Daily Draw: An Exercise for Creative Teams
Today’s Phrase: Dead Alligator Surfing
Toward the end of 2019, before the holiday season, our team had several large projects looming and zombie projects were resurrecting themselves looking for revisions. We weren’t burnt out, but we weren’t exactly the most inspired either. We started brainstorming creative exercises that might help us break free from the cycle of edit/review/edit/review.
Our goals:
- Create a workplace culture that values creativity
- Bring sketching into our design process
- Build relationships with teammates
- Make space to be more playful at work
Daily creative exercises are a great way to stimulate new ideas and have benefits even outside the world of design professionals. Through the lens of our goals, we researched a few activities:
Inktober — a project for artists to dedicate the entire month of October to drawing once a day in ink.
The Sketchbook Project — order a sketchbook, fill it up and send it back to The Brooklyn Art Library to be cataloged and archived.
28 to Make — weekly creative projects delivered via email, designed to get you into the habit of creating.
You’ve probably seen someone in your Instagram feed participating in the global Inktober phenomenon and while we love the artistic spirit of The Sketchbook Project, it’s a little too time consuming for the level of commitment we were looking for. We wanted something easy to engage with, non-intimidating, and that we could start right away, on our own.
Where We Landed: ‘Daily Draw’
Our ‘Daily Draw’ is based on an activity called Word Stacks (credit to CreativeLive). This activity involves creating three stacks of cards: the first pile contains adjectives, the second pile contains nouns, and the third contains verbs. The idea is to flip one card from each pile to build a random phrase such as “Excited Tomato Wiggling” and then draw it!
Adding in the habitual quality of Inktober, we decided to turn Word Stacks into a daily activity for an entire month. We added some loose boundaries around materials. Ideally, we should be drawing on a 3x5 white index card in standard black sharpie. Those of us working remotely, of course, are free to choose whatever materials they have available. We don’t want to create unnecessary barriers to participation.
So each day, at around 12:30 pm — just after lunch — we flip the cards and dedicate 10 to 15 minutes to drawing the phrase.
Retrospective: Did it work?
1. Creating a workplace culture that values creativity
This was one of the easier goals to achieve and it happened early on. Everyone on our team bought into the concept right away. We collectively made the decision to value this small amount of daily creative time. So on really hectic days, it was easy to say “Hey, I need 5 minutes before our next meeting because I haven’t done my Daily Draw yet.”
Our peers and even people we report to would be like “Of course. Take your time.” or in some cases, they would say “Oh yeah — I haven’t done mine either! Great reminder.” And then we would carry on with work a little bit happier after some laughs over our drawings.
2. Bringing Sketching into Our Design Process
The goal was 30 days of drawing. At the time of writing, we are on day 50. So based on that alone we can say it was pretty successful. Of course there were some days we missed because of holidays or work events, but we’ve exceeded our goal.
Through it all, we got to see our personal styles develop over time. We‘ve seen ourselves grow, taking less time to draw each day. We built confidence in drawing and making choices, committing to ideas and following through.
3. & 4. Building Relationships & Being playful
Initially, we started out with just our creative team of 6 people, but as our studio walls filled up with drawings people from other departments started asking questions and expressing interest. So we created a dedicated Slack channel called #daily_draw and opened it up to anyone at Glassdoor that wanted to join. This did two major things for us: it allowed people in other offices to directly engage with the activity and it also became our main tool for documentation.
From the beginning, we made sure that sharing our drawings were a supportive environment where instead of critiquing work like every other project, we championed each other and the weird ideas we came up with. When we’re done drawing for the day, we pin them on the wall or post them in Slack and we laugh at the quirkiness while admiring the different interpretations. It’s a moment of celebrating our individual perspectives.
And today, when so many of us are working from home, Daily Draw has continued to be a fun way for us to connect and share face-to-face interaction with our teammates. If you want more info on how to start your own Daily Draw, reach out to us at brand@glassdoor.com. We’d be happy to share our Daily Draw tips with you.
