As a design team grows, how do you maintain quality? We think a “design manifest” is part of the solution.

Designing great products as a team is hard. Everyone has different ideas about what is best. As we’ve added design staff, we’re learning about how important it is to “norm” the team around the different phases of design: client communication, user research, UX, UI, etc. The most important ingredient for great design across a team (outside of an amazingly talented team) isn’t a web app, whiteboard, or sketch book – it’s a shared understanding of how to make a great product.

This is our first attempt to articulate our design values. We expect this document will change over time, based on our experience. Our aim is that the manifesto serves as a guiding light for ensuring the quality and integrity of our work, and inspires your team to engage in the hard process of becoming better.

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Exygy Design Manifesto, v1

We always…

Pursue Excellence. We always ask ourselves “Is this the best ________ we’ve ever done?” If it’s not, we keep going.

Recognize when you need to…

Take a Break. Sometimes good design is elusive, and pushing harder won’t help. We know when to step away from a project and let it idle.

Innovate. We aim to build fresh, new things that delight and astound.

But we’re not afraid to…

Reuse Good Ideas: We don’t reinvent the wheel. Unless the project is to reinvent the wheel.

Use a System. Grids, layer styles, object styles, palettes and font families create consistency and usability within a product. We never leave home without them.

Throw Things Out. We weed out weak elements without wincing, and embrace the hard work of rebuilding the holes we create in our products.

Overcommunicate. We want everyone to know what we’re doing, all the time.

Break things. We hammer our designs with edge cases to make them stronger.

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Norming will not make a good designer into a great designer. But it can catalyze significant actions that lead to high quality work. Since users will judge us on what they can see (an amazing, user-friendly  product), not the stuff they can’t see (awesome code!), our design – and the things we do to become better designers – are vital to our continued success.

In other words, we think our design manifesto helps us operate more effectively by aligning our beliefs around how to create quality work. Less time talking, more time making.

Do you have critiques of our manifesto? What would be on yours? What do you think about this idea?