On being the change you want to see in the world

Fabricio Teixeira

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3 min readJul 30, 2018

Dear reader,

We have been writing, curating and sharing design-related content for the last 12 years. What started as a little side project has taken a scale that we could not have imagined when we were just starting out — even in our most ambitious dreams. Today, the UX Collective is the largest Medium publication about Design and UX, with more than 200k designers receiving our content every week, all over the world.

Last year, we published and shared 4,302 articles and links with the community — through Medium, our newsletter, our chatbot, our yearly trends report, Today, Journey, and many other channels.

That’s a lot of links.

Most of them 5-minute Medium articles.

Not as thorough as we would like them to be.

Not deep at all.

Not as honest as our industry deserves.

In the back of our heads, we have always wanted to do more. We’ve always been extremely critic with our own work, and with the type of content we (and other design publications) put out. In an era where the lines between community-generated content and content marketing are so blurred, we have seen the quality of online content about design plummet at unprecedented levels.

Every week, we receive a handful of emails from companies asking us to promote their services. “It’s a partnership”, they say, “and I’m sure your audience will benefit a lot from our services”. What they really mean is that they want to pay us to promote content we don’t necessarily believe in.

We say no every time.

Despite our efforts to keep our content as impartial as possible, we feel partially responsible for the less than inspiring quality of what the see online today — especially given the reach and influence we have. Personally, our frustration comes from the fact we, as designers, simply cannot find the type of content we would like to read online about design, with really rare exceptions.

So we decided to do something about it.

We are quite excited to announce we’re changing things here a bit.

UX Essays is our attempt towards more honest, independent, and thoughtful publishing in design.

UX Essay #1 — Are we designers shamelessly good at self-promotion?

Historically, our ability to talk about our own work (a.k.a. “self-promotion”) comes from a place of survival. For a long time, designers have been the minority in their companies. They’ve had to fight hard for attention at all levels, constantly explaining what Design does and how it can help other internal teams, to setting budgets that would allow design teams to grow and improve their practice, to claiming a “seat at the table” through the ability to participate in strategic conversations within the organization.

And we’ve gotten really good at it.

But how much of what is shared online by designers / for designers is an honest attempt at giving something back to the community vs. simply a way for designers to build their personal brand and companies to promote their services? And how critical are we, as designers, when we click, read, and share that content with our peers?

We did some research to try to find out. Tangibly.

We hope you enjoy the ride,

Fabricio + Caio