Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here. If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

When we think of spaceholding, we normally resort to a personal context, where we console someone in crisis or grief. Or maybe we’re on a therapist’s couch, and they’re doing the work of spaceholding.

That is not what happens in design. When we speak of spaceholding at Draft, we specifically mean the process of managing the emotional & energetic tenor of others in order to get work shipped. It isn’t a whole lot different from what happens on the couch, but there’s a whole set of mostly-unspoken professional rules around it.

Imagine an invisible grid of boxes superimposed on your site. Tapping each one does something. The rules aren’t immediately clear – you need to create an interface for that. These are your tap targets.

Take a slider. You would think that tapping only the slider would control it. In practice, though, there’s an area around the slider that controls the same thing. You can safely tap white space, control the slider, and never think twice about it.

This separation between control & intent is a key pillar of mobile-first interface design. In this lesson, we’ll talk a little about tap targets, and outline how to use them in your app.

What does the present moment look like for value-based design? There are numerous opportunities for profit generation. Points of leverage always exist for us.

On the more production-grade end, design is load-bearingly critical in down-funnel activities. After all, you can never have a too high-converting checkout form.

It’s also highly useful in the more performance-based aspects of tech work, especially now that we’ve all learned to code & measure our impact. A faster-loading pricing page is likely a better-converting one.

Speaking of pricing pages, design will niche to supporting individual activities. “Pricing designers”, “onboarding designers”, and “checkout designers” will come to exist. From specialization comes real expertise.

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, January 21 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

Happy new year, y’all. Feels good to be back. Got a fun one this week.

In his recent excellent book The Four Conversations, consulting consultant Blair Enns describes a term called the flip, where a prospective client begins to view you as a consultant, not a contractor.

This is essentially a matter of positioning: you view yourself as an expert, talk about things that promote yourself as an expert, and hopefully the client views you as an expert, too.

One does this a few ways:

• Teaching everything they know on their mailing list (hi)

• Podcasting

• Guesting on others’ podcasts or blogs

• Writing books (also hi)

And then hopefully your prospective client comes in the door already knowing your whole deal. For the rest of them, there’s this lesson. Here, we’ll talk about the role of consultative positioning, and why it’s vital for the future of design to work in a consultative capacity.

Intermission is over. I emerged from deep rest, deleted all of my unread email, and now here we are. I hope you had a good few weeks.

First, I wrote some text about a gift I gave to myself, which was a long time coming.

When I wasn’t cooking on the aforeposted gift, I spent most of deep rest reading. Of the topics I circled around, the most Draft-pertinent regards the ongoing structural remediation of design.

The past two years have witnessed a significant collapse within contemporary design. A few hundred thousand of us were laid off by businesses who chose to abandon design. By abandoning design, businesses became more hostile towards customers. A few high-profile incidents occurred, and a term got coined, but we are really only witnessing the beginning of tech’s find-out phase.

When a team size increases past 1, it’s necessary to create a source of truth for coordination, delegation, and ongoing reference. That includes:

• What needs to be done
• What’s already been done
• Conversations around how to execute on what needs to be done
• The results of any learning or research

This is 101-level business practice, but we see organizations messing things up in key ways. In our final paid lesson before we enter deep rest for the holidays, we talk about how to create & manage sources of truth in any organization.

I got interviewed on Step by Step Business. Parmesan is also depicted on the aforelinked.

Scott Berkun is smarter than me. He wrote the book I wish I had written in this moment. His work pushes us to be better designers. And recently, he wrote a post that asked eleven questions that should be in every designer’s browser history.

While I don’t know if I personally search the web in complete sentences like that, the questions are excellent. They’re also kind of hard! Some of them likely have book-length responses, or they involve practicing design for decades. At least one of them has a really spicy answer. Another is probably answerable with therapy.

Continuing from last week’s lesson, we’d like to go deep on what happens when you start on a new team: what power you have, how you can change behavior, and how you can gather power going forward.

Power is the most important component of design. After all, learning design is pretty easy, but how do you get it shipped? How do you measure its impact? How do you get an impact?

Things are, broadly, bad. They are bad in the tech industry and bad in the world. They are bad for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that we keep using software that happens to be run by bad people.

We don’t intend on doing this. We all started using the bad software with good intentions. In this post, I’m going to outline why this happens at a very comically high level, and then I’ll leave the “actionable steps” to all of you, because you’re smart adults who can be left to their own devices.

As a disclaimer, I’m about to diss a direct competitor of one of Draft’s clients, but it wouldn’t change what I’m about to say here.

The newsletter

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, December 17 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

Over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time talking with designers about the dynamics of leveraged power. Since design is a form of leveraged power, it’s important for us to understand how power is created & worked with in any organization.

Done well, this allows our designs to ship with minimal interference. Critique goes easily. People trust you more. And you get that “seat at the table” with less mess.

When people are in the market for something, they come to your site, browse around, and have opinions. Since the fundamental question of the web is “why wasn’t I consulted”, it is necessary for us to understand what those opinions are and what we can do about them.

When someone has a conception of your business’s offerings that might hold them back from purchasing – and I mean purchasing, where money exchanges hands – we call that an objection. If the objection isn’t addressed right away, people are likely to bounce at the point of maximum interest in your product.

It’s our job as designers to understand what those objections commonly are, and how we can address them before they cause us to lose customers.

Before the internet, it used to be that you would more easily understand what the objections were – and how to head them off. People would come into your business, ask questions, and you’d use your own skills to answer them. Maybe you’d even adapt what you offer to meet their needs.

I’ve really enjoyed how thirsty stores are this Black Friday season. It’s a whole season now! I always track the first time when I see the first mention of Black Friday on any store, and this year it was September 20. It wasn’t even fall yet, and someone came out and provided early access to Black Friday, in defiance of god.

Does anyone believe this? Black Friday primes the consumer. Everybody comes in, buys at once. This is notionally good for consumers (one day, thank god) and it sucks for everyone else (imagine your warehouse, delivery networks, etc over the following week). Stretching Black Friday is notionally good for customers if and only if they believe they’re maximizing their deals.

One of my clients put up early access to Black Friday a couple of weeks ago, and they wondered why sales slowed. There are two theories:

• People don’t believe it’s the actual sale yet. They think they’re likely to get bigger discounts on Black Friday itself. Priming them for Black Friday is giving the opposite effect of what’s intended.
• America is fascist and everybody is afraid to buy stuff.

After two months of work, we’re finally ready to finish migrating all of our membership benefits over to this list. In this letter, we’ll talk about what we’ll be doing going forward.

What happens now

We used to post lessons, new design decisions, and office hours to a separate website. Now we’re posting them here, paywalled for paid members.

In short, paid members won’t have to check a whole separate website, and free members will see some paywalled emails. That’s it.

Intermission is essentially over.

Us

Here are some bullet points:

• We’ve folded our paid community into our letters going forward. Email gets read. Our writing exists to be read. Conscious attention to the practice is necessary if we’re going to survive the next decade.
• We’re going to continue making the next book, but when things are ready it will be distributed… quietly. Think “our laser printer + handwritten letters” quietly. Kindred spirits only for now. This will be our final update until it’s ready for wider consumption, which may be never.
• Updates will be more freeform going forward, and they may not happen exactly on Tuesdays, or every Tuesday. This is more in alignment with the practice, which must be protected, of course.
• We finished everything we wanted to do in intermission early. We’re still going to rest a little between now and when we said we were going to resume work. Creating more spaciousness can only help the business. Within apocalypse, it is structurally necessary to create periods of deep rest & spaciousness. After all, we’re sure to uncover things that we hadn’t thought about before!
• Paid updates will be on Thursdays, usually. Previously they were sporadic. Now they will be less sporadic.
• Towards that end, this Thursday we’ll be sending our first paid member update summarizing a few changes and providing next steps.
• We’re accepting new consulting work for kickoff in April 2025. You may apply here, or get a retainer to start a conversation now and skip the line.

Hi! Just a heads-up that our self-paced workshop is available for 40% off for only a little while longer. Our limited sale ends this Friday, November 22nd, at 5p CST. Don’t sleep!

In the meantime, we’ll talk about what happens when people don’t practice value-based design. Because that’s the norm, right?

But look where that got us.

Design is in crisis

We’re near the end of intermission. A few things to keep in mind:

• We’re still in the (long, slow) process of integrating our existing mailing list with the private community. Progress has been made, but as mentioned: long, slow.
• We’ve compiled enough for a book of text, but given the current vibe weather it may no longer be structurally relevant. As a result, it’s been relegated to the “fun hobby that will turn into a zine someday” bucket.
• We now have an introductory course around value-based design that will greet newcomers to this list. Once people complete the course, they’ll be able to read the rest of the list.
• Speaking of what we’ll post here, our updates will be considerably more freeform going forward. We believe most common design discourse isn’t focused on the necessary work of understanding & leveraging power, and so we’ll be following a path that looks a little different.
• Draft will be closed for holiday break starting on December 20, so we won’t be writing then anyway.

A brief life update, which is about as much of a bummer as you would expect it to be

I spent the past week mostly doing what you would expect: disassociating in a park in Amsterdam, looking up real estate in Amsterdam, and moving large sums of money around my bank accounts while in Amsterdam. I have also been on a series of brief 2.5-hour calls, and being in Amsterdam is quite nice for these because nobody in the states wakes up until around 2p local time, so I get a lot of time to do the aforementioned activities before the calls begin.