Sometimes you simply write over 500,000 words on the practice of profitable, value-based design and then you look back and have no idea what to do with all of it. It’s a universal concern, really, shared by everyone, so you understand, then.
I reached my own personal moment of reckoning last week, when I realized that half of Draft’s resource library was out-of-date. On top of that, we’ve reached the definitive conclusion of quantitative research, and alas, we’ve written a lot about the topic that will be scrubbed from the record. And we also have this other list where we’ve written enough to make another mid-career essay book.
It’s time for another intermission.
Those of you who have been around since the beginning know that we used to pause all of Draft’s operations for a month in order to get the headspace to try something new. That ended when we came out with our flagship consulting service, because it did so well that we ended up paying our student loans, buying a house, putting two dogs in the house, and flying to 26 countries.
Now that we’ve finished our major launches for 2024, we’re desperately overdue for another intermission.
Intermission is not a vacation. I will still be very much at keyboard, just working on Draft’s business at a higher level than we usually do in our day-to-day operations. This intermission will be longer than those in 2012 through 2014, and it will result in a handful of major outputs:
- Our fifth book, a compendium of text
- A wholesale reworking of these letters, membership offerings, and text’s editorial direction
- A comprehensive rewrite of our resource library, incorporating dozens of formerly-paywalled lessons on qualitative research
- An evergreen, free email course for profitable design
- Planned editorial for the next year of writing
- A realign of Draft’s site & business positioning to reflect the most profitable component of design: qualitative research
If you’re a paying client of ours, thank you and we will still do work for you during intermission. This will affect our existing publishing schedule more than anything else, as well as our ability to quote in new work.
We’re going to tack an extra week onto our usual holiday break in December in order to do some of the deepest, most attention-demanding work of our intermission. Experiments will run while we’re closed, but we won’t be holding meetings or launching new experiments.
Why now? Because October through December is the quietest time for value-based design work. Smart stores hired us in April, spent the year improving the way they communicate to customers, and stand to profit in the months ahead. Plus, we’re fully sold out of consulting work for at least the next few months.
Intermission starts today and will run through Monday, January 06, 2025. During that time, you can expect sporadic updates on our progress. Members will get first looks at everything we’re doing, as well as the ability to guide what we do next. I have no idea what the business will look like once we’re done, other than 1) better, and 2) with 100% of our consultative work intact.
This is mildly scary for us, but I also know it’s the essential move for leveling up the business. It’s important to take a brief pause from time to time to see what grows. I haven’t done that in years, so I’m tremendously excited to see what comes through while we work.
Thanks for your understanding & support, now & always. We’re really excited for what comes next of rus.
This week, for paid members
- This week’s paid lesson talks about what we’ll be doing in our brief intermission over the next few months.
- And our design of the week concerns a fascinating back-in-stock notification.
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Links
- Design is a form of leveraged power. (Semi-related.)
- Design is a form of leveraged power. (That’s an affiliate link, for the record, but I’d be posting it regardless.)
- Tooling doesn’t matter when it comes to design. Design is an approach more than anything else. Related.
- Designers will code, of course. Related.
- Show what’s true to size.
- Points in time, out of context. Remember: nothing matters but the path you take.