everyone, not just those in power. When you are asked to work on something that can marginalize people, you must stop. When you are asked to come up with solutions that tighten the grip of fascism on your community, you must stop. And not just move over so that someone else can take the oar, it is your responsibility as a designer to make sure that work never sees that light of day. Even if that means throwing your body across the gears of fascism. This is the job. This is what you signed up for.

And the company that signs on to build the Muslim database can go fuck themselves.

Prepare for a better future

We’re in this situation because we designed the world to work this way. The rescinding of the Voting Rights Act, the gerrymandering of congressional districts, the existence of the electoral college, the underfunding of schools to create an undereducated electorate. We did all that. And we’ll have to undo it. This will take a fuckton of time, which honestly I’m not sure we have. But we have to try.

Right now, as we speak my friend Dana Chisnell is working on how to improve our election process at the Center for Civic Design. Part of me thinks she is insane because we’re never going to have another election. But I’m trying to listen to the part of me that wants to ensure she has a chance to get there.

So we fight. We fight because we can’t not fight. We fight because maybe this is the cliché darkest before the dawn. We fight because if we don’t people get beat up, rounded up, stripped of their dignity, and killed. And while this may or may not happen in a large government-sanctioned way, it’s definitely going to happen in small pockets of deplorable misery throughout the country. And there are things we can do to prevent it. We have to try.

Fight fascism.

Mike Monteiro is a nice guy or a total asshole depending on your opinion. He is also the Design Director at Mule Design. And the author of Design Is a Job and You’re My Favorite Client.

How To Fight Fascism was originally published in Dear Design Student on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Q: I really want to make a killer portfolio piece. Should I take a packaging class? A UI class? What should I do?

So many design students feel a great and terrible pressure to produce work they can safely stuff into the mental flat file labeled PORTFOLIO. Apparently, they desperately want to make work they think “looks professional” so that they have something to graft onto cheap PSD mockups, plug into a Squarespace template, and eventually use to get freelance production design work at the second largest events company in Tulsa.

This fixation on traditional portfolio pieces is a total drag. Not only is it boring, it stunts your creative development. “How dare you say I’m creatively stunted?” you might ask. “I poured a hundred hours into this amazing Day of the Dead-themed tequila packaging. It took me a whole weekend just to hand-ink the sugar skull on the label!” When design students tell me they want their work to look professional, I hear them saying they want their work to look invisible. The standard they’re using for that tequila packaging is that it’s convincing enough to pass for something that’s already on the market. This amounts to hoping that the bottle you slaved over will vanish into the shelf of all the other budget tequilas in Trader Joe’s agave aisle.

Someone gets paid to design every billboard, every banner ad, every breakfast cereal box — it’s all totally professional, and almost all totally awful.

All “professional” means is that someone got paid. It doesn’t mean they got paid well. It doesn’t even mean they’re a designer. These days, most “professional” graphic design is made by marketers and PR flacks who don’t value graphic design enough to pay someone else to do it. Someone gets paid to design every billboard, every banner ad, every breakfast cereal box — it’s all totally professional, and almost all totally awful. Using “looks professional” as a standard will trap you into making safe versions of safe design, bad versions of bad design. It is a sure way to stagnate creatively at the exact moment when you should be growing the fastest.

If you’re already hellbent on making work that resembles work people get paid for, I can see why you’d be tempted to make work that resembles work people get paid a LOT for. Unfortunately, that’s another creative dead end. Just look at what some of the best-compensated designers are getting up to these days. Now that tech companies have started building giant in-house design teams, promising entry level visual designers can command six-figure salaries. What are these bright young things actually doing with all their professional design time? Most of them are eating fancy lunch, testing forty shades of blue, and putting together Stranger Things-themed costumes for the office Halloween party.

The promise of fame and fortune, Silicon Valley-style, means that design students continue to sacrifice their own humanity in order to create offerings for Dribbble, that insatiable cyberlord of user interface porn. The real winners here are those who forgo the quest for likes to focus on developing their own ideas and visual language. If they’re good enough and work hard enough, they get to engage with the tech world on their terms, and they can survive the bust that’s sure to follow the current boom.

So what’s a poor design student to do? You’re up to your nostrils in debt. Your parents have changed all the locks on the house. You’ve developed a considerable almond milk latte habit. Soon enough, you’re going to need a job. Here are some suggestions for how to think differently about building your portfolio.

1. Drop out.

Don’t mistake me for someone who agrees with the startup billionaire dropouts who casually dismiss the value of college. But if you think critical thinking is a waste of time, stop wasting your time. If all you want are skills, there are cheaper ways to get them. Go to boot camp, or night school, or YouTube. Plenty of people are hiring for skills regardless of credentials. That said, take care that your skills have some staying power. Woe to the paste-up artists and Flash developers!

2. Choose classes based on what you’ll learn, not what you’ll make.

What you make in a class is finite and static. It will always smell like school. It will often look like a second-rate version of something in your professor’s portfolio. Meanwhile, what you learn in a class is infinitely applicable to future work. It can be combined with what you’re learning in other classes, and become something bigger and richer than it was alone. Use your portfolio to build a case for who you are and what you’d like permission to do next. The work you make in school is evidence for that case, but it is not the case itself.

3. Own your work.

I don’t care whose class you made something for or what the assignment was. Tell me what you made and why. Tell me how you got to this solution. Tell me what you learned. Show me where you are in the project. Show me the creative twist. Show me the point. If you can’t, leave the project out, no matter how pretty it is. Your portfolio should be yours. And if it’s truly yours, it will be materially and clearly different from every other portfolio, even if everyone’s using the same template. What is a job? It’s people asking you to use your skills to do their thing. Use your time in school to make something that’s yours alone. And once you’ve made it, own it.

4. Be careful what you wish for.

Your portfolio says everything about who you are and what you can do. If your portfolio tells me you’re a Photoshop wizard, then that’s what I’ll hire you for. If it tells me you can make anything explode in Cinema 4D, I’ll hire you for that. But I won’t be much interested in your opinion on what we’re making or why. Being amazing at a complex piece of software today is like being amazing at taking dictation fifty years ago. It’s a valuable skill. It will get you a good first job. But if you want to move up the food chain, being known for having deep technical skill in one area probably won’t help you. Do you want to excel at bringing other people’s ideas to life? Or do you want to be asked for your idea?

5. Update your definition of a good portfolio piece.

When a professor tells you you’ll get a great portfolio piece out of her class, ask her what she means by that. Maybe she is still getting paid to make the type of design that is so often associated with portfolio pieces — things like food packaging, magazines, or logos — but hardly anyone else is. Just because a piece is easy to represent in a portfolio doesn’t mean it’s a good portfolio piece. Start by deciding what story you want your portfolio to tell, then figure out what to show and say. Today’s designers are increasingly expected to be systems-thinkers, good collaborators, and agile learners. Process images and written explanations can be a better showcase for these skills than traditional product shots. Scrappy, weird, unresolved projects can make great portfolio pieces. Use VSCO to shoot a bunch of garbage knolled on a table — it will always look good. All it takes is a wall label to turn a urinal into priceless art.

Your portfolio should be a birthplace for future work, not a graveyard for past work.

For that to happen, your portfolio has to demonstrate more than what you’ve done. It has to show who you are, how you think, and what you have to offer. That might mean it doesn’t contain any “portfolio pieces” at all.

Rachel Berger is a graphic designer in Oakland. She is chair of Graphic Design at California College of the Arts. She holds an MFA from Yale.

The Myth of the Portfolio Piece was originally published in Dear Design Student on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.