Mac Cormier
@maccormier
a cajun designer, printmaker, and burrito connoisseur • prints at cypressdesign.co • VP of design @navSMB
Growing a Design Team: Building a Culture of Collaboration
The @mutinycorp design team grew from 1 to 5 in about three months.
And now that we have a full team, it's on each of us to intentionally define the culture and tone for Mutiny Design. So we set out together to built our own guide for collaboration and crits:
We didn't want working with the design team to feel like there were just 'more hands on deck.' Our internal stakeholders should benefit more from a team of designers' perspectives than from a single opinion from their design partner.
Show less in portfolio reviews
Portfolio reviews often encourage designers to overcomplicate their work.
Not every piece needs a set of personas, a whiteboard full of stickies, and hand drawn wireframes.
If you're having to wrap a complex set of processes around a project that only took a couple of iterations to (successfully) pull off, maybe you're presenting it with the wrong context.
The Designer jam session
It's so hard to understand how well you and a designer can work alongside each other in a remote environment. So how the hell are you supposed to get signal during interviews when everything is so scripted?
The jam session.
Jam sessions have become my favorite interview for designers.
It's the best way to get a taste of what collaboration could look like with a candidate without asking them to prep a portfolio or do a take-home exercise.