Draft is a small interaction design consultancy for independent product-led software businesses.

We help you make more money by teaching you how to make informed design decisions. We focus exclusively on the creation of outsize economic value for our clients. We provide clarity in an industry that isn’t known for it. We also do a lot of other stuff, but those are the three biggest things.

We’ve written over 250,000 words over the past 15 years, including four books on the practice of design, two of which are best-sellers. (We love the other two equally.) You can look at our writing and do everything yourself – or you can hire us to do it for you.

Why we’re a good fit for you, specifically

There is considerable benefit to hiring us. Chief among them is our ability to de-risk your decision-making, generating outsize profit in the process. Unlike other design consultancies, our method focuses not only on the strategy side, but also on the practical evidence at hand.

We’re well-respected in a field where competence and integrity are in short supply. We have a clearer sense of what works than most other people – and when we don’t know what works, we know how to figure it out. We’ve been running A/B tests for longer than you’ve known of their existence. We’ve been trusted by quite a few brands you’ve heard of. We fare particularly well when we’re trusted to consult directly with executives in rapid growth situations.

Our two-year track record has seen worst-case increases of $500,000 ARR, 5% CLTV, and 8% conversion rate. In certain cases, we’ve seen outlier results like 34% reductions in manufacturing expenses, doublings of sales volume, 40% conversion rate bumps, massive improvements on mobile, etc.

If you seek the cheapest possible solution to your problem, you shouldn’t be considering us. But we do reliably provide handsome returns on your investment, every time – which is economically what really matters. We’re a little island of safety & stability in a baffling, savage world. And you probably need to work with us.

How we work

We follow a specific way of working that we’ve found works best for you. Beyond that:

• We don’t run ads, take sponsorships, or place investments.
• We don’t work for free.
• We only send email when marketing to people.
• We cherish referrals, and have a specific structure in place to protect everyone involved.

We also wrote a brief care & feeding guide for those who do end up working with us. Turns out 20 years of doing this gives you self-awareness and confidence! Gosh, who knew.

Who’s responsible for this

I’m Nick Disabato, a designer & writer from Chicago. Most people call me nickd, though. Either “he” or “they” pronouns are fine by me.

I have 19 years of experience in classical UX and interaction design. I’ve spoken all over the world, including some places that you know of, like Web 2.0, SxSW, Tools of Change, Weapons of Mass Creation, IDEO, Smart Marketer’s Ecommerce All-Stars, and Double Your Freelancing. I’ve worked for lots of businesses including The Wirecutter, KeySmart, Buttondown, and Planet of the Vapes; a full list of case studies is here.

If you want a press photo, we have casual & fancy options for you.

Colophon

Written in Chicago, Lisbon, Marseille, Paris, Amsterdam, Kyoto, Kanazawa, Melbourne, Milan, Wellington, Chiang Mai, Puerto Viejo, San Juan, Denver, Philadelphia, and a few other places between 2012 & 2025.

Body type is set in Brabo, designed by Fernando Mello and initially issued through Fontsmith in 2015. Sundry functional type, including Draft Evidence’s title, is set in Flama, designed by Mário Feliciano in 2004 and initially issued through Village. Monospaced type is set in Cartograph, designed by Connary Fagen and released independently.

Cadence & Slang’s title is set in Zine, designed by Ole Schäfer and issued through FontFont. Value-Based Design’s title is set in Comspot, designed by Nils Thomsen and issued through TypeMates. Store Design’s title is set in Fabriga, designed by Greg Lindy in 2016 and issued through Lux Typographic + Design.

Draft’s logo is set in Akzidenz-Grotesk, originally issued by the Berthold Type Foundry in Berlin in 1898, and now issued by Monotype. Modifications to Draft’s logo, specifically the “ft” ligature, were made by Ben Syverson.

We use (former client!) DNSimple for DNS, Nearly Free Speech for hosting, and (current client!) Buttondown for email.

Our grid system is a heavily modified form of Skeleton, and we use Tangle for our in-page calculators.

Almost all of our text is written in either Nova (for code) or iA Writer (for text).