Go read this essential post on No Best Practices now. I think it’s insightful, it taught me a lot, and I have thoughts.

Ok, did you read it? Great.

I love this post, and it got me thinking about a lot of the things I do to determine whether a certain experiment – or experimentation at all – is a good idea. Yes, below a certain point, you should buy a teardown and run with it. Past a certain point, you should hire a value-based designer to run experiments.

From what I’ve seen in my work, the cutoffs between each of these are a lot fuzzier. For the purpose of a blog post, it probably makes the most amount of sense to say “if you make $X, do this,” but we can go deeper here. So I’m writing up a little bit of clarification here to show the art that goes behind a post like this, in the hopes that it may cultivate your own intuition around what to do and when.

Y’all, I’m so excited for today’s launch. I’ve been planning it for a little while with a dear friend of mine, and now it’s time for us to do a thing. You love it when we do a thing, right? Let’s go.

If you want to skip past the story: I’m doing joint teardowns with my friend Lianna Patch, where I pick apart your design & she does a copy audit. We’ll coordinate our work so we can give you something maximally actionable. And you’ll get $100 off of buying from us separately.

I pinged Lianna about this a couple of months ago, after I kept encountering clients that could benefit from some really focused copywriting. Tonal, confident copy is the single biggest conversion boost I can think of. Yes, everything else is important, and in aggregate it’s why we’re able to get the results that we do. And I’m pretty good at writing copy, but it’s been more appropriate within our consultative work than Draft Teardown.

Lianna is the kind of person who is fairly modest about her achievements, so she will be horrified to hear that I am telling all of you that she is an absolute legend in value-based copy. Her client list is cooler than our client list. Her website is better than our website. She has way more pets than I do. And her work will make our work better.

So, the links are pretty grim this week. Sometimes they’re useful, sometimes they’re grim, sometimes they’re both. This week you get grim. I’m almost sorry; blame the vibe weather.

Design loves to feel bad about itself, and we respond to getting fired by moping. I don’t do much of that here, not only because we’re doing great, but because moping does not do anything actual.

In my progressive circles, when we face a setback – and we have faced many, many setbacks over the past two decades – there is a process that we follow. First, we grieve. Then, we plan. Finally, we act.

Grieving without action is not resistance. It allows us to internalize the pain of a setback while creating the psychic conditions for future action. It is our first impulse to grieve, but it must not be the last. We are often rudderless in the face of grief. We forget to act. We must remind ourselves to act. Action takes work.

Because design is a form of leveraged power, our highest priority should be to understand the existing structures of power, and then to claim that power for ourselves. This is, in 2024, the only way we will practice & ship impactful design.

In practice, this takes a few steps:

1. Understand power. In what specific ways is power already leveraged in the organization? Who makes decisions? Whose decisions ship in practice?
2. Understand incentives. What are the built-in incentives of those in power? What drives them in their careers? “More money” and “more prestige” are two big ones. In what ways do they get recognition, promotion, and progress?
3. Get small wins. You begin creating the ability to leverage power by clearly showing the economic benefits of design. You cannot do that by redesigning the product wholesale. You need small, easy wins that ship to real customers.
4. Make the case. Point to the wins in front of those with power and provide a strategic path forward. Then, own that path and start practicing design.

Remember that as a designer, you rarely possess power right away. Your goal is to convince those in power to embrace design, so you can gain power & leverage it. Or, find an organization that already respects design, and work there.

I read something recently about a person who headed design in a very large organization. In their practice, design worked across business units and discrete teams to solve a broad array of problems.

Since they couldn’t work on every design problem in a large enterprise organization, they had to be discerning about what to take on. They said they chose projects based on two criteria:

1. Does the team involved love design, want design, and know how to act on design?
2. Is there an abject disaster at play, where design is possibly able to salvage that arm of the business?

Everything else was declined.

One of the nice things about having a book out is that you can promote it as much as you want. Writing & publishing a book is the climb to the top of the mountain; promoting it is your way back down.

There are a handful of reasons why I’m not promoting Store Design as much as I normally would for a book of its stature:

• I already have an audience here. You are part of it. Most of you have bought it.
• I already sold most of the print run through preorders, and I won’t be printing this again.
• I don’t think Store Design’s wisdom is ready to be received by those who have the power to buy design.

Expanding on that last point, I have spoken frequently of the deep issues that exist within direct-to-consumer ecommerce that hold them back from leveraging profitable store design. Owners believe they are saviors, that their ideas are worth forcing on others. They do not listen to customers in a wide, structural sense. Why would I sell store design to an audience that will not take the practice of store design seriously?

In advance of another major launch, I wanted to talk a little bit about the role of discernment in our work.

It’s important to negotiate new work from a psychic position of abundance. Even though the work may result in life-altering sums of money, even though the work may be the difference between making a mortgage payment or not, you still must arrive to the discussions of that work as if you can take it or leave it. Prospective clients know otherwise.

Discernment blooms from this position. You’re able to see things as they really are. You’re able to know whether the client is fully present & attentive to the work. You’re able to understand whether the client wishes to co-create that work. And finally, you’re able to understand whether the work is something that will nourish or harm you.

The goal, of course, is to avoid work that is likely to harm you. High-end consultants are on permanent strike from toxic work environments.

It’s happening soon: our first-ever public workshop is in two days. We’re going to close registration shortly, so now is your last time to join us.

In the meantime, if you have any final questions about the workshop, please hit reply!

This week, for paid members

Our first-ever public workshop is next week, and time is running out for you to join us. I made a couple of minor changes to the outline, based on initial feedback, and I’ve spent most of the past month writing new content for the workshop. I think it’s a good distillation of what you’ve already been learning in Store Design, with a lot of real-world application and group discussion.

If a full day is too long for you, or if the timing doesn’t work out, remember that you can always sign up now, come through when you can, and get the full recording, with subtitles & transcript, after the workshop is done.

If the fees are too high, remember that this is an investment in your ongoing practice. The hope is that the skills you learn in our workshop will provide outsize returns for the businesses that you serve, which will in turn allow you to demand higher fees for your own work. And since it’s our first rodeo, the fees will never be this low again.

I’ll admit it was hard for us to distill everything in a value-based designer’s job down to only five hours, but this should give you a good start. Remember that I’ll always be around to answer questions & provide resources on other research methods.

I can’t believe that I felt motivated to write this in 2024, especially after the kind of year we had, but here we are.

Draft is a business. (I know, right?) Like other businesses, we sell things that we believe to possess intrinsic economic value. And we’ve made enough money off our work over the past 12 years to think that we might be onto something, especially considering all the money that we’ve made others in the process.

In design as in the rest of life, you get what you pay for. That’s the whole point of design as an investment, one that is provably low-risk when executed appropriately.

In short, if you want a free unresearched “audit” that will make you feel good about yourself while hurting your business, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would be happy to oblige. If you want something that will reliably make back your investment because it’s grounded in real-world evidence, you know where to go.

I’m grateful for everyone’s interest in our Value-Based Design Workshop that’s happening in a few weeks. Today, I’d like to talk a little about why I think this is important, and what designers can do to sit more in their integrity.

We are, rather obviously, in design winter, but I think even more is at stake than our jobs. More fundamentally, we’re dealing with a collective religitation of the purpose of design among those who buy it. Organizations are asking: should we have design at all?

This is an existential question, and a tremendous opportunity for us to define the conversation. Will we rise to the challenge? Not change anything? Quit the industry?

If you want to start getting answers, I invite you to join us in a few weeks.

In 20 years of working in design, I’ve never seen the sort of existential handwringing that pervades our industry right now. Unfortunately, feeling sorry for ourselves won’t get us anywhere. Taking action will. We need to embrace what we’re capable of, step into our own authority, and own our power.

It’s in that spirit that I wish to share a new offering. For the past couple of months, I’ve been working with my friends Joel & Taylor at Badass Courses to give you something truly special. Presenting the Value-Based Design Workshop, an all-day course that will change the way you think about & practice design.

On Thursday, March 21, I’ll be leading a five-hour workshop that will teach you the fundamentals of value-based design, with a heavy emphasis on group activities and hands-on work. It will not be a series of boring lectures where I dramatically read one of my books to you. It will be value-packed, full of examples that will help you level up your design careers now.

Three years in the making, this is the first time I’ve ever offered a workshop like this, and I hope to do so again in the future. As a result, the pricing for this course will never be this low. So take a look and sign up today. I’d be grateful & honored to see you there.

The first round of Store Design has mostly been delivered domestically. My favorite quote so far:

Holy shit this is a gorgeous book. I had high expectations but the subtlety of it all needs to be experienced in person.

And:

It's clear that you don't just read business books and are actually literate, making for a refreshing read.

Store Design continues to be available. Tell literally everyone.

I was chatting with a client recently about how the new analytics software is bad, and how there seems to be no real alternative.

This is a different energy than what happened when the big experimentation framework went away. When that went away, it went away. It wasn’t replaced by anything. This is replaced by a simulation of something that approximates the old thing, but is not the old thing and does not function like the old thing.

This is our 400th letter. Our first one went out to 18 people, 7 of which remain. Regardless of whether you’ve been here for 1 week or all 400, we’re grateful for your support.

Store Design is now available & shipping. Tell everybody.

Shipments will be paused and Draft will be closed this Thursday, February 01, which is my birthday. How will you be celebrating?

If you preordered Store Design, we’ll be reaching out to confirm your shipping address shortly. Copies should start shipping out this week. Don’t sleep!

This week, I’d like to discuss what it means to be aligned with the sort of work that we perform here at Draft. Yes, we generate lots of revenue – but we only really work well if there’s deep cultural alignment with our work practice, which is sacred. Given the current conditions, this idea feels worth reinforcing.

We’re not a sack of money button. We have a very specific and clear sense of what it means to generate revenue through the practice of store design. We possess a close perception of leveraged power as it applies to one’s work in this industry. And we disengage from all structures that provably fail to nourish us.

Printing of Store Design is now finished. Next up, the printer ships all the books to me, and then we ship to preorders, friends & family, and then everybody else.

We’re proud to support our clients with additional usability-focused heuristic research from Baymard Institute. To bolster our work on this front, we’ve thought about getting certified. If and only if you’re a store owner, hit reply and answer the following yes/no question with a “yes” or a “no”: would such a certification matter to you when considering whether to buy design from us?

Welcome back, everybody. Deep rest was useful for us; we’re fired up and ready to start a great new year. We’ve got so much cool stuff in the hopper that we can’t wait to share.

First up, of course, is our next book, Store Design. Proofs have been approved and the printer is producing the book right now. Once we get copies, we’ll ship to preorders, then friends & colleagues, then we’ll formally launch our onsale, and then after a little bit the price will change to reflect Store Design’s outsize value. Order now & don’t sleep!

This week, for paid members

Our first weekly paid lesson of the year is a comprehensive, evergreen response to Jakob Nielsen’s post. There is another way forward that Nielsen doesn’t immediately recognize. In it, we describe how to expand one’s design practice to be creative in a way that contemporary machine learning models can’t reasonably mimic. Who is the human behind your work?

This is our final letter of the year before we go on break for the holidays. Thanks again for your support, now & always.

Store Design’s proofs have been approved, and book production has begun. Soon, soon.

This week, for paid members

• Our weekly paid lesson is about how to plan your value-based design work for the following year.
• Our design of the week is the single worst default we’ve ever seen. Sorry to end the year on a bummer note?
• We’re throwing our last office hours of the year on Tuesday, December 19 at 1p CST. Share your glazed ham recipes! Or just talk about design. I don’t care!
• And finally, our final teardown of the year is for Baymard 1%-er REI. You may have heard of it.

What store design activities make the most sense to run over the winter? A few come to mind:

• Card sorting. Remember all of that drum-beating that I’ve been doing for members about how important your nav is? Card sorts are how you rework your nav thoughtfully & profitably.
• PDP updates. Now’s a good time to finally build that swipeable, full-bleed image gallery that you’ve seen around. It’s also a good time to fine-tune your upsells. Nothing is off the table.
• More ambitious reworks. Now is a great time to make bolder changes that you’ve been putting off, up to and including re-theming or re-platforming your whole store. Deeper changes are lowest risk after big sale periods, because there will be reduced short-term impact and a higher likelihood of long-term optimization work. Plus, most of you did make a lot of money this past month, right?

You should probably also do what I’m doing and take some time off. You earned it.