Shared Visions and Sticky Notes

When we started redesigning cloudfour.com, I knew I wanted the entire team to feel a sense of ownership in the end result. To establish an inclusive design direction without designing a camel, we had to distill the collective input of every team member into one guiding vision… a singular “us.”

Fortunately for us, few problems in the universe cannot be solved by getting in a room and writing things on sticky notes.

After broadly discussing our hopes and dreams for the redesign, we jotted down words on stickies that described how we wanted Cloud Four to feel.

Each of us presented and clustered these notes on the whiteboard, grouping those that seemed thematically related.

Then, we agreed on informal titles for each cluster. These became (in no particular order):

• Leadership
• Academic
• Open
• Ahead
• Craft
• Integrity
• Cheerful
• Web ❤
• Responsive
• You
• Boutique
• Portland

We managed to swiftly condense 93 sticky notes from nine team members into twelve tidy descriptors. I call that a successful exercise!

These directly informed our mood boards… but that’s a story for another post!