In our recommended reading this week: saying adieu to the Ada Initiative, which did so much work for conference codes of conduct and women in tech; project budget-setting (who wants to see some spreadsheets!); speaking up in the type community; and smartphones, smartwatches, and smart gifs (er, maybe we need to cool our Wet Hot American Summer binge).

When it's time to get feedback on a new project, Anthony Colangelo looks for input from these five personas: 

Structured, automatic systems are great at managing content efficiently—but not so great at accommodating human changes in that content. On the other hand, free-for-all WYSIWYGs lead to inconsistency and breakdowns. Stakeholders and content administrators need flexibility and control, especially where the all-important homepage is concerned. What’s a website to do? Johanna Bates suggests embracing a people-friendly homepage solution within our robot-driven architectures.

Every product has a personality—but is yours deliberately designed? Meg Dickey-Kurdziolek shows you how Weather Underground solved its personality problems by creating a design persona, and teaches you collaborative methods for starting a personality adjustment in your company.

We’re short on mountaintops where we can find mentors, but the good news is mentors are actually just people like you and me who keep at it. They work at listening, ask people how they prefer to learn, make time to meet. Lyza Gardner talks about her terror at being a novice, and how she loves gradually building her mentoring muscle.

Facebook’s Instant Articles throws down the gauntlet to the open web over speed and performance.

(We’re so excited to welcome developer and thinker Mark Llobrera as A List Apart’s newest columnist!)

This week's recommended reading list has bad news for icon fonts: we learn from Seren Davies' presentation that they present accessibility issues for people with dyslexia. Plus: our favorite tech TinyLetter, the NYSE computer glitch, an animal gif, and more.

Validating emotions isn’t a glorified psychological process; part of our work is to hear our colleagues and clients out. Kelsey Lynn Lundberg shows us how we can identify the underlying needs—security, freedom, identity, worth—that drive emotional responses, and how to translate those needs into productive discussions to keep our teams moving forward.

More than a decade after we won the battle for web standards, too much code is still crap. Dr. Web is back to answer your career and industry questions. This time out, the good doctor considers what you can do when your boss is satisfied with third-party code that would make Stalin yak.

When we prioritize billable hours over people, our work environments can take a turn for the tense. Some agencies try to combat low morale with foosball and fancy perks, but what really matters is investing in people: fostering a workplace that supports dialogue, collaboration, and professional development. From onboarding new hires to ongoing engagement, Justin Dauer shares some starting points for a healthy office dynamic and confident, happy employees.

One year ago today, we wrote “we have work to do,” and we said we were making the web industry’s diversity problem our problem.

We’re far from fixing everything at ALA, but from our editing processes to our recruitment to our messaging, we’ve been pushing ourselves to prioritize inclusivity. Editor-in-chief Sara Wachter-Boettcher discusses what we’ve been working on, where we can do better, and why it’s important to share our challenges. 

Does the internet ever stop you in your tracks? Does it sometimes make you pause and think about what you’re doing? Andrew Grimes calls such moments meta-moments. He walks us through why meta-moments are occasionally necessary and how we might build them into the experiences we design.