The zine as trial balloon
The slow roll is important. There is risk. Printers don’t have undo buttons. You can’t take years of your life back. This is why zines exist.
The premise
At some point, I got the idea that Value-Based Design wasn’t specific enough. Agency owners were buying it; other designers were buying it; store owners were not. As of press time, Draft exists to serve stores.
What if I took the evergreen & fundamental principles of value-based design, and applied them to stores in a new text? It would probably be 3/4 a rewrite of the previous book, and 1/4 actionable content that’s germane to stores. So I made basically that, in a 10-page zine, and put it on the internet for five bucks, calling it Store Design.
It’s useful enough to be actionable. You have five bucks. Some of you like my work enough to collect it. So this feels like a good trade. And I handed out a few copies for free to store owners.
All 50 copies of Store Design sold out in a week. A fourth of them went to store owners.
Next, the goal is to get unflinching, brutal feedback from everyone who bought a copy. I have their email addresses. In another week, I’ll ping them and ask for their insights. The goal is to massage the original text into an outline for something larger, something even more useful. Then I will either publish a new zine or go for a full book. Either way, the original customers of Store Design will get a free copy of the next thing in exchange for their feedback.
So, to sum up:
- People are motivated to buy Store Design because I’m awesome.
- People are motivated to buy what comes after Store Design by ripping apart Store Design.
- The book becomes better.
A word on durability
When I print new books, the goal is for them to last as long as humanly possible, in an industry not particularly known for long-term durability.
I don’t think that is possible here.
Ecommerce is still in its infancy. Global infrastructure has not caught up yet. Experientially, there are still major friction points. Sustainability & durability will reach all corners of the industry, but it will take another 5 or 10 years.
In the meantime, design still needs to happen, and it’s still going to happen – even in a period of comparative immaturity. I was lucky enough to write Cadence & Slang after the industry spent over 3 decades practicing user experience design, and after people started paying more careful attention to user experience due to Apple’s successes.
I don’t think we have the same luxury in store design right now. Yes, there is Amazon, and Apple Pay, and there are a few design details that really work right on some DTC stores, but broadly speaking, few stores truly care about design, invest in design, and make evidence-informed design decisions. Just look at Baymard’s benchmarks: most stores get usability fundamentally wrong, in a way that has not changed in over a decade. Baymard typically analyzes large, enterprise-grade storefronts with massive teams. Now think of a theme-default store on Shopify.
I have personally found that it’s easier for me to clarify what’s already in front of us, than to waste a bunch of ink & paper trying to move the industry into a place that they’re not ready for yet. The final, definitive version of Store Design will probably be ready for the public in 2030, best case.
Between now & then
For us, the answer is probably to keep publishing zines. I like making zines, people like reading our zines, and we can make more and more polished zines until the industry is ready to accept & invest in true, consultative, executive-level store design.
At some point, the line will blur between “zine” and “book.” There is no thickness maximum for a zine. There will also be a blurred line between “unfinished” and “ready.” Once a thing is polished enough, you may as well call it a formal release. I think this level of surrender is healthy for me, because ultimately, it’s all about the process. That’s why I’ve made some text about it.
Stores will someday realize that “good enough” is insufficient for the design conscious. That will be the first step of a multi-year mindset shift. In the meantime, one’s competitors are already hiring us and winning.