Visual Design Pass Proposition

[rossPatton]

Hey all,

So, just posting this here in the interest of democracy and gathering feedback. Me and danny have been chatting a bit about doing 2 small design projects with regards to the TWC newsletter project.

1 - A general design refresh of the newsletter micro-site. We were talking about moving to something softer, more welcoming palette. Red and Black is classic but looks a little rough tbh. I was also thinking this could be a potential starting point for doing a design refresh on the main site as well.

2 - Really fleshing out the "vision and values" section by giving it it's own page. We were thinking that we could really get the point across with a timeline style design, listing a number of the most important actions tech workers have taken over the last several decades (with imagery of course), building up to the present day.

I'm sure Danny could probably articulate the project a little more cohesively than me, but that's the gist.

If folks are on board, I'd be happy to start working on this soon?

[anaulin]

I have no objections to sprucing up the newsletter microsite, but can't speak for the rest of the @techworkersco/newsletter-folks that have been setting it up and maintaining it.

As for the main site, that looks a little bit more "designed" to me and I don't know who is involved in that and who might Have Feelings ™️ about it. (But I personally, again, would not object to improvements!)

[dellsystem]

sounds good to me!

[jessesquires]

Hey @rossPatton - thanks for taking the time to think about this!

A general design refresh of the newsletter micro-site.

I'm skeptical and apprehensive toward these types of projects/proposals. My concern is that we end up focusing on web design, infra, and productization — instead of on the actual organizing work that needs to be done. I think that is a mistake, letting ourselves fall victim to the capitalist mindset into which we've been conditioned.

I don't view this site as the project, the content of the newsletter is the project. The site, while a conduit for delivering that content, is important, but I think it is really secondary to the mailing list and arguably tertiary to the RSS feed. And neither of those mediums would benefit from a re-design. (Mailchimp has its own extremely limited style options, basically just text colors. RSS readers apply their own css.)

In my view, the site was intended to be minimal and bare bones, and primarily serves to facilitate automation and collaboration, reduce the barrier to publish, and provide a searchable archive. It is not the end, but the means.

It's not clear exactly what the proposal is — are we just changing some link colors (that seems ok) or are we doing a full redesign (that seems problematic)?

To be clear, I'm not trying to shoot this down and be an asshole 😄, but a large redesign does not seem like a valuable use of our (very limited!) time and labor. But not only that, it sounds like it could take time and energy away from the aspects of this project that really matter — that is, producing the content for the newsletter.

One of my top goals is reducing and preventing burnout, thus all of the automation. A redesign seems counter to that.

I was also thinking this could be a potential starting point for doing a design refresh on the main site as well.

Same points as above, but more importantly that project is unrelated to this one. We are not involved with the main site. It has different owners, so you'll have to take this up with them.

Really fleshing out the "vision and values" section by giving it it's own page.

Yes. I think we already established we would have a top-level page for this. We have a draft in google docs.

We were thinking that we could really get the point across with a timeline style design, listing a number of the most important actions tech workers have taken over the last several decades (with imagery of course), building up to the present day.

Again, I'd refer to the points I made above. I don't see much value in this. We have a doc that we have all collaborated on. I'm interested making final edits to that and publishing it.

Regarding the "timeline" idea specifically, again it's not clear to me what the goals are for this and how it's relevant to our "editorial vision" and "collective values". This is already done extremely well at collectiveactions.tech. I don't understand why we would try to reproduce that here.

[anaulin]

To synthesize what has been said on the thread so far:

• We are open to a PR or two with a lil' bit of design polish, as long as it doesn't require too much of a time investment that would detract from our time spent getting out the newsletter itself and other work.
• The timeline thing seems cool, but duplicative with the work of collectiveactions.tech. If you wanted to do some more visualization work in that area, you could reach out to them directly (they are good people, we like them).
• Work on the main TWC site is separate from this newsletter repo, so that would be a different conversation, with a different set of people.

All that said, we're excited about the possibility to have more hands on deck, and more capacity!

@rossPatton, if you have energy that you want to invest into the TWC Newsletter, maybe there are other things you can help out with, aside from the redesign? We have a few small issues open (see: https://github.com/techworkersco/techworkersco.github.io/issues), maybe one of them appeals to you? Or maybe you'd like to help write one of the upcoming newsletter issues?