Store Design preorders, optical constraints, digital gardening
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.
Really, this is going to be ours to lose. There is plenty of margin to play with. First, I’m bundling Store Design with our other three books, so if you want to save some money on getting all four, you should wait a couple of weeks.
The same with teardowns. We’re bundling teardowns with Store Design for a month. If you run a store or work for a store, and you want to save money on a teardown for the first time ever, now’s your chance. They are generally worth it.
The more teardowns & bundles we sell, the more pure profit we can pour back into making Store Design as awesome as possible.
And finally, we’ll be taking this chance to restructure our blog around establishing the correct mindset to practice store design in your organization. Our blog is a bit of a living document; many of the lessons in it have fallen out of date, and much of it has been updated for Store Design. So you should expect a lot of the blog to be different going forward. That’s our next priority in the spring.
And that’s it. We made the book you’ve been asking for, and we’re excited to put it out. We hope you can spread the word, because as usual, word of mouth is all we have. Thanks for reading, and let us know if you have any questions!
This week, for paid members
- Continuing our final few paid lessons for chapters in Store Design, we’re talking about… analytics. In a very broad sense. What can quantitative insight teach us about store design? Less than you think, but still something.
- Our design of the week covers a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to checkout. What conversion killer did we find this time?
- And we threw our monthly office hours this past week, talking about the latest in store design & our book’s progress. Exciting!
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Links
- Why dark mode is hard to get right. In short, people perceive black differently than they perceive white, and they perceive differences in shade on the black end of the spectrum more drastically than they do on the white end. (Related: we don’t actually “see” full black, but a color called Eigengrau, whose approximate hex value is the text color on Draft’s website.) (Also related: optical adjustment for shapes.)
- I’ve been enjoying (former client team member!) Maggie Appleton’s work on digital gardening lately, and have appreciated & admired some of my colleagues for working in public – especially Philip Morgan’s compendium of research notes. (I’m keenly anticipating his new small-scale research guide!) Digital gardening appeals to me – in fact, I have hundreds of text files on my computer, in a system that makes sense to only me, which could easily be parsed as a nascent form of the gardening that people like Philip & Maggie practice. Alas, I never ship unfinished work, so my garden will be a garden for one into perpetuity.
- In the pantheon of “things I said in 2008 that people are still yelling about in 2023”: don’t use lorem ipsum.