Alley Sessions

The Micro Design Studio: Your Secret Weapon for Remote Collaboration

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Design studios bring people with varied skill sets together to solve creative problems such as identifying compelling graphics, homepage layouts, and establishing brand identity systems. Traditional brainstorms can often be ineffective, favoring the loudest or most popular voices in the room. Design studios are structured in a way that encourages the participation and the creativity of your entire group. The emphasis is on finding the best ideas, not offering up the most ideas. In this way, design studios are inclusive of diverse voices and surface promising ideas quickly and effectively.

This session will describe how, even while remote, designers, developers, and writers/editors can still participate together in these studios. The aim is agility, such that creative ideas emerge quickly and are brought to life early, leaving time for iteration or even rapid user testing.

We will discuss when a micro design studio is in order, how to plan a session from start to finish, and which tools and platforms work well for facilitation.

  • Christa Field

    Creative Director
    Alley
    Christa is the Creative Director at Alley, specializing in brand development and user-centered design methodologies. She brings a deep understanding of design systems and has crafted solutions for a variety of organizations including The Brookings Institution, The Dallas Morning News, and most recently Defector. Christa is based in the New York City area.

  • Susan Finkelpearl

    Vice President of User Experience
    Alley
    Susan joined Alley in 2014 to build a fully integrated UX and design practice. Her team provides clients with a full suite of services spanning product strategy, visual design, formative research, information architecture, content planning and writing, and user testing. Susan has brought these services to clients including The Kaiser Family Foundation, The Brookings Institution, Science News, and Colorado Public Radio.

Webinars webinars

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How Strong Communities Bolster Journalism and Impact Your Bottom Line

This past year saw subscription-based models for journalism flourish. To ensure this trend continues to grow, media organizations can consider a number of ways to focus on their communities first in 2021. Panelists in this webinar will discuss ways to grow and support a readership community. Many media organizations are recasting the question “How do

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Choose your own adventure : an overview of decoupled solutions in WordPress.

Decoupled WordPress may sound like a buzzword, but this architectural pattern has become increasingly popular over the last few years. Determining whether it’s the right choice can be a challenge, though, even for seasoned technologists and product managers.  In this Alley Session, we’ll examine the growing landscape of decoupled WordPress strategies, focusing on how each

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A new model for membership-driven media: A conversation with the team at Defector

The changing landscape of news media has sparked innovations in platform development, subscription models, community engagement strategies and more. The pioneers of this movement are reporters and ambitious teams of talented writers who are ready to jump out from under legacy media limits and experiment in new ways with subscriptions and relationships with their readers.

Latest News latest news

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Meet Mantle

Allow us to introduce Mantle, a framework for building websites and applications using WordPress. Mantle is a layer that sits between WordPress and your custom code, providing you all the benefits of the WordPress CMS with a developer experience similar to Laravel.

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An Intro to Styled Components

Senior User Experience Developer Jo Murgel created a short video course to explore a simple usage of Styled Components. Check it out!

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Out in Tech & Alley

Alley is committed to amplifying the unique voices, experiences, and career advancement of women, black, indigenous, people of color, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities. It is our responsibility to address the shortcomings in the technology industry so we can begin to include and diversify not only our employee base, but also the communities we invest in.