Canva Design Week — Creating Space
While growing the design team at Canva, I obsess about preserving and scaling what was great about the team early-on. Adding team members shouldn’t dilute the magic but grow it instead. To do this, I think about preserving the Spark and Space that the early design team had.
- The Spark is the drive and proactivity to create a simple, magical design tool for everyone. The confidence to lead with your design. And the urgency to ship it as soon as you can.
- The Space is the autonomy and room to connect meaningfully with other team members and go deep on a problem.
There are many ways that we create The Space. In this article, I describe a key way that we created The Space in 2019: The Design Week.
For three-and-a-half days, the entire Sydney Design Specialty spent time offsite to design, prototype and grow together. We bunkered down in a large airbnb in Bondi — surrounded by a garden, our peers and glowing MacBooks.
Like a lot of design teams in cross-functional product teams, much of our time is spent apart from other designers. The goal of the offsite was to dedicate time to bond as a design group, work together on the design vision for 2020 and re-energise.
It was three days of spontaneous collaboration, intense feedback and celebration of the remarkable year we had had. It was also totally exhausting and challenging.
The approach
Early on, I had the idea that the week should feel like a more compressed version of our existing Sydney design team cadences:
- Weekly Meeting on Monday afternoon. Status updates and organise outside catch-ups based on overlapping work.
- Design Sanctuary on Tuesday. Three hours to get away from your group and work side-by-side with another designer. This is also when we hold Office Hours for Design Systems and Content Design.
- Design Critique on Thursdays. Three designers will spend 20 min each sharing something they’re working on that they want specific feedback from the group on.
- Design Pairing. Each Product Designer at Canva is matched with another Designer to spend one hour a week sharing their work, designing together and giving feedback.
- Design Salon, once a month. A designer will host this session to talk about any design related topic they wish. Often accompanied with a workshop and intense Q&A.
- Show and Tell. Every group at Canva shares their work every 2 weeks in an informal show and tell session.
I have read about — and participated in — design and product off-sites that focus on presentations and workshops. Instead, I wanted to encapsulate the spirit of our design cadences into a week together. No talk-fest; this was a design-fest.
Pre-offsite
Form teams. Two weeks before the offsite, we pitched ideas in a Google Doc and formed into groups of 2–3. Most of these ideas had come from existing Canva 2020 plans and goals. Others were important design itches that we had not found time to scratch.
Get feedback from others. It was important to us that we had input from our product and engineering peers and founders before we went in. Many of us consulted our groups to get their input before the offsite.
Interview Melanie, our CEO. A couple of days before the offsite, we shared our list of ideas and interviewed Mel in a group setting. We wanted to understand any product or design philosophies she had around the ideas we were collaborating on. This format ended up being in a podcast style, in fact, we had two episodes — with the second episode mostly Q & A followup from the first. They were hugely influential to our offsite, and a format we want to continue in 2020.
Monday
Monday was a half-day where we set up the space and cleared out as much room as we could to create a workable environment. We made sure to think about all the little things; power, drinks, space to work, stationery supplies, screen to share work and dial in others, etc. The space was a little cosy but most people were able to carve out their own working space downstairs or in one of the many rooms upstairs.
People ended up working in many different ways, sometimes dictated by the space around them:
Tuesday
We kicked off Tuesday with breakfast and stand-up. Everyone went around in their groups and talked about their idea and who they were collaborating with.
They then went off into their groups and started their work. This was also the first day of extreme bushfire smog in Sydney … and also the moment that I realised I didn’t check that our airbnb had air-conditioning. It didn’t. :(
Lunch break was accompanied with a Team Values workshop that I ran. We collected all of the product and design principles and values that I could find from various sources at Canva. As individuals, we sorted them into prioritised lists and shared our rationale for the top 3. This now gave us a clear list of design principles for 2020. Later, we will put these into posters and used them as a way to guide our design decisions.
At 4pm we had a design Crit. Half of the teams presented work-in-progress, same format as our regular Crit — 5 minutes of context and 10 minutes of critique. Importantly, these were concept-stage designs, it was good to get input early.
Wednesday
We kicked off with a Brand Breakfast, hosted by our Brand Studio Lead: Cat. She went through the direction and progress that the brand studio has made in 2019 — from defining the illustrative style to recent campaigns. It was inspirational and a great way to kick off the day.
Everyone burrowed off into their groups again. You could certainly feel that teams were more relaxed and focussed today. The smoke had cleared and we were all a bit more comfortable.
Lunch break was accompanied with a presentation from long-time Canva Product Designer, Matt Hardy, on ‘Design Excellence’. Matt talked about some of the design challenges and lessons learnt over the course of Canva’s last five years. Something we continue to face as a fast-growing team with so many different teams and ways of working. He spoke of the importance of designers at Canva to continually advocate and drive for simple, elegant solutions amongst the fast-paced and sometimes chaotic Canva environment.
At 4pm we kicked off another critique. You could really see the progress people had made over 24 hours. Afterwards, some of us worked back, grabbed some Mexican dinner and watched the Grinch. (It was December) :)
Thursday
Thursday was kicked off by Angela, one of our Art Directors in the Template Design team. Wow. Angela walked us through the mood boards, styles and emerging trends that our amazing template design team use to create the hundreds of thousands of templates our users love so much.
Lunch was hosted by Yehyon, our Product Designer in the User Voice team. She spoke to a very relevant problem at Canva — how the way we’re organised reflects the product and designs we actually ship… aka Conway’s Law. This lead to an interesting discussion on ways that we can dissolve some of the barriers in our communication to collaborate in the interests of the user, not the organisational structure.
Everyone then bunkered down towards the afternoon where we had our final Show and Tell at 4pm. Every team, 11 in total, presented their walkthrough prototype — even our remote team of Robin and Marie in France. It was pretty clear that each team had carefully used their time offsite to go deep on each idea.
While I can’t share all of the ideas in this Medium post, I can say that they were all deep, future-thinking design concepts that spanned the entire Canva user design journey including: How we help users design and print beautiful layouts; Helping Canva users manage their designs; Improving our editor and creating the most amazing presentations product in the world.
Most teams spent 5–10 minutes walking through their prototype, discussing the trade-offs, design decisions and final outcomes.
Finally, the celebration. Our Canva Vibe team supplied everything we needed for a chilled out BBQ and drinks. Accompanied by ‘kudos pass the parcel’, a now traditional design team celebration of each other’s strengths and terrible art store prizes.
Reflection
Everything wrapped up on Thursday evening. We had a BBQ, some beverages and decompressed.
While reflecting on the week, the most remarkable achievement I found was the Space we had created as a team. The space we had architected and designed had a massive effect on our ability to go deep on a problem.
It kind of reminded me of an Alain de Botton book I read many years ago, The Architecture of Happiness. From that:
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Space and a nurturing environment is crucial to the creative process. It helps focus us, go deep and create Spontaneous Moments of Collaboration (SpoMoCo), which can often lead to design ideas that would not have otherwise happened. The offsite has challenged me to think more purposefully in 2020 about how we can incorporate more of these spaces into our everyday work-life as our design team continues to grow.
Feedback
The next week I sent out a survey to understand how others felt. Most people felt like they got personal value out of the event, with 91% giving the offsite a rating of 8+ out of 10. Most called out the collaboration and extended time to bond as a team as the highlight. Along with the good vibes, here were some snippets of feedback:
I have been able to think sensitively and deeply about the future of Canva and genuinely feel part of the team.
— Anon Canva Designer
The best part was the final prototype. Was amazing to be able to focus purely on the problem itself and work cross group. Working cross group was amazing because instead of focusing on limits or working under the uncertainty of another group potentially being on a different wavelength about the same issue we could each bring in contextual knowledge that would further get us closer to the solution.
— Anon Canva Designer
Some of the lowlights were the smog on day one and the sometimes cramped location in Bondi. Other people wanted longer — a full week. Others wanted to do it more often.
For the next offsite, I’m looking forward to continuing the good vibes and creating a space for unique collaboration that could not have otherwise happened, while praying for no bushfires and a bigger location with A/C.
Kudos
Many thanks to the Canva Vibe team who helped us with all the stationery, snacks, breakfasts and caffeine to keep us running.
Thanks to our CEO and cofounder, Melanie, for her time with the Q & A sessions — especially at such a crazy busy time of year. Our CPO and cofounder, Cam, for the feedback, support and improving my bad ideas. :)
Finally, to the Design team at Canva: Thanks for making the time and effort to create meaningful connections and be a part of something special.
