Carolyn has been one of our own since 1999.

She’s written or edited for A List Apart, Digital Web, The Manual, and Codex: the journal of typography.

Jeffrey Zeldman calls her strategy work the “secret sauce” behind many important projects. Many of you have reached out to her for help and for laughter.

Today, Carolyn needs your help.

Carolyn’s Story So Far

Carolyn Wood is living every American’s worst nightmare. She’s burning through her family’s savings trying to get the healthcare she needs, which isn’t covered by insurance.

A series of catastrophic medical problems combined with America’s nightmarish insurance system have cost her tens of thousands of dollars. And her expenses are mounting.

Carolyn has been confined to a wheelchair for the past three years.

This April, after a week-long illness, she developed acute injuries to the tendons in her feet and the nerves in her right hand and arm. She couldn’t get out of her wheelchair, even to go to the bathroom.

At the hospital, they discovered Carolyn had acute kidney failure. After a month in a hospital and a care facility, she has bounced back from the kidney failure. However, she cannot take painkillers to help her hands and feet.

Carolyn cannot stand or walk or dress herself or take a shower.

For mobility, she is dependent on a lift that can only be manned by two people. Without it, she can never leave her bed.

She’s now warehoused in a home that does not provide therapy—and her insurance does not even cover that cost. With her bills are skyrocketing, she has to pay rent on her bed for $200 a month.

Husband’s Health Crisis

Her and her husband are each other’s only support during this crisis, but they have been living apart since April as he is dealing with his own health crisis.

He’s been going through intense pain, fatigue and side effects from twice-monthly infusions as her husband deals with leukemia.

Together, the only income they have is his disability.

The whole situation is heartbreaking, but Carolyn still feels hope.

Let’s Kickstart Carolyn!

Will you help us give us physical and occupational therapy she needs to be independent again?

Your donation of $25, $50, $100, $1,000 dollars or more will be used to:

• Gain access to more medical care to get proper diagnoses
• Provide day-to-day expenses, since she cannot work
• Help her catch up with her enormous bills
• Pay for medical transport to see any doctors
• Get access to physical and occupational therapy to help her live independently again
• Hire a patient advocate to help her navigate the medical system

Please contribute to help Carolyn out of this nightmare.

As the story goes when the average lifespan was 35 years, an 81-year-old Ben Franklin was approached by a woman. The Constitution had been ratified that September in 1787:

“What kind of government shall we have?” she asked.

He answered, “A republic. If you can keep it.”

And he rather hoped it would stick.

As this republic was Ben Franklin’s second chance at starting up a country. 

The first government, under the laws formed in the Articles of Confederation, stilted and sputtered in its actual use.

The Congress under this Confederation sent of some great minds to a team meeting in Philadelphia. They weren’t there to make what we have now.

In was in this convention, they were tasked to make only edits and revisions. 

Instead, they reinvented. 

A version 2.0, if you will, and people didn’t like this upgrade, this Constitution. Well, not immediately.

Congress initially wanted to censure the delegates for overstepping their bounds. Others thought it formed too central of a government. There was the issue of it being formed by well-off gentlemen much like the royalty they had fought against.

83 years after the Constitution ratification in 1870, the fifteenth amendment passed Congress to the constitution allowed men of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” to vote.

133 years after the Constitution ratification in 1920, the nineteenth amendment passed Congress allowing women, like the one who asked Franklin about her new country, could finally cast a vote to help steer the course. 

The year is 2016. It’s been 229 years since the Constitution ratification. The current average life expectancy is now 79 years — longer if you eat more of the boring stuff — and we still have a signs of life in this republic.

Some responsibility in continuing a republic, though, is voting. Voting is rather a blunt tool to steer the country. 

For one, we get to do it infrequently. And second a vote is a step or two removed from the work of government. 

Second, the we-the-people pick out of the few-of-the-concerned that stand up to do the government work so we can do our own jobs, attend our own families, and pursue other interests than that of government. Most people simply do not want or cannot be bothered with it’s day-to-day operations. 

Yet, the vote is vital to the process. Voting is doing our part to keep this great experiment of a republic living a little bit longer. 

If you are of the legal voting age and in good standing with the law, you can vote, yet so many Americans do not.

In years when there is a presidential race to decide, the voting percentage is 54.9% of all able voters. That number has not been in the 60% area since the 1960s. Those modern numbers are painfully low when deciding the a president. 

Today is Super Tuesday. Americans are not voting for a president today — it’s more important. Today a large number of states hold primary elections to pick the candidates that get to run for their party’s candidate.

If you have not already, vote in the primary. (If you have already voted in your state’s primary, thank you.)

If you are not registered to vote. Don’t worry. Register to vote so you can vote in November.

Super Tuesday Primaries

• Alabama
• Alaska (GOP Only/Caucus)
• American Samoa (Dem Only/Caucus)
• Arkansas
• Colorado (Dem Only/Caucus)
• Georgia
• Massachusetts
• Minnesota (Caucus)
• Oklahoma
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia

When we built pages out of HTML tables, we measured our designs to that of print. Books, magazines, posters, and so on.

With the arrival of multi-device web, it was obvious that the separation of print and interactive is very real. We can achieve e‑commerce, make connections, on a scale that a book simply cannot. 

Yet, there is nothing like a book. 

It’s a time capsule without need for a power supply — needing only our mind, the time to engage it, and the light on a sunny day.

I’m able to buy out-of-date design books off of web seller like an Amazon or eBay, just as easily I could loan a book from a designer friend. 

Yet, we seem to be constantly looking for the next alternative.

I can’t go back in time and look at the content on Geocities, Apple’s iWeb pages, Gowalla social history, or the code from Yahoo! Pipes.

Even a small number of years removed from their deletion, we can never know whether how big the collection was. All we know is its absence like the great Library of Alexandria.

Winter seems like an appropriate time to have these discussions. And with the death of the prolific Bowie, even more so. 

Soon Spring arrives. I would prefer to think about ways in which we are preserving our digital work — the good stuff and the mistakes—for the next generation of web designers 

It is not about passing on monuments of ourselves, but it is an honest hope that they learn from our mistakes rather than repeat them.

What the answers to these questions: How are we preserving our digital work? What happens to this online work when we pass away? Can this Internet archive survive the same amount of time as a simple book?