I’ve got some new design work to announce, but it’s still very much in progress. Here’s where it stands right now:
For the last couple months I’ve been helping out over at Unbreaking, a project aiming to document the attacks on American institutions waged by the current far-right administration. Unbreaking’s cofounders have tremendous amounts of expertise in journalism, mutual aid, and technology, not to mention large-scale volunteer-powered documentation projects. My contributions have been focused almost entirely website-shaped: I worked with the team on the new site’s design and branding, and I’ve been helping out with new design tasks Unbreaking grows.
The site’s been live for some time now, but it’s changed quite a bit since launch. And with everything else the team is working on, I can’t wait to see how it’ll change next.
If you’re curious about Unbreaking’s work, here’s a short excerpt from their About page:
The United States is experiencing institutional collapse at a speed and scale that are difficult to understand, especially through feeds and updates that atomize our attention. We believe that mapping the damage done and its human costs — and the pushback and resilience work already underway — is necessary groundwork for building and retaining political agency.
In our work at Unbreaking, we’ll help orient and ground our communities in clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters. To that end, we’re building a set of pages that will serve as a backgrounders for the issues we cover. Each page is written by and for ordinary people, and conveys essential context, a sense of what’s happened so far, and what countermoves are in play.
I don’t know about you, but this really speaks to how I’ve felt since the end of last year: every day feels like it brings a new set of terrible headlines, with crises unfolding on several dozen fronts at once. Keeping up with the issues I care about has felt nigh on impossible, as I’ve spent most of my days feeling awash in news coverage, social media posts, and concerned texts from friends. My attention has absolutely felt atomized.
From what I’ve seen, Unbreaking’s working to bring a little more sense to the senselessness. Their current homepage has a list of the issue pages they’ve published so far. If you’re wondering about the hollowing-out of the federal workforce, the latest attacks on transgender healthcare, or the threats to the postal service, there’s an exhaustively researched page that describes what’s happening.
And I do mean researched. Their About page makes it clear that this isn’t original reporting. Instead, it’s something I’ve found almost more valuable: it’s a team of researchers, community leads, writers, and editors reviewing countless sources, pulling together relevant updates and threads into each issue page. The first time I read the Medicaid page, I sighed at my desk — I mean, it’s a page filled with horrors and harms, but it felt like I finally had a measure of clarity amid all the chaos. Unbreaking is making sense of what’s happening, at a time when those in power are investing in confusion.
That’s all to say that I think Unbreaking is doing vital work, and it’s felt incredibly good to contribute to that work. The team also needs more hands on deck. If you’re looking for something to do right now, I can strongly recommend getting involved. It’d be good to have you on board. Besides, I bet we can build a little more clarity together.
This has been “Unbreaking.” a post from Ethan’s journal.