Design Friends
Design is decentralized across several groups at The Washington Post. News, Opinions, Graphics, Product, Arc, Brand, and Client Solutions all have designers. In 2023, I launched Design Friends as an initiative to bridge the gap between design teams.
Goals
Facilitate connections through organized activities and casual introductions.
Increase awareness of design work across the company.
Create a sense of community and fun among designers.
Activities
With co-planners and the support of team leads, I organized interactive events designed to engage designers across teams.
Surrealist portrait game
Designers participated in an Exquisite Corpse-inspired drawing activity.
Three designers made “Rotini Boi” image in a collaboration building activity.
Design trivia
I hosted an interactive trivia game that featured questions from the different design disciplines at The Post.
Examples of design trivia from Slides with Friends.
Virtual art gallery
Designers showcased creative side projects.
Digital doodles with Gartic Phone
A digital game of telephone that combined silly sentences with creative drawings.
Album from a game we played on Gartic Phone. Honey Toast is an adorable cat of one of the participants.
Escape by Design
An escape-room-inspired challenge tested designers’ knowledge of design with puzzles that lead us to “escape.”
Slides from the escape room game.
Designstravaganza
Designers printed custom trading cards that doubled as introductions at simultaneous parties in DC, New York and virtual.
A collection of the trading cards we had printed for Designstravaganza.