For about seven years I had my own office overlooking the river in downtown Milwaukee working for a design firm. In fact, actually everyone at this company had their own office. This was nice to be able to hunker down and work on projects without being interrupted everyday but it was horrible for my growth as a designer. It was up to you to walk over to an art director or designer in another office to get input on your designs or for technical issues you might have in design programs. I think people at times felt intimidated walking into another person’s office to ask for “help” or to ask them to stop what they were doing to give you a quick critique on a project. While in my own office I definitely did get up and ask for help, especially in my first few years working there. But as time went on and I became more comfortable with my abilities as a designer I realized I wasn’t making as much of an effort to get input on my designs or ask for help if I was stumped with a technical issue in a design program like Photoshop. I truly believe this had to do with the work environment and how the office was set up, it really did nothing to allow people to easily work together.
After I left and as we looked for our Stream Office we specifically looked for an open office environment that would help to make collaboration easy and to keep lines of communication open for all projects. Between all of us choosing the space this was the one thing that was mandatory in our new office set up as we knew how much this would help our design and technical skills evolve.
The past few weeks have been busy here in our office and while we are working on a variety of design, flash and video projects having the open environment has really been great for all of us and made me realize it’s worth blogging about. As I am sitting next to Brian and he’s been working on a bunch of Flash Actionscript/XML I am beginning to pick up on some more advanced techniques in Flash. He also recently wrapped up a 55 page booklet for a client of ours and as he was creating this booklet in InDesign from scratch I was sitting close enough to him to pick up some great tips and tricks with InDesign styles to help me when my next project comes up that I need to use that program.
We also are able to turn our chairs around and go over design layouts on each other’s monitors rather quickly and this happens all the time. This is not a distraction or interruption, it’s just how we work daily on all of our projects (as a team).
I think a good majority of design/ad agencies have this work environment going on right now, it’s not a new trend. If you don’t have an open office space for at least your creative side, it’s something you should try out and see how the positives outweigh the negatives in terms of communication, individual/company growth and creativity.
