Publishing for Designers: 3 Steps to Make it Fun for Everyone
How we approached the topic of creating content inside the Product Design Team at Frontify and what every leader and designer can learn from this.
Every profession has its superpowers and favorite skills. Solid negotiations on the sales side, a powerful level of abstraction with science buffs, and a creative discourse led by philosophers. Designers also bring a great set of tools to do their jobs in the best way possible – but with so many variations on what being a designer means today, each niche role in the field brings something totally unique to the table.
Looking at Product Designers, for instance, we might find they’re able to translate difficult technical tasks into easy-to-use interfaces for the right target group without skipping a beat. Communication skills, on the other hand, can be a challenge, when it comes to sharing the successes of such work. How might one go about publishing work milestones, sharing efforts with the communities, and being an ambassador for the profession?
In this article, we will find some ideas on how to boost the team’s efforts as a collective and deliver a great template that will help you to kick-start your team’s contributions to your Product Design Content Strategy, and with a little fun, you can easily take the fear of writing, publishing or any contribution in general out of the equation.
The Intro — or — Sounds Nice, But Why Publish?
It’s always worth checking the etymology of a word:
…of publicen (early 14c.), which is from the extended stem of Old French publier “make public, spread abroad, communicate,” from Latin publicare “make public,” from publicus “public, pertaining to the people” — etymonline
Focusing on the make public makes clear that it’s about bringing something from inside to outside. Information or content that was reserved to a dedicated group/individual is becoming available to a much bigger one, probably even to everyone.
Some designers might say now:
“That might be right, but I’m a designer, and I’m here to design.”
And that’s true. Our profession is about creating solutions for people’s problems and needs. But the best idea, product, or outcome would never see the light of day without communication.
“But don’t we work for that hand-in-hand with content writers, journalists, producers, and other kinds of publishers?”
Yes, we do — in most cases.
If we’re lucky enough to work together with these magicians of content.
But what if not? And what about the authenticity and the deep level of detail of your work that probably you – and you alone – are best suited to phrase in some form of communication? — I think I got you.
It’s always better to read a story about something from someone who lived it.
Don’t believe it? Let’s try an example:
Becoming a Pop Icon: It’s possible that a New York Magazine portrait as such could be an interesting read. A biography-style piece about a pop star with some good stories and perfect prose. But what if Madonna, for instance, was the subject, but instead she was the one writing the piece? Then, we’d get deeper insights into the search for a producer, the feelings that she was holding around her heart while her career launched like a rocket, and intimate conversations with trusted ones that only she would knows. Sounds more exciting, doesn’t it?
The perspective that you have in your profession, the vocabulary, and all your experience around it make you the ideal candidate to write about what you do. Especially if the people who are going to consume the content are doing the same as you.
There are numerous reasons why you should start publishing on your own, and ways to make that happen, too. Let’s have a look at what we tried at Frontify to empower our Product Designers to publish their work.
Step 1: Remove Obstacles
We all should start with the consciousness that we aren’t professional writers in most cases (until we don’t want to turn into these ones).
And that’s completely fine!
Understanding this might help us to start writing and to relieve ourselves from the fear of underperforming. Our publications don’t aim for a Pulitzer. Their purpose is to share, inform, and spread. To go public.
What sounds simple in these few sentences, is something that needs to be trained and to be revisited several times. I mean, I also lose myself from time to time on rewriting the same phrase in ten different ways and I like to write and publish for a while now. Everyone gets stuck from time to time – even the best writers out there – so don’t let that hold you back.
Step 2: Empower as Best as You Can
Publishing or sharing content is culture. It needs to be incorporated by role models in your company or your teams. It needs to be simple, to start from the edge, and to see small successes quickly. And, it needs to be communicated in a way of a transition, not intimidating the people with rocket metrics right from the beginning.
As a leader, it’s your mission to design this culture and to make visible how it could work. We found for ourselves different ways to empower people to produce content that goes public. Let’s see how.
Embrace Every Contribution
It’s important to value the smallest contribution and to let people realize how quickly they can publish something. In the beginning, many people who already write social media posts about their profession don’t realize that they are already part of the game of publications.
Measuring the smallest posts is a good possibility to initiate your team’s efforts.
Embracing every contribution means also accepting publications that are not always created in the name of your brand, being published on personal accounts of the authors, or even on channels of other brands and magazines.
To unite everyone on this journey of creating content, we developed a small formula that allows us to measure the contribution of each one and to weigh it fairly:
Let us explain what we mean by the Resort Factor and the Ownership Factor, which multiplication results in the Publication Factor.
The Resort Factor is a value that we defined on our own to weigh the impact of a medium on the public awareness a publication can create. It’s a number that helps to differentiate between the efforts of creating and the impact that it will have. That’s important to value the work correctly. A LinkedIn post might be in most cases less work and less impactful as a keynote at a conference.
To complete the calculation we add the Ownership Factor in the multiplication. But why?
A publication on the company channels has a different reach and a different impact on your (business) brand. Simultaneously, a personal publication can have an influence the value of the brand. Why’s that? Well, as employees of a company, what people do on a personal level with their personal brand might be even more effective in reaching the right target groups. This needs to be recognized.
Bringing this formula to life helps to show the impact of our Product Designers. And it’s already a huge impact. We totally believe that the journey of publishing starts there: being aware of the power that you already have. And on this foundation, you can build and evolve. With training, new formats, different experiments, and more facilitation.
We reviewed our efforts of Q4 recently and were happy to nearly reach our goal. And everyone thought we did nothing on publications this quarter. That’s not true. Often, it’s just not highly visible or easy to overlook unless you’re conscious of its value.
A system like that is lean, adaptable, and helps you to measure your efforts. It shows if your contribution to more publications really works out and it makes your work accountable; indispensable as a leader shaping this topic. Especially while working with frameworks like OKRs, it helps you to communicate the impact of a content initiative around the whole company.
Be The First Address For Help
Empowering isn’t limited just to processes and foundations around your publication efforts. It continues with the direct coaching and orientation that you can offer to everyone who wants to contribute in any way to go public.
I learned that listening, especially, can make the change in the game. Being open to doubts, creating a foundation that really removes efforts from the creators, and offering people methods to identify their content ideas are just a few examples I’ve picked up from the feedback and ideas of every contributor.
We started our first official quarter with the publication efforts with two assisting elements to guide the people. A survey on Typeform to identify the favorite contribution categories and a workshop on Miro to help people to grow their ideas and to start with a first outline.
Both led to early results and it felt like people are losing the fear of activating their ideas. It was awesome to see that in our team people already had different preferences to initiate their efforts and that this range might be super helpful to distribute content on different channels.
The workshop around the content revealed that many great ideas are already available, but very fragile in the beginning. By evolving the ideas in the method “Brainwriting” we helped the each person to win new perspectives on their content ideas and to pick interesting inspirations to grow it to new ones.
Our learnings: it needs this guidance in the beginning. Don’t think that you waste time because you prepare these workshops and bridges as a foundation for your folks. A solid understanding of how to approach your own content ideas is indispensable to start and to evolve.
Step 3: Open The Game For Different Kind of Publications
There is another important decision to take: the right medium.
Should it be a text, a visual, a video, a podcast, or something else? This can steal some time from you because you need to experiment and to feel what’s the right content for you and your work. Possible formats could be:
- Podcast
- Video
- Exhibition
- Talks & Keynotes
- Meetups
- Work Examples
- Plugins or Templates
- Social Media Posts (LinkedIn, Instagram…)
- and so many more…
I personally feel better by finding out what doesn’t work for me. It’s like a process of exclusion and might be more helpful than searching for the strength that you don’t identify with the first experiments possibly.
A publication doesn’t need to be a text. This is one of the most important takeaways I communicate to my colleagues, but it’s worth trying out writing for yourself to find out.
It’s always great to have a diverse set of publications and therefore different channels that you can serve. But this shouldn’t be your focus.
Another takeaway from our initiative is that you need to make clear that every kind of public contribution is welcome. When we talked about Figma Plugins, for example, some people really did not believe that this is also a way of publishing our work. But it is and it might be a very attractive one for some of your colleagues if they don’t like to write. Be open to the different ways to “go public” and try to inspire everyone to find new ways.
Outlook
Our initiative is ending with this quarter and it produced a lot of issues, ideas, and results. Not everything worked out, not everyone really contributed to the goals and some blockers are still there. But on the other hand, we found a platform to discuss the way how our team can publish its work. And, we published content.
We learned a lot from the big players about how they communicate, how they create dedicated pages with a .design domain, and how they produce stuff. But of course, we are far away from this number of team members in our Product Design team.
In my point of view, it is important to start and to experiment.
Letting the people participate in shaping a system that’s really serving you and not overloading you with new processes. Something that really helps to produce content quicker and with fewer obstacles.
In the future, we will need to learn how to motivate people better, how to measure the impact of different publications, and to see which channels work for our team and which probably not. As always, an ongoing project that needs some love to grow.
We finish this Key Result in our team’s Objective this year. But I am confident that we will leverage this initiative as a constant effort, probably as one of our first KPIs in the Product Design team.
Now it’s your turn! We hope you got inspired to start a content initiative like ours in your teams or to tackle your next article, contribution, or any kind of material that goes public. Happy production!
At Frontify we believe that content needs to be produced by the people leading the topics. Our company-wide initiative “Everyone is Marketing” is helping us to find new ways to motivate people.
I‘m Patrick Hummel, Product Designer that loves to facilitate processes and find easy ways to tackle people’s needs.
Do you also want to be a part of our Product Design Team?
Check out our open positions!
