Org Design for Design Orgs

Foreword

“The space between is just as important as the objects themselves.”

MY 10TH-GRADE GRAPHIC ARTS teacher had just finished tearing into my layout, complaining that my kerning was off, my margins were wrong, and my proportions were uneven. I was manually laying a page of text and images, and having just burned my hand on the waxer, I wasn’t interested in his advice. What did it matter if the top was off by a millimeter? There’s plenty of room on the page for the rest of the...

Oh.

It turns out Mr. Mackie was less concerned about my ability to follow his instructions precisely and more interested in my understanding of the relationships between the content on the page—the letters, the images, the whitespace. Without planning and proper attention, the effects can ripple through the work. I didn’t need to work on my kerning—I needed to get better at seeing the bigger picture.

This lesson stood out more than any other and has followed me throughout my design career. There is a distinct rhythm to content on a page, objects on a screen, and people in physical space. The sum of these interactions defines the success or failure of the design. As designers, we’re charged with solving detailed problems, and those solutions are often most powerful when balanced with a larger perspective.

I’ve often thought about design teams in terms of organization and operation—the structure and methods created to help designers do their best work. Designers who have worked both at an agency and in-house ...