Notes from intermission: content, directions
I’m writing this two days into intermission and I’m already questioning large parts of the business, which is precisely what one wants to happen.
Most of the initial work involves what emails get sent and when and to whom. I love this list, but I often get stuck in my habit of weekly publishing, and I don’t zoom out as often as I maybe should.
How do we introduce people to Draft?
We need to find a way to give people a good first impression when they join this list. That’s my first challenge. But I don’t particularly know how to go short on what we do, you know? We do a lot. We have a strong point of view. You either possess ideological resonance with our mission, or you’re vaguely bemused & horrified about everything I write.
I have historically been terrible at writing introductory email sequences, mostly because our method is so complex and our audience is fragmented between economic buyers & independent practitioners. So developing an introduction as a “product” is its own bit of fun. Whom is it for? What endpoint does it lead to? What outcomes do we catalyze for the reader?
My assistant is currently poring through a large tranche of content to put together the initial sequence, and then I’m going to edit it and turn it into something that hopefully teaches readers our method and its likely impacts. I’m nervous but excited.
How should members read?
In the process of this, we’ve also been figuring out paid v. free content. Members are all the way over on this site, which was built well before I could be paid over here. So that’s what we’re going to do, and it will probably be a lot easier & more convenient for everyone involved.
Publishing in the same place will alleviate a few headaches for our team, and it’ll give everybody a consistent place to look in a place where they’re already looking. Win-win in the long term.
What do we say?
On top of that, we’ve already said most of what we need to say about the practice of value-based design. Over the coming months, we’ll be diving into the messier, more interesting forms of human behavior that define structures of leveraged power and internal organizational communication.
I’m over here using Naomi Dunford’s method to focus us on the most important topics in profitable design today. I’m going to write a little more on that method in text.
What else
I rewrote a few pages on Draft’s site, reworked the nav, and unliked the the resource library, which nobody used and fell horribly out of date. Plus, people should be reading these letters, instead.
More wood, fewer arrows.
On the nightstand
I’ve been reading Why Design is Hard, which is the only recommendable book about design to be written in the past five years. It speaks deeply to the issues of power that we’ve been writing about here for a while. It fully owns many of the arguments that we’ve been making around our job titles, “seat at the table” mewling, and discomfort around economic value.
I’ve been using this book as a way to clear up the real reason we’re all here, and understand how to build our expertise. I think that’s a good next chapter for us, especially given the ongoing psychospiritual collapse of small-business ecommerce. The big players are about to win, and we shall see about the rest of them.
I’ve also been reading this piece on the structural compatibility between design & agile software development, which we all knew but nobody really wanted to say for a while. This, about correctly leaving social media & touching grass, my two favorite activities. And finally, a piece on contemporary machine learning.
Finally
Autumn in Chicago is as good as it always is. The leaves are changing, the dogs are loving the cooler weather, and paw paws & saturn peaches have arrived at the farmers market. I’m having long conversations with close people around fire pits, going to lots of shows, and quietly preparing for my escape flight in a few weeks. I know these updates are supposed to be mostly business-y, but there’s a human behind ‘em, you know?
Anyway, in short, intermission is going well, and I think now is a good time to reply if you want me to write about specific topics, especially if those topics concern structures of leveraged power or design persuasion. Not how design can be persuasive, of course, but how to persuade economic buyers to buy, accept, and internalize design, how to promote our expertise as practitioners, how to make the world a little more generous and less annoying. Because at the end of the day, that is the entire practice.