18F Visual Design team gives a design lab a go.
Welcome to the 18F Design Lab repo — we’re glad you’re here! The Design Lab is a virtual design center where you can get personalized help from members of the 18F visual design team. The Design Lab is intended for small tasks (<10 hours). For larger tasks or project work, you should follow 18F’s staffing and resources process. (If you’re not sure which it is, feel free to ask in #design.)
We've written up a guide to the Lab for both people submitting issues and for our editors. In the guide you can find information about the metadata in Lab issues, how to submit a good issue, and what to do if your issue isn't being worked on by a Lab editor.
If you're looking for other content guidelines, you can read the 18F Design Principles Guide.
- Create a new issue for each help request you’d like to submit. Your new issue will automatically be populated with the following template:
### Due date
When do you need this by?
### Audience
Who are you addressing?
### Project type
What kind of design are you working on?
* Website content
* Blog post
* Talking points
* One sheet
* User interface copy
* Email
* White paper
* Presentation or slide deck
* Partner agency communication
* #news post
* Other (please include a short description)
### Help type
What kind of help do you need? Choose one or a few:
* I'm not sure: I'd like to have a half-hour conversation with a Lab editor to discuss the content.
* Generative: I'd like help coming up with and fleshing out ideas for a piece of design.
* Developmental: I'd like help structuring and planning a piece of design.
* Stylistic: I'd like help shifting the look and feel of a piece I've already designed.
* Design review: I'd like someone to give a design review to my finished piece of design.
_If you request design review, but your piece isn't quite ready for it, lab editors will re-tag the issue and get in touch to discuss how best to help._
### Time estimate or length
How much time in minutes or hours do you think you’ll need? If you're not sure, just let us know roughly how long you expect the delieverable/asset/piece to be (Google something similar).
### Bill to
If this is for a billable project, please list the Tock code.
### Description and links
Summarize the design you’re working on and the goals of the design, along with any links to in-progress work, notes, or related documents/images.-
If you’ve begun a draft, please update the document settings to allow comments or edits, and include a link to your Drive document in the issue. If you don’t have a draft, mention this in your issue (and add the link once you have one!).
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Submit your issue. We'll get a notification in Slack, but if it's urgent or you have questions, pop into #design-lab and let us know.
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A member of the Design Lab team will claim your issue and contact you to get more details about the help you’re looking for and your project’s deadline.
That’s it!
Please note: Because of how Tock works, we're not able to bill in increments smaller than 30 minutes. Accordingly, we round tasks to the closest half hour (15-minute tasks are billed as 30-minute tasks, 45-minute tasks are billed as one-hour tasks, and so forth). If you have questions, please post them in #design-lab.
If you’re not comfortable with GitHub or you have other questions, reach out to our team in the #design-lab Slack channel.