Around that same time, some changes in the organization were happening on the federal level, and I found my expertise being politely brushed off at best, and just straight up refuted at worst. The latter is what really started to grind on me. And I am not talking HTML and CSS, I am speaking of the stuff that comes before – information architecture, interaction design, content strategy. While I am certainly not the best in my field, in my little pond, no one in this organization knows more about how to put together great websites than me.

And yet in meeting after meeting, I found myself defending this knowledge against people who had never been part of making a website. These folks opinions were taken by the higher ups in the room as just as valid as my own, even though they were backed up by nothing but their own personal web browsing experience, and some things that they had heard at one point from someone else in the building – ironically, things that I had preached years ago, but that have been distorted over time and retelling.

Now I find my expertise not just being ignored, but not being invited at all. And what’s worse, we are starting to spend money to have outside people tell us what they are already paying me to tell them. But even though I can say the exact same thing, it means nothing coming from me, and everything when coming from the outside.

I wonder if this is something that happens to all “In House” web designers/developers – especially if you have been with your organization for a long time. Though our opinions might be the same as those outside folks, because they are fresh and new, they are heard where ours is not.

Needless to say, it is a morale killer. Even folks who only really interact with me on Facebook have noticed the shift – where I used to love my job, I now hate it. Where I used to look forward to going in to work, now it is a struggle to get in on time. And where I used to care about and fight for the sites we created, I now just acquiesce to their requests.

This shift saddens me on some level, because I do want to care about the work we do, and the products we create, and the difference I hope we are making. But now, I am there now just to collect the check, because it comes down to this:

Why should I value what the organization does, if the organization is not going to value me?

As I started coming in to my own and understanding my own strengths and weaknesses, I realized that my organization had absolutely no appreciation for these skills. We made things, they worked, they were “pretty” (sometimes), and so we moved on satisfied with a job well done.

Yet no one was considering some hard truths. Putting a 40 page Word document online as-is or giving users every conceivable option in an application might not be the best idea. We were applying no information architecture, no content strategy, no usability testing. We were editing these things grammatically, but we were not editing them from a design perspective.

I have an education background, and so my instinct was not to stand on a mountain top and command thing be done differently, but to educate. To share the wealth of information that was out there about how to make something usable. After all, this stuff made too much sense for people not to see the wisdom.

And there, I think, was my mistake. In essence, I did what my organization had been doing up to that point – giving too much information without fully considering if they really needed to know what I was telling them.

And so, I find myself more often than not having to defend my expertise in these areas against the same people I had hoped to educate in the first place. People who have sat through a couple of presentations (including at least one that I gave to them), and thus now feel that they know as much about it as I do, and so their opinion – however misinformed – is as valid as mine.

On the one hand, this is incredibly insulting. I know that if I were to go read a few Wikipedia articles on inundation or socioeconomics, and then start walking in to meetings demanding that we do things a certain way, I would be run out of the building in a heart beat. Yet no one thinks twice about doing such things to me.

However, as I have thought more about it, I am beginning to think that I am a victim of my own good intentions. I have brought this upon myself by giving them too much. They ate from the fruit of knowledge, but instead of being kicked out of Eden, they think they know enough to run the joint.

However, I realized that while Designing dot Gov was a great identity, it was too limiting. Originally, I was ok with that. After all, 10+ years in the government sector tends to encourage many more years, so what’s the harm in boxing myself in?

But after some change of perspective at the federal office where I work (more on that later), as well as my wife and I opening our own business, I decided I might just need to be a bit more broad than dot Gov would allow, so I decided on something simple: Designing Sean.

I settled on this pretty quickly, and with no real consolation from the folks I usually bounce ideas off of. It probably helped that I was coming from Designing dot Gov, so I was already in the mindset of talking about what I was building and why. And then I realized that these designs and blog posts weren’t just about designs and web happenings, but were really about me (deep, I know). Or more to the point, how they impacted me and who I am as a designer.

So here we are. I am just starting to get some content in, though I doubt everything will transfer from the original Onedeep portfolio. But now that I am actually satisfied with the idea, name, and layout…I am hoping that the content will be much easier to arrive at.