Working Together

We actively want to work with clients who want to get it done, do it right, and be kind to each other in the process.

We love solving problems collaboratively with the best information from inside your company and our expertise in design, web, and UX. Let’s get set up to work well together for years to come! 

A few things to keep in mind:

  • We work in weekly design sprints to get the most time for the best kinds of creative work.  
  • We are client available 10am to 4pm, MST. 
  • All interactions with your agency are billable, this includes emails, Slack messaging, and meetings. We often collapse the time when a number of billable people are in a meeting. If you ever have a question about the billable status of an interaction feel free to ask the Job Captain. 
  • If you ever want to meet with Amber, the Principal Partner, you can set up a meeting anytime with this link: https://calendly.com/anchoralpine/30-minute-chat 
  • We need data! When we do any performance-based creative or engage in strategy we must have access to data and findings to inform our work. 
  • All product, web, and UI/UX work is done in Figma so that clients, designers, and developers are working from the same source of truth. 
  • All other work is posted in InVision for client access and comment. No prototyping or flow work is done in InVision. Interactive flows will be posted via Figma to project docs.

Weekly Meetings

  • We meet weekly with all reserved hourly clients. During this meeting, we review work from the last sprint and prioritize 1-3 (and no more than 3) items to work on for the next weekly sprint. 
  • Each month we provide a report with work completed in that month (new for 2022).
  • During our weekly meetings, we’ll t-shirt size projects (a popular agile methodology) to help us all get an understanding of the amount of work to be done.
    •  XS – < 15 minutes; Quick project, just get it done.
    • S – 2–4 hours; about a half day.
    • M – 8–12 hours; about two days.
    • L – 20-40h; 1–2 weeks.
    • XL – More than 2 weeks, should be estimated or broken down into smaller tasks.

Quarterly User Audits 

Once per quarter we conduct user audits with clients to keep WordPress administration lean and secure. Additional security and maintenance happen as part of your managed hosting contract. 

Audits

Need to know where you stand and where to go from here? We offer four website audit packages:

  • Site Speed
  • User Experience
  • Security 
  • Accessibility

If you have several banner ads over the course of a month please share your ad calendar with us so we can stay up to date. Having an ad calendar also helps ensure that we deliver creative work in time for a round of revisions.

If you have creative specifications or examples of past work please provide those upfront along with ad sizes, review timelines, and deadlines. 

Our experience tells us that banner ads have minimal revisions once creative is established and can usually be reviewed and edited within a couple of days. If a big change to the established creative will take place on this round of banners (hopefully because we have some great data!) please allow for additional conceptual time. 

As with all creative and web projects, banner ads fall into our weekly sprints and need to be sized, ranked, and prioritized in our weekly calls. 

Anchor & Alpine Critique Framework

  1. Designers present work that is at least 25% complete but no more than 75%. so there is room for collaboration and critique. We adopted this from Pixar as a creative best practice.
  2. Designers get to present their work without interruption, called “full pitch style”. Participants may only ask questions if they are lost or don’t understand how something works. 
  3. Once the designer has presented:
    1. Acknowledge the work – sometimes this sounds like, “wow, this is great!” sometimes it sounds more like, “well…you did a lot of work”, and sometimes just, “thank you for sharing your work and putting time into this”. Get the ball rolling with an acknowledgment of what you’ve just seen. 
    2. Find at least three things that are good, work well, and should be kept. A critique that is too focused on what isn’t working can miss the good stuff and designers may rework things that should stay. 
    3. Find at least three things that need to change, need more information, or question why it’s like this. Please work to stay away from comments like, “I don’t like it” or “this isn’t good”. It’s often better to ask why something is done the way it is and then lead into what isn’t working for you. Always remember, we create goals-driven design and while it should be aesthetically pleasing, personal taste is not the driver of good design.

up