Store Design has been sent to the printer. Still on track for a January delivery.

Rest is necessary, of course. In what specific ways have you rested this month?

Draft will be closed this coming Friday in honor of my dog’s birthday. In this moment, I invite you to reply with the specific ways in which you will be reflecting on Basil on the occasion of his birthday. Thank you.

This week, for paid members

• Our office hours are a week from today, Tuesday, November 21 at 1p CDT. Want to talk to a value-based designer about what to do over the weekend? I have a very good stuffing recipe.
• Our weekly paid lesson is about nav reworks. The options you give customers defines how they behave on your store. Are you making the right choices? How do you find out?
• Our fortnightly teardown is for apparel brand Marfa Stance.
• And our design of the week covers a truly curious way of displaying collection text.

Final edits on Store Design have come back. Now I get to final-final edit it and send it off to the printer.

Still on track for arrival in the next few months.

This week, for paid members

This article on the feminization of design and attendant restructuring of “web design” into “front-end development” is an absolutely essential read.

If you’ve been following my letters for any period of time, you’ll find some parallels between what’s happening here and the shift from design to “product” that has happened over the past decade. For almost its entire history, the tech industry has involved women getting into a field, that field being proven to show value, and men taking over that field. This happened to programming itself in the 50s & 60s.

There is materially no energetic difference between what happened then and what is happening to design now. Or how support has turned into customer experience. Take note.

In the department of “things that should happen but won’t,” we have Jakob Nielsen talking about ‘vocabulary inflation’ with respect to design. “UX” is design. “Product” is design. “Design systems” are design. It is all just design.

People choose to label design as something else in order to appease stakeholders in power who incorrectly devalue the outsize economic impact of design as a practice. One of the more minor consequences of design’s structural failure to take a “seat at the table” is that I guess we don’t get to call what we do design anymore. Being disempowered to do our jobs is a bigger issue. Being laid off en masse is a bigger issue. Ending up with stuff like this is a bigger issue.

The answer is not to rebrand ourselves as “product,” and do nothing else to leverage our power. The answer is to understand design’s power, claim it, and learn how to move within business.

Edits have wrapped up on Store Design. Now we move into final typeset, preflight, and then printing.

This week, for paid members

• Our weekly lesson talks about the economic value of customer education. How does one do this well, in a way that separates the best brands from the rest?
• Our design of the week shows the biggest home page fail we’ve seen in a while. And then we show you another one. On the same page. Hilarious!
• And our fortnightly teardown is for carry & apparel brand Filson.

Our editors have kicked off our final editing pass on Store Design, and our work should be off to the printer within the next six weeks. Gosh, isn’t that exciting? I’m excited.

This week, Shopify is rolling out a new checkout system. It’s kind of wild: as a value-based designer I usually find high leverage in checkout improvements. Working on Shopify, I have very little latitude in what we can do with checkout. As this new checkout page rolls out, we’ll have even less latitude. So ultimately, one hopes for the best, and surrenders to Shopify and what they want. Ultimately, I think these improvements are a good thing, although they are clearly more about Shopify’s long-term corporate direction than any palpable improvement for the customer.

There are three sets of stakeholders when Shopify rolls out any change: Shopify, Shopify’s customers (online stores), and Shopify’s customers’ customers (actual customers).

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In therapy lately, I have been processing some feelings about how design is received among the economic buyers of my industry. In short, because design is a form of leveraged power, and because power dynamics have shifted towards more toxic structures, people have consciously chosen to remove the power of designers and create more hostile experiences on the web. Designers are losing jobs, reworking their job titles, or leaving the industry entirely. The pendulum will swing back towards us someday, as it must, but for now things are grim.

Presumably, you read these updates because you want to learn how to practice design better. Or you like what we do here at Draft and want to keep tabs on our business. Or you just think I’m a cool space alien, and you like basking in my piles of words? Either way, I’m a designer, I’m going to remain a designer, and we’ve suffered through design winters before. Draft has so far survived a financial crisis, a fascist uprising, an ongoing war in Europe, and a global pandemic.

And now, blessedly, we are booked through the rest of the year, and so we will be winding down the receipt of new consultative operations until at least February. We are grateful to those who understand the outsize economic value of design, and are willing to act accordingly.

It’s my job to make design legible & understandable to you. It is not my job to manage how you receive what I have to say. Maybe you think listening to customers isn’t a good use of your time, or you think you have better ideas than they do. I don’t agree, of course, but ultimately you’re going to do what you’re going to do, and I’m going to do what I’m going to do.

I finished line edits for Store Design last week. This happens on a printed document, and so the next steps are:

• Type up all of the changes
• Final conceptual pass to add anything that might be missing
• Line edit of anything that gets added (this will take way less time)
• Hand off to someone else to do a final copy edit & preflight
• Get the thing printed
• Get the thing shipped to me
• Get the thing shipped from me to you

This sounds like a lot, but some of these phases are going to be quite short. We’re still on track for a year-end delivery, but this will be my first post-pandemic printing rodeo, and so I wouldn’t be too surprised if this pushes into January or February.

I’m proud of this work. I believe it will act as the definitive statement on store design for at least the next ten years. Preorders continue to be available. Thanks, as always, for your support of our work.

One of the most interesting things about my job has been the tension between evidence & agenda. Does anyone speak of this? It feels like maybe no. We are now here, in this place.

When one comes to the table with an agenda, they must as a rule either fundamentally ignore evidence, or misread it with intent to execute on their agenda. This is obvious, a structure of incorrectly overleveraged power, and it must be named if design is ever to reclaim its authority.

When listening to evidence, one lets go of their agenda and puts the power in the hands of the customer, where it belongs. One must come to the evidence with a clear head, with no expectations, preparing to be surprised & challenged.

Customers are supposed to challenge us. They are supposed to push our business forward. There is always a path outside of the one we think we know.

The last time I chatted with Kurt, he remarked out loud ahead of time that store design is one of the most widely misunderstood profitable practices in ecommerce. And as I’ve written Store Design our the past year, I’ve wondered: why is design so hard to understand?

• Design has an eternal identity problem. We don’t know what to call ourselves, and so people don’t know how to understand us. Many people don’t even know what we do.
• Because design is the strongest form of leveraged power in an organization, designers have become structurally disempowered by business strategists, executives, and other workers.
• We don’t have peers who practice design – at least not as we recognize it. As a result, we don’t know what “good” design looks like, and we lean into “bad” design patterns. (90% of our teardown work exists to identify obvious errors that store owners lack the peer group to isolate themselves.)
• Because online stores incorrectly believe that they are not existing within technology, they don’t know how to hire for design or development roles, and so don’t know how to be discerning with respect to quality talent in these areas. As a result, quality talent often leaves for other industries.

Value-based designers struggle to prove themselves in the best of times, and right now is not the best of times. That’s why our case studies have such outsize value – and why we keep generating them as we get more wins.

If you run a store or know someone who does, and you want to benefit from the outsize economic impact that design is capable of, one consulting slot is available. Reach out and let’s get started.

For the first time in 10 months, a consulting slot is open for outsize revenue generation. We’ve also recently posted two new case studies that show what we’re capable of.

We’d be honored to have you reach out & begin a conversation. And if you work for a store or know any store owners who might benefit from the sort of work that we do, please have them ping us. We are friendly and good at our jobs. You know this. It is obvious.

You love me more than you dislike webinars, so fortunately I’m the latest guest on SegMetrics’ webinar series. I bet you won’t guess what we talk about.

This week, for paid members

• Our design of the week shows one of the smartest upsells we’ve seen in a minute. How does it play out on desktop versus mobile? What constraints do upsells exist under in general? How can you simplify a buy box?
• And our weekly paid lesson is about long-form product descriptions. How much should you write for each product detail page? (Less than you think.)

Want in? Join us now – named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

Utterly riveting news: I’ll be doing a presentation on quantitative design research with SegMetrics tomorrow, August 02, at 1p CDT. You can sign up at the aforelinked. Should be fun! I’m fun. Hooray!

And as I mentioned before, I’m looking to guest on a few podcasts this month. Let me know if you run one and are interested.

This week, for paid members

I keep reading things that proclaim the death of design and the resurgence of other terms that describe design.

What people fail to understand is that design is eternal, evergreen, and one really does not need a word for it at all.

This week, for paid members

What if tech has plateaued, out of sheer ubiquity? What if that’s okay? What does “okay” look like?

What if there is no “next best thing?”

What if AI really is just great for transcription & shitposting?

What if tech is just something we all do in the background of the rest of our lives, rather than the focus of our lives?

As we wrap up our editing of Store Design and move into the consultancy’s busy season, it’s time to talk more publicly about what we’re doing in the current moment.

Obviously, much has happened since I last spoke about store design. Google concluded their engagement with quantitative design & experimentation; other tools have launched to fill the gap. Technique is nice to discuss, of course – but beyond that, and far more important, is adopting the correct mindset to become receptive to the essential practice of store design.

If you have a podcast or a blog where you think our work would be a useful perspective for your audience, please hit reply and let’s begin a conversation.

I recently spent a few weeks holding structural space for a client whose team members have been incorrectly seized by the ego-driven toxic masculinity that is all too common in the direct-to-consumer ecommerce space. It was fun pushing back on literally everything, saying “no” seven times a day, hauling people on calls and telling them are fundamentally, cosmically wrong in front of all of the people who are responsible for paying them. I love having fun. Don’t we all?

I’m reminded of that one time in 2009 when someone got the company to print business cards for me with the job title “Fun Ruiner” as a joke, only it wasn’t a joke then and it’s not a joke now. The client hired me for this. The CEO supports the practice, which is sacred. Two objectively incorrect people got fired two weeks after my arrival. Now we are all here, witnessing.

At Draft, we sell design research, you buy A/B tests, and the fundamental outcome is deep structural cultural change. This is evident in our case studies, which speak more broadly to cultural change than numbers in specific. We are good at shifting psyches, at redefining what “focus” should be.

Meanwhile, I finished writing the end of Store Design last week, and in it I spoke of the deep psychospiritual impoverishment afflicting ecommerce, and how it will bring about the long-in-coming conclusion of independent business, as we are all eaten by a company who actually knows how to research and focus on customer needs, unlike most store owners.

As Google’s attack on the practice of value-based design continues apace, my colleagues & I have been given to a deeper reflection on what tools will facilitate right relationship going forward.

We’re used to technology changing, of course. But we’ve come to rely on our tools for maintaining our client relationships, building infrastructure, and expanding our skillsets. Since value-based design is such a nascent industry, we’ve watched our tools change rather frequently, especially over the past few years.

We’re currently settling on some final recommendations for new tools that are likely to stick around for a while and consciously support small & mid-sized businesses. These will go out to paid members in a couple of weeks. They will involve a complete disengagement from businesses that have consciously proven themselves, through their actions, to be hostile to the business that we wish to practice.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with the creator of a promising new experimentation framework. He asked what he could do to make our relationship positive into the long term. My reply was blunt: don’t fuck us. Why? Because value-based design tools have a long history of fucking us. Now we’re all tired.

What causes someone to embrace value-based design? Do people change their minds as they work in tech?

I’m curious to hear your stories – just hit reply.

This week, for paid members

We’re currently working with a client that knows its problems well and takes steps to solve them. I love this. It is so much nicer to work with clients who get it than to clean up disasters. Disasters may be more lucrative, but ultimately people got to such a place for a reason, and it’s more likely than not that they’ll reject the medicine and backslide quickly after.

This client won’t reject the medicine. They get it. But as you probably know, once you solve a given problem, another, larger, more interesting problem always seems to take its place. And that’s where we find ourselves now, with crunchier issues and deeper questions.

This client knows their customer behavior pretty well. Reorder rate is clearly delineated. Tropes are predictable. We can see a big fall-off after someone’s second purchase, for what amount to good, practical reasons. On a recent call, I looked at these numbers and said “okay, so people are leaving for what we think to be common-sense reasons. Yes?”

Some nods.

I recently read a piece in UX Collective about “the one true way to design”. This week, I want to provide some thoughts on it, and how to read the variable nature of agencies’ design processes.

Yes, every design agency has its own method. We do, too Agencies do this in order to compete effectively, to make clients feel like they are buying something specific to them. And in doing so, we need to play off like our process is better than all of the other processes.

But they are all pretty similar on face! Something unites them. I was a math major, so I often think about first principles – the axioms that we take for granted before creating a body of work. I think design agencies work from a handful of first principles that feel more-or-less uncontroversial:

1. Design is creative work in the service of business goals.
2. Design should focus on uniting customer needs with business goals.
3. Design fundamentally involves talking to those who will use it, so they can have a seat at the table.

As I’m finishing up the first draft of Store Design’s manuscript, I’m curious: what topics around value-based store design do you want us to include?

This week, for paid members

• This fortnight’s teardown is for apparel brand Cuts. They do a lot right!
• And our weekly lesson is about the basic contents of a buy box. What goes in, and what stays out?
• Finally, our design of the week shows a rare hover state that we actually care about & endorse. (No hovers on mobile!)

I’ve been compiling & typesetting the text for Store Design lately, as our first step before a full edit pass. It’s been really nice to get the text all in one place, giving the final work structure & form. I feel like I’ve been making a lot of scaffolding.

The introduction speaks to the spiritual & intellectual impoverishment that obviously exists in contemporary independent ecommerce, and it gets spicier from there. I suspect people will either get it or they won’t. If you’ve been reading our letters over the past few years, none of Store Design will come as much of a surprise. But will the tent expand at all? Do I care?

Draft Revise is once again sold out. Grateful for those who take a chance on our practice. It feels good to exist in right relationship to the practice, to be performing nourishing work again.

Remember that little link I sent along last week saying that we now have a consulting slot open? I am now so busy with prospective calls that this, this is what you get for the weekly letter. I’m almost sorry!

If you wish to work with us in the future, get in touch. We’d be grateful to begin a conversation.

Links

One bespoke consulting slot is available, for kickoff in late May. If you wish to increase your business’s revenue, we invite you to reach out.

Quiet week otherwise, working on Store Design & client projects. Some good links at the bottom. Wishing you all the best as we begin the spring harvest here in Chicago.

This week, for paid members

Howdy! Just wanted to let you know that we’ll be bumping the price of teardowns in 8 hours, at 5p CDT. If you’ve been on the fence, you might want to grab one right now.

We’re also in the process of working on larger teardowns for SaaS businesses, focused on their product direction, feature set, and overall interaction design. Please reach out if you’re interested – just hit reply!

Within ten minutes of my showing up at Microconf’s first event a fortnight ago, someone looked me in the eye and straight-up commanded me to charge more for teardowns. This happened shortly after I did an hour-long in-person teardown for my very nice email provider that was later described as worth the entire time he spent flying out to Denver for the actual conference.

Whenever anyone tells me to hike my prices with that much urgency, I hike my prices. And this particular exhortation came from someone I trust & deeply appreciate. So in one sense, this is all her fault; but in another, more accurate sense, it’s entirely my fault. Or we can blame inflation? Let’s blame inflation. I just adopted a new dog and I’ve been told he has to eat. You could help with that?

So this Friday, May 05 at 5p CDT, I’m hiking the price of teardowns. You may wish to buy yours right now. I am profoundly serious about this and regret nothing.

At MicroConf this past week, someone remarked to me that I tend to write books as a way of marking the ends of eras – implying that Store Design’s release happening at the same time as our repositioning isn’t really an accident.

I don’t know if this is true! I feel like the books are more accretive. I had to write Cadence & Slang I’m still talking about value-based design in everything I do. What happens is that the work discussed in our books becomes additive to the practice. One expands the practice to encompass new work;

Applied here, our prior work on stores is going to infuse our whole design process when we work for more structurally nourishing industries. The Draft Method, devised between 2019 and now, isn’t going away – or even changing much.

What is happening is a comprehensive shift in who we serve, and how we serve them. And we’re doing that with everything we’ve learned & shared over the past 17 years. MicroConf taught me a lot about how we must move. And for now, that must be enough.

Hello! Just a humble reminder that preorders for Store Design wrap up in 8 hours, at 5p CDT.

We’d be honored if you joined us.

As mentioned, we went dark for the past couple of weeks. Here is why: in March of 2020, I bought an infinitely rebookable flight to Japan, because the Bad Times™ were supposed to last six weeks and stuff. Three rebookings later, I teleported out of the hemisphere at maybe the worst time for my business in the history of the universe.

Somehow, nothing collapsed in my absence. (Good job, team, and thanks.) In the meantime, I had a magical experience, one I’ll not soon forget. And now it’s time to get back to work.

Most importantly, Store Design preorders end in 4 days. At that point, the price will go up, and you won’t be able to get our bundle discounts anymore. We’ll also be providing periodic updates exclusively for those who got in early. If you’ve been waffling on joining us, you may wish to do so.

Store Design arrives at a time when ecommerce desperately needs new ideas. We’re honored, now & always, to have the support to make awesome books like this happen. Thanks for reading, and help spread the word!

I’m thrilled to report that Store Design now has enough preorders to cover printing costs. Thanks to everyone who has preordered thus far, and a special thanks to everyone who ordered teardowns & bundles; a few of those over the weekend pushed us over the finish line.

And as mentioned previously, the more we raise, the better the final product. If we get a hundred more preorders, we’ll be able to release Store Design with better paper stock, a nicer cover, and in higher quantities.

Those who have been around these parts for a while – like, since 2009 – know that we are no stranger to crowdfunding. We started on Kickstarter 14 years ago and have run several major campaigns to fund our work. This one, independently run, is comparatively unconventional. Yet it’s still worked.

We’re trusting you to believe in this and spread the word about us, now & always. If you’ve enjoyed our writing about store design, both here & in our paid group, we’d be grateful for you to write some nice things about us & spread the word.

I saw a chart the other day that gave me pause. In it, you have three slices of the total American ecommerce pie: the top 14 publicly-held retailers, Amazon, and everyone else. The latter is about 30% of total online sales in 2022.

On the one hand, that pie is very large, comprising over $1 trillion of annual sales. On the other, I suspect that the slice for direct-to-consumer businesses is even smaller than the aforelinked. And it’s probably decreasing over time.

Between this trend, a general favoring of experiences, inflation, and overall market uncertainty, it’s a rough time. Independent businesses have two options: fight or fold.

You’re probably reading these letters because you fancy yourself the fighting type. Fortunately for us all, there is hope. Niche businesses are doing great, because they can create more effective competitive moats against big players. Smaller addressable markets mean a bigger opportunity for independent businesses to communicate effectively.

After one week of Store Design preorders, a few things have become clear:

• People want the book. (Thank heavens, right?)
• The book is for practitioners, not store owners.
• People are more concerned about how to reliably generate profitable design decisions than we thought.

There’s nothing like a public release to provide clarity on the way you’ll be moving going forward.

Three weeks remain to preorder. Join us.

For those who don’t want to hunt for the link, Store Design preorders are now open. You have two options: take a look and join us now, or read the rest of this bit and join us after you’re done.

Store Design is the culmination of seven years of on-the-ground work. It represents the clearest statement that I think we can possibly make on what store design is, how to practice it, and how to generate outsize profit from it. Unlike those who simply audit stores for a living, Store Design is also backed with considerable on-the-ground experience, facing customers directly to understand how businesses can meet their needs & aspirations.

It’s in that spirit of humility that I offer Store Design, hoping that its message of listening to customer needs and building relationships at scale lands for you. In a world where most trust in institutions writ large has been eroded, I think my design practice has become more urgently focused on restoring integrity to whatever relationships we have. And since store design is my little plot of ground, I work hard to make it as nice of a place as possible. It may not be world peace, but it’s something.

If you’re a store owner and wondering where to start, Store Design is the answer. If you’re an individual practitioner wanting to level up your game, here’s your tool.

Designers are all obsessed with process. I am, too. I think the following is true:

• Unlike the scientific method or any sort of legal method, there is no one “design method” that anyone agrees upon.
• Nobody agrees on what any branch of design is, to the point where DTDT, or “defining the damn thing,” is a common acronym.
• Methodology is a competitive differentiator.

And so, we exist in a realm where the only correct design process is the one that I personally invented.

At the same time, we all steal from each other. My first book is an amalgam of hundreds of sources; it invents hardly anything. (Heck, even the page layout is a ripoff.) Value-Based Design sits on the shoulders of giants, too, from Mike Monteiro’s groundbreaking work to traditional consulting texts on value-based pricing to business books that don’t suck.

Preorders for my next book, Store Design, go live in precisely one fortnight, on Tuesday, March 07. By that point, the first draft will be done enough that I will be able to call it “done,” for some value of done.

I am kind of terrified about this! What if nobody spreads the word about it? What if the 20 people who bought our first-draft zines about store design don’t come back? What if it flops?

Well, then maybe I’ll make something smaller & simpler. Unlike a typical crowdfunding campaign, I deliberately don’t have a minimum number of orders on this. Ultimately the goal is to make a print book, and the quality of the book will befit the number of orders we’ll get. I’ll do it print-on-demand if I have to. (I know. I know.) I’ll do it on cheap paper, as a trade paperback. (It might be cooler that way?) And if we get “enough,” for the value of enough that befits the print quality I’ve done in the past, it will be offset, fancy paper, hardcover, foil-stamped, etc etc etc. (The text is one color and one typeface, by design.) But I’m going to do it. I already have the typeface; I have the budget to hire an editor. The more money this makes, the better the book will be. That incentivizes you to spread the word about it – since the more people who preorder, the better it will turn out.

The preorder period will last for a month. Once it closes, we look at how much money we made, and budget accordingly – and we hike the price for everyone else, of course.

On the one hand, Google Optimize shutting down is a big deal. It’s absolutely going to change the pricing structures of the experimentation industry, mostly for the better. In the meantime, everyone should be concerned about one company consolidating power for six years, and then walking out of the room when it suits them.

On the other, I kind of… don’t care? Perhaps I have moved into a state of acceptance. I have been here before. Being an evergreen process, design does not care what tools you use. If Adobe buys your tool, you can use a different tool. If Google shuts your tool down, you can use a different tool. The goal is to practice design in a way that feels nourishing and creates positive business outcomes.

Business does not profit from Google Optimize. It profits from the results that a tool like Google Optimize is able to create. Google Optimize is not the only tool, and it never has been. The goal is not to run experiments, and it never has been. The goal is to use design as a tool for generating profit.

Grieve first, then act.

Google are not a trustworthy company.

For two decades, they have built products that boldly enter industries, used its advertising business to prop up margins internally, and then exited when they aren’t making enough money to support those independent products. This happened with project management tools, RSS readers, and chat. If you wish for more details, you may visit the graveyard.

So when Google announced that Optimize, its once-beleaguered online experimentation tool, was getting a serious upgrade in 2016, I was skeptical. I put a lot of effort into understanding the ins & outs of an experimentation framework – and at the time, I was all-in on a competitor. My A/B testing framework is a load-bearing component of my job. I didn’t want to become dependent on Google to do my job, only to have them pull the rug.

At the same time, I looked at the competition. My platform of choice, VWO, had not updated their JavaScript tech stack in the five years I’d been using it. (They still have not, forcing an incorrect sideloading of jQuery 1.x on every customer session.) They hiked their pricing, limited my agency account, and started to strong-arm me into onerous long-term contracts. I looked at Optimizely and discovered an even worse situation, with “call us” pricing and five-figure enterprise-level contracts.

In quiet, reflective observation of the national holiday that is my birthday, Draft will be closed tomorrow.

Speaking of Draft, we celebrated 11 years in business this past Friday. Thanks for all of your support, now & always.

We were recently quoted in Shopify’s roundup of 2023 ecommerce trends, alongside a lot of people who are smarter than us. Take a look, and celebrate with us by setting all trends on fire.

Draft has three goals in 2023:

• Finish Store Design and open preorders.
• Ruggedize our consulting operations by solving expensive problems for more consciously wallet-out industries.
• Create a less adversarial, more collaborative sales process for ecommerce.

I’ll be expanding on the third point today.

Since we’re a consultancy, our whole thing is that we sit on the same side of the table as you, trying to solve problems together. Yet in contemporary ecommerce, there exists an adversarial dynamic between store owners and those who can serve them.

I’m working on the next book, and almost ready to take preorders, and I’m curious: what big questions are you facing around the topic of store design right now? Hit reply and let me know.

In the meantime, new text is coming.

This week, for paid members

I have a weird relationship to work. My job is one of my making, so I should probably love it, right? And I do, because I get to write this, in the blazing sun, in Marseille, a light breeze coming in through the window, drinking sencha that I brought from Japan to Chicago to here. I’ll be here until March, waiting out another harsh winter back home.

Last year was hard on my relationship to the practice. I was mostly ignored or denigrated by an addressable market that clearly didn’t want to buy design, despite everyone saying that it did. I lost sight of how to communicate to a market that is mostly focused on the psychic sugar highs of “quick wins” and quantitative dashboards. Now I’m getting back to it. Deep rest is medicine. But I’m still hurting, questioning whether this is the correct relationship that I should be establishing to my work, trying to find greener pastures.

I’ll work at Draft until I die, of course, but who Draft works for is now quite open for debate. You understand design or you do not. You buy design because you want design, or you do not. It’s not my responsibility to make anyone want design, any more than I can make anyone want to run their businesses more ethically, or in a more customer-focused way.

The coming months will witness a deep reset for us. I’m excited to have a new job by the end of the year. I suspect it will look quite a bit like the old one, with one key difference.

This is our final update before we return for the new year in a few weeks.

As a reminder, this is the last week to order books & pins. At 5pm CST on Friday, December 23, Draft will close for deep rest, with shipments paused until March.

Deeply grateful for your support, now & always.

I received a question lately about the role of value-based design. Now that we’re in recession and tech companies are laying off a bunch of workers, how will designers’ practices shift?

I must admit that I didn’t know how to answer the question, other than to say I feel bad for anyone who has been impacted, and that design, in its purest expression, serves commerce, and is hence value-based.

The closer you can get to a direct leverage on profit generation, the more likely your work will be valued going forward. No matter your circumstances right now, the question remains: going forward, how will your work directly support profit generation?

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Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Helium Customer Fields!

Name. Email. Password. If you want to add anything else to your customer sign-up form on Shopify, tough luck. Customer Fields can help. Create registration forms as unique as your business. Add new fields, get new email subscribers, or let customers edit their account info. 14-day free trial.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!