The Weisheimers

The Weisheimers were created to bring our team together once a month to review our work.

My proposal was to take one of our monthly traditions and go completely digital. We do a lot of digital work already, but every month we meet in the hallways of GSW and pin up printouts of websites and ipad apps and mobile experiences and have a design review around sheets of paper on a wall. It didn’t make sense. These experiences were never meant to be printed or pinned to a wall. 

The idea had a few challenges. First, our team was used to doing it this way. Tradition is tough to overcome and changing it meant that the “new way” had to be simple. Second, and this is what made the concept really shine, was the benefit to the team wasn’t big enough. And third, we didn’t want to lose design review aspect and it was nice to meet and talk about the work we had done.

To solve for the first two challenges we needed to create a simple way to upload work and structure those uploads in a way that made this useful for more than just our monthly design review.

Our solution was to organize the work the same way we organize case studies on our website.

As a bonus, we created a downloadable archive of the submissions for new business pitches and industry award shows.

The final challenge was solved with a custom web application for live voting. At the end of the presentation the audience could now go to a website select their favorites and see a live tally giving us our “Best in Show” for the month.

The impact of this project is yet to be seen. COVID-19 put our first Weisheimer awards on hold, but I’m confident this experience will be something really nice once we can all get together again.

UPDATE: The first Weisheimer’s was a success. It went a little differently because of COVID and required a bit of an adjustment, but it was well recveived and provided a nice break from the typical Zoom meeting.