While at Disney, I served as part of the weekly Style Guide Counsel. The goal was two-fold – 1. To present new work and ideas; then discuss how these fit into the overall brand strategy with the design platform (Note: when I say “design platform” I mean everything from development, ux, content and visual work). 2. To address any issues from past work, revisit and evaluate this work from a cross-discipline perspective.
The goal of these meetings helped to solidify a deeper holistic approach to platform design decisions. As leadership met during this time, it served as a way to build synergy, understand and trust across disciplines. This also allowed leadership to communicate back to the disciplines about supporting various changes and why they occur.
Presenting new ideas
When presenting new ideas, the goal is share an approach that fixes or drastically improves a problem that has not yet been solved. When working on such a large scale project, such as the MagicBand and Disney platform, there can be a lot of things to solve for. Various pieces of logic, user experiences and scenarios create a very large amount of work to address. The goal is always to make it as simple as possible for the end user.
The ideas are communicating thoroughly. Examples, mockups and ideas are shown. These are usually vetted with a smaller team and the discipline leaders beforehand. As these efforts are supported and shown, the entire group of the Counsel discusses, asks questions and moves to either implement, or table the approach for further evaluation.
Address issues
how the counsel is formed
how the ideas are voted
sustainable efforts