Design principles represent core values and attributes present in an organization's output. While aspirational and brand-centric, their true utility lies in their wayfinding capabilities, especially when navigating complex design decisions.
In late 2023, my content-design counterpart and I initiated a project to formulate design principles for Driveway's design organization. The principles needed to be both approachable and applicable to our designers and processes. Additionally, recognizing our own biases, we prioritized involving the broader design organization in their development.
This resulted in a multi-phase collaboration, encompassing multiple rounds of workshopping, synthesis, elicitation, and refinement.
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The final outcome of our multi-step process.
This voice and tone map illustrates the full breadth of what our principles had to encompass.
We held multiple collaborative workshops to help the team gather around a direction that felt right. This is an artifact from one middle-phase exercise.
Words are so hard! Multiple group synthesis sessions were held to tune the language that was flexible and easy to interpret.