From the course: Creative Inspirations: Duarte Design, Presentation Design Studio

Workspace

(Music playing.) Nancy Duarte: Hi! I'm Nancy Duarte and we're here in Mountain View at our shop. We've been in this building for a couple of years and right after we moved in, my husband walked me out here and said, oh my gosh! You need to look across the street. What's over there? And we actually started the business in one of the apartments right across the street. So, we've officially moved to the other side of the tracks and this is where we work now. So, it's kind of fun to see kind of some historical context every single time we leave the building. So, I'll walk you guys through. When I walked in, I knew that this was the space I wanted. It feels like oxygen, so we always try to describe our brand as oxygen. We want it to be like a big open space or a meadow. Where you can find little fun details like a butterfly or whatever, where you can zoom in on some kind of quirky and fun, but yet the feeling you get is that it feels kind of like oxygen. So, our website is like that too where you can actually kind of have a sense of breathing easy because you've come here, yet there's little bits of creative environment in places. Each of our teams are organized by client. So, we have clusters of teams. So, we're organized a little bit differently and that we have-- each team has its own account manager and the account manager manages the artists, which is very different, so they are also located next to each other in proximity and then they have a designated account base. So, they would work consistently with the same clients and each team handles a different type of client base. So, we have an office in Chico which has about ten people in the office up there, so you can see my Art Director from Chico is actually in this meeting via teleconferencing. This theme up there is super valuable. So, that's how we do a meeting when someone from Chico is involved. This area is where we kind of play a bit and usually in the evenings we play ping-pong. We also always try to have a brainstorm going on all the time. So, we use these boards, somebody will put something in the middle, usually on a Monday and then we brainstorm all around what it is we want to do a brainstorm around. This week it's a concert, your most recent concert memories. This room is multi-purpose room. We host our workshops here. So, we fill it up with tables and chairs. It's a really interactive workshop with lots of sticky notes, pens, glue. They draw, they use rulers and pens and it's really pretty cool. Here's the basketball court. This is where they play. We could actually run around a lot in this area, you can just run, which is kind of cool and not in very many places you could do that. The girls' bathroom is decorated like Lucille Ball, which is kind of cute. All of our private offices and all of our conference rooms have floor-to-ceiling whiteboard, which is awesome and we use it like crazy. So, we'll collaboratively work on a storyboard in here, we'll do word storms, brainstorms, do kind of out-of-the-box. Sometimes our clients come up and-- this one is the client meeting they had yesterday. So, we just write on them all the time to the point where we have to have special Expo eraser cleaning wipes. Everything we do here is really visual, really interactive and requires visual thinking, which is really important and not everybody can do it. So, I think that's why people call us to communicate their business needs that they have visually. So when you look around the shop, you'll be able to see all kinds of different things placed in weird places, little surprises that we put up here. We have some birds that fly through, it's subtle, but you can actually notice it. I'm excited to be in the space and watch it grow. We're starting to fill it up now, which is kind of fun because it was kind of-- I mean it's really tall and the space is really big. So everybody was dissipated for a while and now that it's filling in, it has a lot higher creative energy, which has really been nice.

Contents