There is always another door, a different path, greener grass — “Is Portugal your forever home?” someone asked recently. The question gave me pause. Shocked me, almost. And I realized that it’s been quite awhile since I thought in terms of “forever.” I was raised to believe in forever. The concept was clear in all the Sunday preachers’ sermons about the…

Notes on self-appointed mouthpieces — On the third day of middle school a boy hollered down the schoolyard at my daughter. Picture her clueless, walking alone to phys ed in her regulation yellow tee and navy shorts that exposed her newly teenage legs, long and brown with a summer of swimming. “I LIKE YOUR LEGS,”…

Thoughts on leaving the USA — Maybe you wouldn’t put it like that. You’re not going to blow up your life. You just want a little change of scenery, a little midlife adventure. You want to dream further afield. Pull up roots and go bloom somewhere else. But detonation doesn’t have to a bad thing. It…

Or is it all just information-shaped sentences — A perspective from LaDonna Witmer, a writer who has been a newspaper reporter, and advertising copywriter, an editorial director, and an after-hours poet. TL;DR: she’s written a lot of un-AI-assisted words. I used to scoff at the idea of a robot taking my job. When it came to writing, I…

There’s no one right way to do this — The internet is a wonderful place, full of interesting people and thought-provoking stories and helpful information and really cool oddities. Also, pet memes. The internet is a terrible place, full of bile-spewing morons and echo-chamber rants and misleading misinterpretations and utterly terrifying obsessions. Also, pet memes. Both of these things…

Tips for diving into creative flow The blank page of paper, staring back at you. The blinking cursor on the screen, waiting, waiting, waiting. When you first sit down to write, all that empty space can be intimidating — it is for me, and I write for a living. Although…

This one’s in Illinois — I am writing from rural Illinois and I’m going to tell you up front, I don’t want to be here. I left this town when I was young for all the usual reasons — to go to university, to work a job that had a future, to find a place…

Our leadership coaching scholarship program — In celebration of International Women’s Day, Design Dept. is highlighting some exceptional women whom we are delighted to know. In 2019, Melanie A. Valdés Olmos burned out. At the time, she was a product designer at Facebook, and found herself feeling alone in the workplace. There was nowhere she could…

It sucks — but that’s not the end of the story — A perspective from LaDonna Witmer, who is Editorial Director at Design Dept. and also a certified Enneagram 4, which means we’re definitely going to talk about your feelings right now. I have been laid off eight different times in my two-decade career. (When the economy contracts, marketers suddenly think they…