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.
Wild how low the bar is. “The author is literate.” We did it!
Anyway, if you want to see what I’ve spent the past year working on, I invite you to grab your own copy of Store Design today.
This essential post from Sara Wachter-Boettcher just came into my field, and it is probably the most evergreen piece of writing on design that I’ve seen in years. She suggests that designers know their value (true), that they should get better at setting boundaries (also true), and that they should stop handwringing about whether they have value in public because businesses will view it as a sign of insecurity and act accordingly (so true that it feels like we should have known & acted on it decades ago). In the article, she suggests a handful of reframes away from the gaslighting and burnout culture that exists across so much of the tech industry.
I would go one further and suggest that designers should actively boycott working in anti-design organizations. Name who they are, circulate the list in public. If people in power are going to give lip service to design without providing conscious support that is actual, they should be put in their place, full stop. We exist in a moment where capital in tech is attempting to take power from workers, but ultimately labor always has the power. The sooner we remember that, the better.
Almost all of the success I’ve had in my career came because I set firm boundaries on my work. My business closes at 5pm every day. I do a specific amount of work every day. I show up, focus, and put in the craft. Every time someone tries to cross my boundaries, they don’t last very long, and someone else takes their place. Eventually we come to a steady state like right now, where all of my clients love & respect me. Discernment is necessary. It is possible.
I suppose it’s possible for buyers to read that essay & parse it as “quiet quitting.” That is itself a form of gaslighting, a way of subjugating labor that I hope is someday recognized for what it is and made fully illegal. I’m a better designer when I’m given the time & space to design and live the rest of my life. So are you. Never forget that.
This week, for paid members
- Our design of the week shows perhaps the most structurally unnecessary design detail for conversion that we’ve yet seen. When will it go away, and what can we do to make it stop?
- Building off one of the posts we’ve linked this week, our weekly paid lesson is about what specifically drives the acquisition of design in the current landscape. What drives those in power to buy design now?
- And our monthly office hours are scheduled for Tuesday, February 20 at 1p CST. Would love to see you!
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Links
- Evergreen resource on emotional resilience & protecting your field, which are essential qualities to be cultivating at any time, but especially in the present moment.
- Most of design’s practice involves managing expectations around visuals. Pavel Samsonov has more.
- This article’s structure makes you think it’s about one thing, but really it’s about the way that design is initiated & accepted into an organization, which is rather useful for us to meditate on.
- How is experience measured? I recently chatted with a client who wanted to implement a low-quality experience for customers. I suggested a way to do it that accomplishes materially the same thing for the business, but doesn’t diminish the experience. Yet it’s easy to think that the first approach doesn’t particularly matter if the business still gets what it wants. There is no way to quantify experience, no system of measurement for it. The answer, of course, is what it always has been for 40 years: qualitative research.
- Don’t clear card details on error. I had a form do this right recently and came away pleasantly shocked.