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By Abby Dean, Sr. Graphic Designer
In a busy design studio with deadlines always looming, it can be challenging to find time to keep learning new skills and sharing ideas that are not project-related. At Tekna, we recognize how important it is to stay connected and inspired outside of our daily workflow, so we’ve built in an hour of design team meetings every week that celebrates creativity and exploring together as a team.
The weekly platform is hosted by different designers on a topic of their choosing. The informal sessions range from drawing games to building competitions, to group discussions about ground-breaking technologies and cultural phenomena, to presentations on personal hobby projects.
While we look forward to and enjoy all our weekly get-togethers, here are a few standouts from the past year…
Charley Harper (1922-2007) was a Midwestern visual artist and naturalist whose prints and illustrations depict wild animals in their native habitats with boldly colored shapes and patterns.
Exercise: breaking the larger group into pairs of “describers” and “drawers,” the two participants sit back to back where one describes a Harper print and the other (without looking at the print) draws what is being described. The “drawer” can also ask the “describer” questions. We were super excited by how close our blind drawings came to the real thing in just 10 minutes!
Sidenote: if you’re wondering about the material scraps around our necks, we kicked off the meeting with a teambuilding “icebreaker.” Standing together in a group, we formed a circle with a single rope that we each held. Once situated, we were asked to transform our large rope circle into a perfect square—while blindfolded!
Not all of our Design Team Meetings (DTMs) focus on drawing skills, but as industrial, UI, and graphic designers, it’s one of our go-to themes. Piggybacking off the Charley Harper blind drawing exercise, we sat across from a team member and drew their portrait—while not looking at the paper.
Later, we translated the portraits into matching collages using official team headshots.
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