Making time for design-initiated work
The Inaugural Designer Day
As part of our Q1 goals, the Medium design team decided to establish Designer Days as a way for us to tackle bigger projects that don’t necessarily fit into the day-to-day priorities of our product teams. Every other Friday, we’ll go offsite or hunker down somewhere to focus on design-led initiatives and make headway on things we normally might not have time to work on as a group. The folks at GV were kind enough to host us for our inaugural kickoff last week, so Sasha, Marcin, Tyler, Pablo and I abandoned our regular schedules and meetings at the Phelan Building and met up at the GV offices near South Park. Sasha, our design lead, put in a lot of thought beforehand on how to make the most of the day and helped us pick bite-sized projects with realistic goals in the week leading up to the offsite.
Of course, all work and no play makes design a dull job. To take a break from all the heads-down work, we played a quick sketching game from Foursquare’s list of creative exercises called Movie Puns to get our creativity going. The rules were simple: change or remove one letter in a famous movie title, draw a clue and then ask people to guess the new movie. Pablo bested us all with both his movie idea and his impressive drawing skills…take a look at his sketch below and see if you can guess it!
At 4pm, we regrouped to review our progress. For the most part, we did a good job of properly scoping projects one-day projects and giving feedback at critique was nice and easy because we’d set aside a few minutes at the beginning of the day to fill each other in on context. By the time crit rolled around, we were just naturally continuing the conversation we’d had throughout the day as we worked in the same space. It’s obviously a significant investment to remove designers from their product teams for an entire day, but there was a lot of value in being accessible to each other as resources and sounding boards for longer than just a regular, one-hour meeting. We left GV with a design research kit, some headway on our longterm goal of a unified style guide, a handful of extra delight and lots of ideas for future improvements — all of which will be rolled out soon. Our next Designer Day is March 4 and we’ll be exploring higher-level questions to figure out where design can make the biggest impact. Stay tuned!
A big thank you to the GV team for letting us use their space and to Sasha for organizing everything. Photo credits go to Marcin and myself.
