Designing for a studio that has gone fully remote

Three weeks into running a design practice without an office. Some short notes, written down before they stop being interesting.

The video calls are not the design problem. The design problem is the loss of the moment in the studio when somebody walked past a printout pinned on the wall and said “that mark is too heavy”. Slack does not surface that moment. Figma does not surface that moment. The mark stays heavy until the next official review, which is usually too late.

A few small things that have helped.

A short shared file, kept open all day, where any designer can drop a screenshot of the thing they are working on, with no commentary required. Other designers comment if they want. Most do not. The file is not for review. It is for ambient awareness, which is the thing the open studio used to do for free.

A standing weekly print run. Whatever each designer is working on, printed once a week on a home printer, signed and pinned to a wall in their own house, photographed, sent into the file. Cheap. Slightly silly. It catches things video does not.

A discipline against scheduling video calls during the actual making time. Most studios have made the mistake of replacing the “open office, walk past my desk if you need me” model with “I am available on Zoom at any time”, which turns out to be the worst of both worlds. The studio’s mornings are now meeting-free by default.

The real change, the one that is not yet finished, is what happens to client meetings. The first round of client calls were, predictably, awful. The second round, which we worked out a small set of rules for, were better. The third round, where we started recording the call and sending the client a five-minute summary the same day, were better than the in-person meetings used to be. I do not think we are going back.

For studios looking for the practical setup, the tools that have stuck for the team: Loom for the recorded client summaries, Notion for the shared file, and a small Brother colour laser for the printed-pin-up routine. None of which is novel. All of which has worked.

Basecamp’s writing on remote work (the book is from 2013 and has aged well) and 37signals’ Shape Up have been the most useful reading on running a small remote team I have come across. Worth the time if you have not.

This is a thing I will revisit once the year settles down. For now: the studio still works. The work is still good. The thing that has changed is not the output. It is the rhythm.