Duck Duck Moose Photo Shoot
am trying to get my blog mojo back after a little bit of a hiatus. I have lots of good things to write about this month — Caroline attended the annual Dust or Magic Conference co-hosted by Warren Buckleitner of Children’s Technology Review where we presented our new app Fish School (for iPhone) and Fish School HD (for iPad). I went to the Decorator Showcase in San Francisco and have lots of great ideas to share for children’s nurseries (including a rocking chair that I can’t stop thinking about).
I took an early morning trip on Saturday down to Palo Alto to meet up with Caroline and Michael (and our little product managers) for our first DDM photo shoot.
A recent interview really got me thinking about how fortunate we are to have such a great team with diverse skill sets and a similar level of commitment to quality.
It is particularly wonderful for me, because as my friends and my husband know, my attention to detail can be maddening (for every one else, that is). Luckily, the other Duck and Moose are detail-oriented and even if they think I am a freak sometimes, they are very, very quiet about it. :)
I have always believed that it is all the little things that add up to good design. In order to make good work, it is important to have a creative atmosphere and that goes for your environment, as well as your team culture. Here at Duck Duck Moose, we have a very collaborative, open-ended design process in which the three of us all contribute throughout. Our process is very back-and-forth which is the secret sauce to coming up with good ideas. It goes a little something like this: Observe children. Brainstorm. Prototype. Build. Test with children. Learn. Refine. Repeat all steps again. And again. And again.
Typically we have far more ideas that we can ever follow through on and our biggest challenge is often deciding which idea we are the most excited about. In the end I figure, that’s a good problem to have!
Nicci
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