It’s happening! Or perhaps, #itshappening. This month, our book gets published. Writing is Designing: Words and the User Experience will be available on January 14th. We hope it will help people who work on digital experiences become more effective and thoughtful writers.

We’re gearing up for a book launch at Adobe in San Francisco at the end of January (more details on that at the end of this email), and we’re looking for opportunities to share this topic with others. We offer training and we’re open to speaking opportunities. If you’re interested (or know someone who might be), just reply to this email, or head over to writingisdesigning.com for more details.

By the way, if you’re tired of waiting for our book, stop reading this and go buy Strategic Writing for UX by Torrey Podmajersky. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone interested in how words affect the user experience.

Thanks for being here and supporting us. We’re so grateful for those of you who have pre-ordered or shared the book with others. Writing it has made us even more grateful for the UX community, especially those who spend their careers making words more user-centered. We hope you see how important your work is, especially when others don’t.

Pencil of the month

We’re really into wooden pencils (in fact, our book has a pencil-themed cover). That’s especially true of Andy, who has been podcasting about them since 2014 and blogging about them even longer. When we taught a workshop in Singapore last year, we brought home around a hundred between the two of us.

It’s not just about collecting something. We use them every day to write and sketch. They’re simple, reliable tools with a fascinating history.

This month, we’d like to draw your attention to the beautiful vintage Futura pencil:

We love the beautiful typography and fun color scheme. While the one in this photo is a hard-to-find vintage model, you can buy a modern version from CW Pencil Enterprise in NYC (our favorite pencil shop).

What we’re reading

From Andy:

You should delete your tweets →

“[T]weets are, by design, carved into Jack Dorsey’s hard drives forever, unless they are explicitly deleted. They are not just reminders of your thoughts, but also markers of where your stance on various topics start and end. Each time you express your thoughts, and someone interacts with them, you dig deeper and get more invested in them. The more they exist, the more your momentary, impulsive, often off the cuff quips become defining you, versus the opposite. Not having to worry about what you've said before can unshackle you from your previous thoughts. Instead of having to lean in to what you have said before, you can analyze every situation independently.”

As of this writing, I’ve made almost 50,000 tweets, dating back to September 2007 (doing what I did best back in 2007, in fact) and as a completionist, I really appreciate that I have my full history in there. It’s like a little download of my mind over the last 12 years.

But Ranjan and Can from the fantastic newsletter The Margins make a really compelling case for why you should prune your tweets down. And not for high-minded, data management reasons, either — there are a few really practical, pragmatic arguments.

If you’re a heavy tweeter like me, have a read! I’ll be chewing on this for a while.

From Michael:

Readability Guidelines Handbook 2019 →

While I’m not actually reading this yet, I’ve ordered my copy and can’t wait for it to make its way across the Atlantic. We cited the wiki version in our book because it’s an incredible resource that will help you make evidence-based decisions about readability.

Here’s how they describe it:

Content people have so much to give. We not only produce content but work on its structure, the user experience, research analysis, tool logic and much more. 

But we need time for that. So this project was about getting together and putting all the style usability evidence in one place, for easy reference.

Sounds amazing to me. Go get yours!

What stepping back from management has taught me →

Rachel McConnell, author of Why you need a content team and how to build one, has written about what it’s like to transition away from a design management role after having built and led a team.

This is a topic that folks working in design wrestle with all the time, and I’m grateful for how Rachel shares the lessons she’s learned in such a thoughtful, transparent way:

Having been a manager, I now observe and regard managers I’ve worked with in a different light. I’ve noticed that good leadership relies a lot on emotional intelligence.

Fostering a culture of passion and psychological safety, as well as creating an environment where teams can do their best work, largely comes down to how individuals are treated. How someone feels at work and how comfortable they feel with a manager personally, will play a huge role in their performance.

This is a great piece for anyone to read, but it’s especially helpful if you’re thinking about pursuing or leaving a management role.

The Character Works newsletter →

Written by Jane Ruffino of the Character content design consultancy (with some past issues co-written by Elaine Short), this newsletter consistently helps me understand the impact of UX writing, and how to practice it responsibly. Take this quote from the latest issue:

As writers, designers, and makers of things, how often are we leaving people thinking, “I get why they did this, but why do I still feel kinda bad?” Once in a while doesn’t affect us much, and, for me, it’s another silly screenshot for a writing workshop. But as the world becomes more digital, these experiences add up.

It’s helpful, thoughtful, and encouraging. 

What we’re writing

From Michael:

Find the human bits →

Connecting with and learning from others has been a key part of how I’ve grown in my career. When Andy and I started writing our book we felt that lots of books about design give readers the impression that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things, but we think it’s more about finding what’s right for you and your situation. Because of that, we included lots of people with different experiences.

One of the people I interviewed for Writing is Designing is Lauren Lucchese, and I recently shared a bit from the interview on my blog:

“We build technology for a paycheck, but what we make has an effect on so many other people—the people who use our technology. Our best work elevates and includes them.”

Lucchese’s story is important, because it shows how to go beyond writing what you’re assigned and actually make things easier for people in difficult situations.

What we’re up to

Book launch at Adobe HQ in San Francisco →

Andy’s employer, Adobe, has generously offered to sponsor a book launch party in San Francisco! If you’re in the Bay Area, and you want to come meet Michael and other UX professionals in-person, come hang out with us on Monday, January 27 from 5:30 to 8 PM. There will be food, drinks, books on-hand for sale, and plenty of Q&A opportunities.

Dot Grid Episode 23: Visceral Panic →

This is a podcast Andy co-hosts with Will Fanguy about digital and analog tools. It gave us a chance to go beyond the content of the book and talk about the writing process. The title of the episode comes from how Michael felt when the first technical review of the manuscript came in. It was a fun, genuine look at the work that went into Writing is Designing.

This is a newsletter by Michael J. Metts and Andy Welfle, the authors of “Writing is Designing: Words and the User Experience”.