Last week I woke upto find the biggest DD ad sale in over a year sitting in my inbox. My heart sank when I read the client’s name. It was a SaaS company I once admired, but whose leadership had spent the past few years portraying themselves – like so many other rich men in tech – as victims of an imaginary ‘woke agenda’.

The sum was substantial enough to make me pause. In our ethically vacant times, turning down money feels almost performatively noble. For a moment, I’ll admit, I contemplated the mental gymnastics required to justify keeping them on. But my gut feeling won out: cancel and refund, even though paying those Stripe fees felt like adding insult to injury.

With impeccable timing, a few days later Elizabeth Goodspeed’s piece on ethical decision-making as a designer showed up at the top of my reading list. It’s worth reading for anyone trying to navigate client relationships while keeping their integrity intact.

Goodspeed doesn’t offer easy answers because there aren’t any. She presents a range of conversations with business owners about how they handle the inevitable clashes between their clients’ values and their own. Her closing thoughts reveal both how blurry these ethical lines can be, but also how much clearer they become when we stop hiding behind convenient abstractions.

Goodspeed acknowledges that we’re all implicated in systems of harm: “Some products carry more harm than others, but none are untouched. Even buying a tomato can connect you to low-wage farm work, pesticide runoff, and monopolised agriculture.”

But she refuses to let this uncomfortable complexity become an excuse for inaction: “I think people often twist ‘no ethical consumption under capitalism’ into a free pass for moral relativism; the idea that if the whole system’s broken, then nothing is off-limits.”

One of the type designers she interviews offers a pragmatic, practical framework of sorts: “It’s not feasible to make a living and keep a spotless conscience, but it’s our responsibility to find the most equitable balance we can, whether that’s through disincentivising certain usage, or turning down work for clients we disagree with.”

Her essay cuts to something essential about how we accumulate and deploy influence. Each client we work with, each platform we support – they aren’t isolated transactions. They’re votes cast in an ongoing election about what kind of world we’re building.

This perspective dovetails nicely with a recent piece by journalist Philip Bump, who explores the dynamics of where we choose to direct our professional energy:

“Your engagement and your work, not unlike your vote, is a form of power, something you can choose to grant to others. Those others, particularly organizations and companies, accrue that power to use as they see fit.”

While the discussion about ‘selling out’ typically revolves around money, there’s a deeper consideration at play: the question of who receives our accumulated influence and how they wield it to shape broader cultural and systemic outcomes. In other words, the more revealing question isn’t ‘Who are we taking money from?’ but ‘Who are we giving our power to?’

I won’t pretend that I always get it right. As Goodspeed writes, there is “no such thing as a perfect project tied up in a neat ethical bow”. But in this instance it felt good knowing that I didn’t empower another rich guy’s victim complex. – Kai