2025-08-27 12:00:00
Note: This post gets into American politics. If that’s not your cup of tea, or if that’s a stressful topic for you, please feel free to skip this one. (Also, it’s a bit long. Sorry about that.)
Last week, my country’s far-right administration announced they were establishing an “America by Design” initiative, along with a so-called National Design Studio to oversee it. That studio will, to quote its own homepage, “improve how Americans experience their government — online, in person, and the spaces in between.” After seeing the announcement, I read through the “America by Design” web page. And I have some thoughts.
I mean, there are the surface-level observations. The text is poorly written, and filled with typos; I expect both of these things on my website, but not on an announcement of this scale. And aesthetically, the design is…well, tepid. Once you get past the literal flag-waving in the header, there’s some text that slides in as you read — something you’ve seen on every other product site that’s launched in the last decade. If this is meant to herald a new era in design for the federal government, it is a singularly meager vision.
But I don’t want to get mired in the aesthetics. Let’s look at how the site was built — after all, that’s part of “design.”
We’ll start with the fact that the “America by Design” site is a single HTML page, not unlike the blog post you’re reading. But to make those words appear in your browser, this new “national studio” used almost three megabytes of code. Imagine having to download a three-minute MP3 each time you visit a web page, and you’re in the ballpark.
I realize that doesn’t sound like much, especially by the standards of today’s slow, heavy, overbuilt web. But imagine you’re one of the millions of Americans on a prepaid “pay as you go” plan, or on a home network with capped, limited data. In both cases, data overages are tremendously expensive. Now imagine you’re trying to access some critical information online — how to renew your passport, say, or to manage your Social Security — and you’re met with a web page that is literally too expensive for you to view. An overbuilt, too-heavy website isn’t exactly a rarity on today’s internet. (Sadly.) But this design is coming from the federal government, which is quite literally meant to serve every citizen — every single one of them. The American people will be poorer for this work, figuratively and literally.
And it’s not just the sheer weight of the page. As inclusive design experts like Anna Cook and Jesse Gardner have noted, this one page is waterlogged with accessibility errors. Low-contrast text, looping animations that can’t be paused or hidden, poorly-structured HTML, images with missing (or incorrect) text equivalents: any one of these errors would be an annoyance. Creating a single page with literally hundreds of accessibility errors will exclude anyone who doesn’t conform to the designer’s narrow definition of “a user.”
In other words, we’re left with a web page announcing a new era of design for the United States government, but it’s tremendously costly to download, and inaccessible to many. What I want to suggest is that these aren’t accidents. They read to me as signals of intent: of how this administration intends to practice design.
A web page that’s literally too expensive to view? It aligns with this administration’s war on the poorest and most vulnerable residents of this country: they’ve passed legislation that will push millions of people off of Medicaid, and are discussing ways to destabilize, if not directly privatize, Social Security. And the awful accessibility isn’t a surprise, not when the current administration is already ignoring its legal mandate to create accessible digital services. (Heck, the current website for the actual, literal White House is a broken, inaccessible mess.) But it also aligns with the administration’s open embrace of eugenics, and with their disregard for disabled Americans. After all, an anti-vaccine extremist is in charge of, and is actively dismantling, the country’s health apparatuses.
So, no: I don’t think it’s an accident that a simple-looking “America by Design” page is built the way it is. It’s communicating their priorities, and how this government wants to redefine design. This “national studio” is designing for the small subset of American citizens who fit their ideal of who can afford, and who can access, the digital services they’ll create.
There’s one last thing I want to mention, but it involves digging into the text a bit. In it, the studio talks about how the “America by Design” initiative will transform the process of interacting with the federal government, turning it into a more “Apple Store like [sic] experience.” It even lists a few examples:
Something you actually look forward to when you…
Pay off your student loans,
Move through TSA,
Renew your passport,
Visit national monuments,
Apply for a small business loan,
Apply for your green card,
Stay the night at a National Park,
Manage your social security.
Even file your taxes.
(Emphasis theirs, not mine, and for reasons I fail to understand.)
Throughout the page, the suggestion isn’t just that the federal government traffics exclusively in poor, ineffective design; it’s that this is the first time anyone has ever proposed changing that.
Of course, that’s — well. Let’s go with “laughable.” First and foremost, it ignores designers and digital teams currently employed by the federal government, who work to make their agencies’ services more user-friendly. And it ignores the United States Web Design System and the people who maintain it, and how their labor makes government services more accessible and consistent. But it also ignores the United States Digital Service and 18F, two digital service agencies tasked with improving the way the federal government built and acquired software.
(I should note that many of the hypothetical scenarios above were, in fact, projects being worked on by those last two groups — or they were, until this administration shut them down after taking office.)
As I’ve mentioned before, I worked at 18F. During my too-brief time there, I saw exactly what it meant to improve the experience of renewing your passport, or providing an easier way to file your taxes. Despite what this new “studio” would suggest, designing better government services didn’t involve smearing an animated flag and a few nice fonts across a website. It involved months, if not years, of work: establishing a regular cadence of user research and stakeholder interviews; building partnerships across different teams or agencies; working to understand the often vast complexity of the policy and technical problems involved; and much, much more. Judging by their mission statement, this “studio” confuses surface-level aesthetics with the real, substantive work of design.
The thing is, there’s something difficult wrapped up in that.
There’s a long, brutal history of design under fascism, and specifically in the way aesthetics are used to define a single national identity. Dwell had a good feature on this in June:
Part of Mussolini’s vision for Italy centered around producing a totalizing image of Italian identity — not Tuscan or Roman or Sicilian. (As [Ignacio Galán, author of Furnishing Fascism] notes in the book, during the Risorgimento one popular saying was, “We have made Italy. Now we need to make the Italians.”) In Mussolini’s opinion, the creation of a national identity could engender patriotism as well as uniformity. If he and his buddies could convince everyone that ideal Italians worked hard, maintained a clean home and healthy body, and believed in the supreme leader above all else, then they could more easily control Italians writ large.
Throughout the text, there’s a single-minded emphasis on aesthetics over design. We’ve already seen that in the studio’s disregard for the page’s weight and accessibility — and now we’re seeing it carried through the page’s text. Design for this “national studio” is about surface-level signals of “experience” and “beauty,” instead of the messy, iterative, imperfect work involved in designing something for people. When this “national studio,” and the administration that created it, tells us it wants to create “an experience that projects a level of excellence for our nation”? That’s aesthetics with a nationalistic twist, and we should take them at their word.
It’s in that light I’d like to revisit something I said earlier: when the administration suggests nobody has tried this before, I don’t think it’s just arrogance. It’s an extension of this administration’s fascist relationship with history.
Since taking office, this administration has worked to position itself as the arbiter of what constitutes “acceptable speech” and “acceptable history.” It is censoring the histories documented by our nation’s museums; it is rewriting curricula to erase the already marginalized; it is canceling artistic grants that don’t align with its goals; it has defunded public broadcasting. So when the administration says here that now, for the first time ever, someone is attempting to do something to fix the nation’s digital services, I don’t think it’s an error. It’s an act of erasure, in line with the other parts of the authoritarian project we’ve seen unfold since January.
Because, yes: this “America by Design” page is shoddily made, and poorly written. But the authoritarian impulse — to erase histories, to control a narrative, to single-mindedly focus on image and aesthetics — shapes not just the site’s text, but its design as well. Its text erases the history and work of the people who quietly labored to create better digital services for the public; in their place, it proposes that one man alone can define “design” for the country. And we find that new definition in the way the site’s constructed: it is digital design intended for the privileged few, one that actively excludes people who don’t conform to a specific, discriminatory definition of “eligible.”
All of this should and must be rebuked by the design community; it must also be actively, urgently dismantled.
This has been “A notional design studio.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
2025-08-12 12:00:00
World’s on fire, so here’s a short post about newsletters.
My friend Eric wrote a great little post about the newsletters that regularly hit his inbox. You should read it! At the end, he tagged a few friends to do the same, and I was one of those friends.
I’m so grateful he asked me. At the same time, I confess I feel a little sheepish writing a whole post about newsletters. (And not just because of the whole “world’s on fire” thing.) Here’s the thing: I get very few email newsletters in my email. The few newsletters I subscribe to are sent to Feedbin, the wonderful RSS software I use. Does the whole “stolen valor” thing apply here?
…no, probably not. An inbox is an inbox, I guess. So regardless of where they show up, here are the newsletters I most look forward to.1
The Economic Policy Institute is a think tank that advocates for economic justice, and I’ve learned a lot from their research-heavy, worker-focused newsletter.
Labor Notes is a nonprofit publication that covers, educates, and builds the fighting wing of the labor movement. I cannot recommend an annual subscription more strongly — but even if that’s not of interest, their email updates are free.
Scalawag is a nonprofit magazine dedicated to telling stories of and from the American south, and each week they share some of those stories.
Jenny’s Show Up Toronto is a thing of beauty, curating a calendar of advocacy events in Toronto. I can only imagine the work involved in getting this site online — building the platform, scouring social media sites for events, entering them into the system — and she still manages to write a thoughtful newsletter about activism? Rude, imo.
(Like everything Jenny writes, it’s wonderful.)
Some of the hardest-working organizers I know, and they still publish a great little newsletter about labor issues (and labor wins) in tech.
The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (“UE”) is an independent union focused on building rank-and-file power.
I hope it says something that even though I’m contributing to the project, I still heartily recommend Unbreaking’s email newsletter. Each new blog entry is emailed out to subscribers, highlighting the big developments the project’s aware of. The news is rarely good, but each email is always, always useful.
That’s it from me, I think. Following Eric’s example, I’d love to invite a few other folks to share their favorite newsletters:
Don’t see your name up there? Well, I’d still love to hear what newsletters you find inspiring, helpful, or hopeful. Write up a blog post and email a link to me. I can’t wait to see what you’re reading.
There are a few other newsletters I subscribe to, but they’re on Substack. While I love those writers, I can’t recommend a Substack newsletter. ↩︎
This has been “Newslettered.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
2025-06-23 12:00:00
World’s on fire and the ghouls keep buying matches, so I’m working on my website.
At the end of last week, I launched a very basic “links and sundries” page. Pretty much ever since I joined Twitter (valē), social media has always been where I’ve shared links I find interesting or inspiring. I’ve always wanted a more permanent solution — or more permanent-feeling, anyway; what’s a link’s average lifespan these days? — so I built one for my website.
When I say “very basic,” I mean very basic. When I first launched it last Thursday night, each link was generated from a Markdown file I’d created in a folder. Heck, the page didn’t even have an RSS feed when it first went live. (It has one now, if that’s your thing.) I’ve spent the intervening days trying to spruce the place up.
As of today, everything in the links section is pulled in from a bookmarking service called Raindrop.io. That’s due entirely to Sophie Koonin, who wrote an excellent post showing how she uses Raindrop.io and Eleventy to automatically generate her weekly link posts. Without Sophie’s stellar tutorial, I would’ve been stuck cobbling together Markdown files by hand, like some sort of feral woodland creature.1 But now, every time I build my site it fetches any new bookmarks I’ve made that day, and creates a post for each bookmark it finds.
I’m really happy with this setup. I can trawl the internet as I am wont to do, saving links to my heart’s content. There’s still more I could do, though. I should probably set up permalinks for each post. Also, while I’m tagging the links I save, I’m not currently showing those tags on the page — that’s probably worth fixing. And I’ve been thinking about other kinds of things I might want to save in that section: not just links to interesting articles or websites, but maybe the odd video or photo I find inspiring. Just to fully embrace l’esprit du Tumblr, I guess.
I’ve also thought about what I won’t be doing with that new links section. Namely, I don’t see myself automatically sharing bookmarked sites on social media. That’s not to suggest in any way that this is a bad pattern! If you do something similar on your site, I think that’s grand — truly. But when I launched the first version last week, I reflected a bit on how I’ve spent years running to social media to share links with my followers. And I realized that this new section felt different: it felt like something I’d made for me. I think I’d like to keep it that way, at least for now. Because in a small way, it feels like coming home.
You know. Like a marmot that, uh, hoards text files. Just like that. (I’m so tired.) ↩︎
This has been “Link bug.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
2025-06-16 12:00:00
I’ve got some new design work to announce, but it’s still very much in progress. Here’s where it stands right now:
For the last couple months I’ve been helping out over at Unbreaking, a project aiming to document the attacks on American institutions waged by the current far-right administration. Unbreaking’s cofounders have tremendous amounts of expertise in journalism, mutual aid, and technology, not to mention large-scale volunteer-powered documentation projects. My contributions have been focused almost entirely website-shaped: I worked with the team on the new site’s design and branding, and I’ve been helping out with new design tasks as Unbreaking grows.
The site’s been live for some time now, but it’s changed quite a bit since launch. And with everything else the team is working on, I can’t wait to see how it’ll change next.
If you’re curious about Unbreaking’s work, here’s a short excerpt from their About page:
The United States is experiencing institutional collapse at a speed and scale that are difficult to understand, especially through feeds and updates that atomize our attention. We believe that mapping the damage done and its human costs — and the pushback and resilience work already underway — is necessary groundwork for building and retaining political agency.
In our work at Unbreaking, we’ll help orient and ground our communities in clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters. To that end, we’re building a set of pages that will serve as a backgrounders for the issues we cover. Each page is written by and for ordinary people, and conveys essential context, a sense of what’s happened so far, and what countermoves are in play.
I don’t know about you, but this really speaks to how I’ve felt since the end of last year: every day feels like it brings a new set of terrible headlines, with crises unfolding on several dozen fronts at once. Keeping up with the issues I care about has felt nigh on impossible, as I’ve spent most of my days feeling awash in news coverage, social media posts, and concerned texts from friends. My attention has absolutely felt atomized.
From what I’ve seen, Unbreaking’s working to bring a little more sense to the senselessness. Their current homepage has a list of the issue pages they’ve published so far. If you’re wondering about the hollowing-out of the federal workforce, the latest attacks on transgender healthcare, or the threats to the postal service, there’s an exhaustively researched page that describes what’s happening.
And I do mean researched. Their About page makes it clear that this isn’t original reporting. Instead, it’s something I’ve found almost more valuable: it’s a team of researchers, community leads, writers, and editors reviewing countless sources, pulling together relevant updates and threads into each issue page. The first time I read the Medicaid page, I sighed at my desk — I mean, it’s a page filled with horrors and harms, but it felt like I finally had a measure of clarity amid all the chaos. Unbreaking is making sense of what’s happening, at a time when those in power are investing in confusion.
That’s all to say that I think Unbreaking is doing vital work, and it’s felt incredibly good to contribute to that work. The team also needs more hands on deck. If you’re looking for something to do right now, I can strongly recommend getting involved. It’d be good to have you on board. Besides, I bet we can build a little more clarity together.
This has been “Unbreaking.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
2025-05-25 12:00:00
Hey, here’s a thing that’s fun to say:
Happy fifteenth birthday, responsive web design!
Well, fun and weird. You know how it goes.
But yes, it’s true: the original “Responsive Web Design” article was published fifteen years ago. Fifteen whole entire years. As the kids say: dang.1
I did a little retrospective when the article turned ten, so I don’t think I need to do another one. I’ll just say again that I coined the phrase “responsive design” well over a month before the article was published, at a conference in early April of that year. Thankfully Mandy Brown, then an editor at A List Apart, heard the talk, and told me it really needed to be an article. Everything sort of followed on from that.
And frankly, I am still surprised by what exactly followed on from that. Ever since the article came out, I tell folks that all I did was meet a publishing deadline; responsive design only became a thing because of the people who got excited about the concept, experimented with it, wrote about it, and moved the idea forward. People like you.
Fifteen years on, it feels like responsive design’s become something truly mundane — something that’s just kind of expected. Is there still work to do? Sure. Absolutely. Urgently, even. But the idea of designing sites that work across mobile, desktop, and whatever else is just kind of seen as the thing you’re supposed to do. And to be clear, that’s not a vindication of any ideas I might have had fifteen years ago. Rather, it’s a testament to just how compelling the Web’s own flexibility is. We’ve stopped designing against a truly fluid design medium, and now we see it as an asset — something we can design both with and for. And I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty neat.
If you can’t tell, I don’t talk to many kids. ↩︎
This has been “Responsive web design turns fifteen.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
2025-05-17 12:00:00
Okay, sorry, I just need a hole to scream into. I’ll be done in a minute.
[inhales]
If you read about the current crop of “artificial intelligence” tools, you’ll eventually come across the word “hallucinate.” It’s used as a shorthand for any instance where the software just, like, makes stuff up: An error, a mistake, a factual misstep — a lie.
I have a semantic quibble I’d like to lodge.
Everything — everything — that comes out of these “AI” platforms is a “hallucination.” Quite simply, these services are slot machines for content. They’re playing probabilities: when you ask a large language model a question, it returns answers aligned with the trends and patterns they’ve analyzed in their training data.1 These platforms do not know when they get things wrong; they certainly do not know when they get things right. Assuming an “artificial intelligence” platform knows the difference between true and false is like assuming a pigeon can play basketball. It just ain’t built for it.
I’m far from the first to make this point. But it seems to me that when we use a term put forward by the people subsidizing and selling these so-called tools — people who would very much like us to believe that these machines can distinguish true from false — we’re participating in a different kind of hallucination.
And a far worse one, at that.
Well, taking into account any subsequent “fine-tuning” of the model that humans may have performed. ↩︎
This has been “Hallucinating.” a post from Ethan’s journal.