Funsize Method Week № 2

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Funsize Stories

6 min readSep 1, 2017

Theme: Learn

Our second Method Week took place in mid July and the theme for that was “Learn”. It wasn’t just about learning things related to our craft, but also finding ways to learn things that we were all interested in outside of design. We focused each day around a different theme to make sure we had some kind of focus for that day.

Day One: Webflow

The theme of this day was about a tool that some of us have dabbled in, Webflow, but wanted to spend more time with.

Chris Meeks, Webflow extraordinaire, was kind enough to come into our studio to kick off our first day. He walked us through some of his projects and his approach to each one. We then had a Q&A session to pick his brain about the pros and cons of Webflow.

We spent the rest of the day executing our own designs using the tool and reconvened at the end to showcase what we had built that day.

Day Two: Funsize

Day 2’s theme was centered around Funsize. We spent the day learning about the health of our company, where we want to go next, areas that we can improve, and the financial state of the company.

Jamie Nau, our CFO from Summit CPA, came into town from Denver to hang out with us for a couple of days. He put together an awesome presentation to show the team how we’re doing as a company financially and tactics that he uses to track utilization, budget goals, and other things.

In the afternoon, we had a roundtable discussion where we spent time doing an opportunity mapping. We drew a few columns on the wall: problems we’re facing today, missed opportunities, what’s going great, what’s critical to get right, and action items that we can take moving forward. We spent 5 minutes a column—each person spent 5 minutes writing down their thoughts on sticky notes — and we took turns going to the board, putting up our sticky notes, and discussing each point.

We ended the day with a party celebrating the completion of our office space! It was definitely the cherry on top of a day focused around Funsize people and culture.

Day Three: 3D

Day 3 for 3D!

Johnnie led this all-day workshop where he walked us through some rad 3D inspiration and helped us get our hands on a tool that was pretty foreign for most of us. We all downloaded Cinema 4D Lite (thanks to this article posted by 3Dfordesigners) and followed along.

We walked through some inspirational slides about the capabilities of 3D and how we can apply a skill like this to everyday product design work that we do for our clients.

The objective of the day was to build a 3D cube scene based off of a tutorial that Johnnie picked out for us.

Day Four: Copy & Watercolor

We kicked off the fourth day with a guest speaker, Felix Morgan, who came in to talk to us about the psychology behind great copy and communication. It was a two-part presentation.

The first part was a general overview of “copywriting hacks” based on evidence about how people read and what they believe and how it influences audience’s belief about the validity of the statement. The second part of the presentation was around client management and the “secret language” of pronouns which can subtly effect how a client feels about their relationship with the person they’re working with.

After we wrapped up lunch, we got our hands dirty with watercoloring. Chloé Yingst, of Chloé Jane Made, came in and led a 4-hour watercoloring workshop where we learned some of her techniques for creating beautiful watercolor art.

She provided templates—a buffalo, the state of Texas, a whale, or a bear — and led us through how to mask off the subject with tape and frisket, creating flat and graded washes, using wet on wet and dry brushing methods, glazing, bleeding, and splattering, and lastly, how to deckle the edge of watercolor paper. In the end, we all walked away with our own starry night sky watercolor print.

Day Five: Wine

The final day of Method Week ended with a lot of wine. We took a tour of the urban wineries around Austin and learned how they bring their grapes in to create wine within city limits and what their values are regarding bringing production closer to the people.