Design Clinics: The Cure for Lack of Design Cohesion?
When you’re a design lead within a large organization, you’re often in charge of groups of designers across different silos. As a design system advocate, you position yourself as a collaborator, someone who’s there to help folks understand the importance of standards, not just point out issues and oversights during a quarterly review.
Nathan Curtis, EightShapes founder and author of Modular Web Design, uses “design clinics” to build collaborative relationships and keep his team faithful to standards and design systems. Once a week, he holds drop-in office hours. Designers and developers stop by to present their work and get advice about how to bring it in line with the corporate brand.
Design clinics are a lightweight, informal way to “triage” glaring discrepancies while fostering a sense of unity and collaboration. They don’t eat up a bunch of hours, but they can have a huge impact on the quality and cohesiveness of your organization’s designs.