Core design principles are undervalued and overlooked in most of today’s business operating practices. Complementing design principles with business operational practices will bring more empathy, connection, innovation, and financial returns to any team or company. Journey to Design I never thought of myself as a designer by any means (I have little to no artistic ability). I’m a scientist at heart and by trade; I observe, hypothesize, analyze, and experiment. When I graduated college, I didn’t know that a field of “design” existed, nor did I know what it actually was. I stumbled upo ..read more

How to design the building blocks of your most powerful, creative asset: the mind Understanding how the mind works can help you design yours to embrace uncertainty, take more risks, and unlock creativity. I’ve always been curious about the mind: Where does it come from? What is it, really? But more important, how can we make it stronger? In Descartes’ Meditations VI, his famous quote cogito, ergo sum, or “I think, therefore I am,” implies the existence of a distinct, nonphysical thing, or the mind. He posited a distinction between the mind and the brain, and that each person is an intern ..read more

Letting go of the need to be perfect and of things that are outside your control will enable more productivity at work and more joy in life. I’ve always been a perfectionist, making sure every “I” is dotted, every “T” crossed. Like many others, I’m just ever-so-slightly OCD. I enjoy creating order within chaos — I want everything to be neat, organized, and lined up. I like having plans, checklists, and timelines, and don’t deal too well with uncertainty. (Consequently, I’m not great to watch movies with, or so I’ve been told.) A few years ago, I realized this was doing more harm tha ..read more

Foster more diverse and inclusive communities with the Dropbox Design toolkit. Artwork by Sarah Chon In May 2021, Dropbox Design introduced the Diversity and Inclusion Toolkit. Like the other Culture Kits we’ve shared with the community, this one aims to channel your creativity and inspire new ways of working. This time we’ve ventured into the complex space of how to build more diverse and inclusive cultures. The lens of design is what distinguishes this kit from the many excellent resources that already exist for diversity and inclusion. When designing, we ask questions, define ..read more

Change management is not about writing a bunch of policies about process; it’s deep design work to establish new operating practices for our teams. Artwork by Aubrey Trinnaman In Design Operations, I think a lot about the way we work. Our discipline is all about figuring out the best ways to reduce pain and increase a sense of purpose for teams who need to get sh*t done. I recently had to stretch the limits of my imagination on the role of Design Operations in helping our company transition to Virtual First. My team and I are partnering with groups across the company to guide the dev ..read more

Photograph by Gabrielle Matte and Samuel PasquierWhat an interesting six months it’s been Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve worked from home for more than 100 days in a row. And during this time, videoconferences have sometimes wreaked havoc on my sanity. Does that sound familiar? Here’s what I did about it and how you can control your own meeting madness. All with a meeting manifesto. Approaching exhaustion When the shelter-in-place order came down in March, my workdays were immediately filled with hours of videoconferences. During the first month, all those videoconfe ..read more

A story of collaboration: How writing and design joined forces to create a power publication for Sundance Film Festival Photo by Pedro del Corro “What I do is not really typography, which I think of as an essentially mechanical means of putting characters down on a page. It’s designing with letters. Mr. Aaron Burns called it ‘typographics,’ and since you’ve got to put a name on things to make them memorable, ‘typographics’ is as good a name for what I do as any.” — Herb Lubalin Sometimes a creative duo works on a project with such synergy, they can’t tell where one person’s idea ..read more

How to find your voice and set it free Photo by Gabrielle Matte One year ago, I had an epiphany that shattered the silence — not only mine, but the silence of thousands of people all over the world. Although I’m a writer and make my living with words, I realized that all too often in my life and work, I was waiting for permission to speak. I was holding back on telling my story, on pursuing my dreams, because something inside me said I needed a person in a position of power to give me the go-ahead. I was raised in an insular, religious world where women are taught to be subservient t ..read more

A Figma template to help your team ideate Artwork by Sydney Goldstein At Dropbox, we work in a distributed fashion across multiple countries all over the world. Although we try to make sure our team members feel closer together, running design-ideation sprints can still be pretty difficult. There are challenges with time lags during videoconferencing, messy Sharpie sketches, and the inability to ensure that everyone is viewing the same screen. Artwork by Sydney Goldstein Recently, we ran an ideation sprint with participants spread across five locations and two time zones. We were int ..read more

How the Design Ops team at Dropbox team takes a strategic approach to people-centered problems By Michelle Morrison, Sarah Lin, and Andrew Lee Artwork by Gabrielle Matte, Samuel Pasquier, and Olivier Charland Among the most enriching aspects of working in Design at Dropbox is the emphasis on creative community. As it turns out, one of the secrets to building healthy, people-centered programming is to leverage the power of Design Ops. From hosting gatherings and lectures to publishing educational and personal perspectives, we prioritize efforts to contribute to the creative community ..read more