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.

Quiet week.

This week, for paid members

• We held our monthly office hours, where we debated what sides to serve and nothing else.
• Our weekly paid lesson is about how to read heat & scroll maps on collection pages.
• And our design of the week shows that none of you learn when it comes to z-indexed elements. I know, right? During this week?

Store Design has been sent to the printer. Still on track for a January delivery.

Rest is necessary, of course. In what specific ways have you rested this month?

Draft will be closed this coming Friday in honor of my dog’s birthday. In this moment, I invite you to reply with the specific ways in which you will be reflecting on Basil on the occasion of his birthday. Thank you.

This week, for paid members

• Our office hours are a week from today, Tuesday, November 21 at 1p CDT. Want to talk to a value-based designer about what to do over the weekend? I have a very good stuffing recipe.
• Our weekly paid lesson is about nav reworks. The options you give customers defines how they behave on your store. Are you making the right choices? How do you find out?
• Our fortnightly teardown is for apparel brand Marfa Stance.
• And our design of the week covers a truly curious way of displaying collection text.

Final edits on Store Design have come back. Now I get to final-final edit it and send it off to the printer.

Still on track for arrival in the next few months.

This week, for paid members

This article on the feminization of design and attendant restructuring of “web design” into “front-end development” is an absolutely essential read.

If you’ve been following my letters for any period of time, you’ll find some parallels between what’s happening here and the shift from design to “product” that has happened over the past decade. For almost its entire history, the tech industry has involved women getting into a field, that field being proven to show value, and men taking over that field. This happened to programming itself in the 50s & 60s.

There is materially no energetic difference between what happened then and what is happening to design now. Or how support has turned into customer experience. Take note.

In the department of “things that should happen but won’t,” we have Jakob Nielsen talking about ‘vocabulary inflation’ with respect to design. “UX” is design. “Product” is design. “Design systems” are design. It is all just design.

People choose to label design as something else in order to appease stakeholders in power who incorrectly devalue the outsize economic impact of design as a practice. One of the more minor consequences of design’s structural failure to take a “seat at the table” is that I guess we don’t get to call what we do design anymore. Being disempowered to do our jobs is a bigger issue. Being laid off en masse is a bigger issue. Ending up with stuff like this is a bigger issue.

The answer is not to rebrand ourselves as “product,” and do nothing else to leverage our power. The answer is to understand design’s power, claim it, and learn how to move within business.

Edits have wrapped up on Store Design. Now we move into final typeset, preflight, and then printing.

This week, for paid members

• Our weekly lesson talks about the economic value of customer education. How does one do this well, in a way that separates the best brands from the rest?
• Our design of the week shows the biggest home page fail we’ve seen in a while. And then we show you another one. On the same page. Hilarious!
• And our fortnightly teardown is for carry & apparel brand Filson.

Our editors have kicked off our final editing pass on Store Design, and our work should be off to the printer within the next six weeks. Gosh, isn’t that exciting? I’m excited.

This week, Shopify is rolling out a new checkout system. It’s kind of wild: as a value-based designer I usually find high leverage in checkout improvements. Working on Shopify, I have very little latitude in what we can do with checkout. As this new checkout page rolls out, we’ll have even less latitude. So ultimately, one hopes for the best, and surrenders to Shopify and what they want. Ultimately, I think these improvements are a good thing, although they are clearly more about Shopify’s long-term corporate direction than any palpable improvement for the customer.

There are three sets of stakeholders when Shopify rolls out any change: Shopify, Shopify’s customers (online stores), and Shopify’s customers’ customers (actual customers).