Title Blending
Jobs that stopped existing, a cancellation flow that cost $2.5 billion, and a book about content operations nobody seems to have read.
When I was in school, pursuing a dual-emphasis degree in graphic design and illustration, I learned how to use a software layout tool called QuarkXPress.
Halfway through the semester, we were told that nobody on the job market was looking for Quark users anymore. InDesign was the new cock of the rock, so we made a hard pivot, my professor forced to adjust his lesson mid-flow. He wasn’t familiar with InDesign, so things were rockier from that point, as we all learned some new Adobe tools, together. Adobe also bought Macromedia while I was in school, which resulted in even more reshuffling of terminology, preferred apps, and user interfaces.
That same year, I took a class in which we hand-cut rubylith (sheets of red masking film used by some ad industry production people back then) into precise shapes, those cut-outs representing layers of color that would later be applied to magazine ads and business cards.
My peers and I have picked up a lot of dying skills and know-how over the course of our educational careers, including the now-forgotten rubylith. I noticed this trend even before I started college, when I was the Art Director for my high school paper. We created the paper’s layout by editing articles and columns using word processors on our outdated computers, before then printing them off, cutting them up, and pasting them, by hand, onto newsprint-sized sheets of paper. That collage was the final layout that would go to print.
Physically pasting up a newspaper was not a skill I ever used again. Why? Because by the time I started college, I was told we would be doing that kind of work digitally. Using Quark.
All of that experience was of course formative and in some cases useful (many software interface decisions are predicated on earlier, tangible approaches to accomplishing the same thing), but the general theme over the course of my career has been that technologies and industries change.
Job titles also tend to change, and the changes tend to reflect expanded scopes of responsibility. Those expanded scopes, almost always, are the result of technical challenges being automated or in some other way convincingly brought under the responsibility-umbrella of what was previously a distinct job description.
There was a time when typesetting was its own thing, separate from other types of design work. As typesetting work became digitized, however, its core functionality incorporated into graphic design software, typography (and overall layout work) became another line-item on the graphic designer’s resume, along with photo editing (retouchers), hue adjustments (colorists), and web page layouts (front-end developers).
These skills are usually absorbed because what was previously a devilishly difficult trade that required years of focused education and experience to do well was digitized. The majority of a typesetter’s job is now done automagically by Word or InDesign. Rubylith was replaced by vector-capable software with alpha channels and one-click masking features.
This agglomeration of responsibilities under fewer titles is far from just a graphic design-world thing: it’s happening across the content landscape.
In the early 20-teens, Sarah Winters (at the time named Sarah Richards) coined the term “content design” to refer to a data-driven approach to creating content that solves user problems. This term has caught on quickly, and has since begun to gobble up the term UX writing, at least in some regions, and it’s already absorbed a fair bit of what used to be handled as information architecture work.
This can be stressful, especially if you’ve invested a lot of time, energy, and resources learning a particular craft or set of tools. If your job title is being assimilated by another (one that you perhaps don’t have the skills and know-how to tackle, in its totality) that’s also stressful.
Some of what we do will persist, but some will become table stakes, like a basic understanding of word processing and email software. I still find immense value in having learned about composition, color, contrast, proportion, and visual hierarchy, despite the many software programs and other tools that have come and gone, because these sorts of informed sensibilities are difficult to automate and turn into a software feature.
Taking a step back and doing an honest-as-possible self-assessment is a good investment, then, as a fair bit of what we’re learning right now will soon be the equivalent of cutting rubylith. And ideally we spend more of our time on transferable, adaptable skills that will persist and maybe even grow in value, as the world and our trades change around us.
Notables
The Iliad Flow
Internally, in documents that later became evidence, Amazon called its Prime cancellation process the Iliad Flow. It was named for the epic, because getting through it was long and punishing.
Signing up took one click. Cancelling took four pages, six clicks, and fifteen options, each offering a discount, a reminder of what you’d lose, or a reason to stay. The FTC sued in 2023. In September 2025 Amazon settled for up to $2.5 billion, including $1.5 billion returned to roughly 35 million people, the largest civil penalty ever imposed for a violation of an FTC rule.
Most of the coverage treated this as a dark patterns story, which it is. The part that stuck with me is narrower and more uncomfortable for those of us who write this stuff for a living: the copy in that flow was good.
Not adequate. Good. The save offers are specific rather than vague. The benefit reminders name actual benefits instead of gesturing at nebulous value. The buttons say what they do. Someone competent sat down and wrote each of those screens carefully, and that care is visible in the final product.
That’s why it worked so well. A badly written cancellation flow announces itself because clumsy copy often reads as untrustworthy, like something’s being done to you. Clean, helpful, well-mannered copy postpones that recognition, to the point that you might not ever realize you’re being led around by your nose. You get three screens deep before it occurs to you that you’re not accomplishing what you wanted to accomplish.
The internal documents make it hard to read this as an accident. Employees described the practice as a bit of a shady world, and unwanted subscriptions as an unspoken cancer. FTC trial counsel indicated that when Amazon reduced the friction, signups dropped, so the friction came back. Each time somebody measured it and made a call.
The settlement’s remedy is structural. Cancellation now has to be as easy to find and use as signup. Which is the right fix, and one I keep coming back to because it’s the clearest case I know of a quality bar that measures the wrong thing. Is the copy clear, accurate, on-voice, tested? Yes, all of it. Ship it. If that’s the whole checklist, this is what gets shipped, and the people who wrote it can pass every review on the way out the door.
The check that was missing isn’t a writing check. It’s asking what the sequence is for, and whether the answer is something you’d be willing to say out loud in the meeting, to the press waiting outside, or in a courtroom.
A free book on content operations
Content Operations from Start to Scale was published a few years ago with chapters from Rahel Anne Bailie, Sarah O’Keefe, Kate Kenyon, and several others, and it’s open access. Free PDF, free ePub, no email gate.
I found it while chasing a citation for something else. Content ops is the part of this trade that determines whether anything else works, and the standard complaint is that nobody writes about it. But somebody did, at length, and then generously gave it away. I’m partway through it, and it’s really solid work.
Links
The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice — Kate Moran, Nielsen Norman Group
Moran built this because the usual advice (be authentic, be consistent) is difficult to test, while these four spectrums give you something you can actually vary and measure. NN/g did exactly that, running identical samples that differed only in tone.
Error Message — GOV.UK Design System
The tightest spec for error copy I know of, down to reusing the field label’s exact wording in the message, and specific enough that you could actually enforce it in review.
I Hate the Word “Content” — Nika Talbot
Nika cut “content” from her bio while holding jobs with content in the title, went looking for a replacement, and couldn’t find one. Which in some ways is a more interesting problem than the complaint that started it.