New old music
Hello friend,
“Life is good.”
I get why people buy t-shirts that say that, or put smiley face pins on their jackets, or buy flowers for themselves. Life is good. But it's so damned hard to remember sometimes, isn't it? Even when it's bad it's good. Any day above ground and all.
It's been a weird/good/hard year. I haven't yet cracked the formula for self-employed success. But the work comes here and there, and I've picked up more these last couple months, and why even have the credit cards if you're never going to use them?
I mentioned in my last letter that A Book Apart closed. That lit a fire of sorts for me to get my own online house in order. Which was not quite the right fire??
Me: “I should quickly remove the ABA branding and re-list my book so people can still buy it, especially right now in a moment where I need revenue coming in.”
Also me: “Wait, first let's rebuild my entire personal website with updated positioning and colors, and create a healthier ecosystem for a self-published book project to exist within, and then also rewrite most of the entire book into a second edition.”
So that's a lot of what I've been up to, that second one.
A new-ish kubie.co
I've rebuilt my website.
I had a nosism thing going for a bit there — we and us and such; a ham-fisted attempt to seem more like a Business and not just A Dude, but it was never not awkward and it didn't seem to affect things one way or the other. So I've rebooted the whole site, and tried to better frame my work the way I would like it to be seen and understood, which is from the perspective of a designer, educator, artist, and writer moreso than that of a content strategy wonk. Which I definitely am. But that's not, like, my dream, you know?
The main objective was to make it easier for people to get to know me and my work. To that end, I've published a new page that collects some of my better and more interesting talks and podcast appearances. If we've only met recently, that might be a good place to start.
I've reworked my collection of 100+ resources — resources is an IA weasel-word, I know, but it's the one the works best here — organized by topics such as:
There's also a new and growing section of design tools and methods that I have tried to package up for public consumption. You can learn about:
and the Messaging Map right now.
I'll be adding more pages for the other methods listed in the future.
I've built out the whole site myself using the GeneratePress theme for Wordpress. If you find anything awry, especially on mobile, I'd appreciate a heads up.
A new-ish Writing for Designers
As mentioned, I elected to update Writing for Designers before re-release. It's not because the ideas have changed greatly, nor that the discipline has changed so much. It's me, really. I was in a fog the whole time I was working on the book, to be honest. Various life things … long story. When I re-read WFD now I feel every thought I couldn’t quite complete, every section and paragraph that still seems too spare.
So while I am expanding the book in several ways, the project feels more like a re-recording session. While searching for other examples so that I didn’t have to reference Taylor's Version (shit), I came across this quote from Streetlight Manifesto's rerecording of Keasbey Nights, the debut release from songwriter Tomas Kalnoky's previous band, Catch 22:
If there's one thing I can't stand it's when a CD is re-released untouched sonically, with a new cover and maybe a live video, and kids are duped into buying this new edition of something they already have. ... [W]e used some of our own money and took our time with this one. ...
We wanted to ... get the record to sound how it should have sounded originally. For that we sacrificed months of our time and our money, and now we feel what we have is worth paying for. ... I don't care if a single record is sold, as it is indeed old music, and kids have a right to know what it is and to decide whether or not they'll pay for it. Do I think it's worth thirteen dollars? Yes, very much so, but that's my opinion. What other people decide, that's their own opinion. We're going to keep doing what we do whether or not a single record is sold.
I may have to charge more than $13, but that about sums it up for me, too. Time and mental distance from the original release made room for me to have warmer feelings about the book, but it still wasn't quite what I wanted it to be.
So that's the book I'm making now. It is indeed old music, but I'll be layering in new melodies, extending the bridges, laying down a few new jams, and, hopefully, delivering an overall higher level of fidelity. Oh, and there's going to be a toolkit. It's a whole thing.
You already get my letters so I'm not entirely sure why I'm telling you, other than that I'm excited about it, and people have been asking. You're all caught up.
A new-ish article
It’s dated from June when I finished the draft on the development site, but there’s technically a new post about how to conduct UX audits with an eye toward filling out a thin portfolio. Or I suppose just to use in your own practice as a client deliverable.
A new-ish presentation
I presented a remixed talk, It's All UX Content, for ISTC UK's annual meeting. (The recording isn't listed publicly though I've given my permission for it to be ... maybe keep this one to yourself for now.) It provided a chance to refresh my thinking around this session from 2022.
The most timely addition was a reminder that implementing or using AI is a choice, as is every part of the when, where, why, and how of it. I tire of being told the cat's out of the bag, the genie's out of the bottle, the ship has sailed — especially when what people are really saying is "criticism of AI is pointless, you have to take the good and the bad, the evil and the banal, all together, it's all one thing, AI HOORAY". That's...no, man. It doesn't work like that.
Hey remember to vote
You might not be in the U.S. but you should find something to vote on in November anyway, maybe on your favorite fro-yo flavor or something.
If you can stand me and my occasional half-baked political pontifications I imagine you might not need a reminder to vote, but then again if you enjoy my work you might also have ADHD and not end up doing a lot of things you really very much meant to do.
So: Make sure you're registered — really make sure, as many red states are purging rolls - and make a plan right now. Put it on the calendar, put the reminder in, and put the second reminder in a few days before that one. We can do this, friends.
...
Hope you're well. If you've been blue for a while get to the gym. I started picking up and putting down heavy things four times a week and it's been real good for my mood, energy, skin, and booty.
Until next time,
Scott