Design Best Practices Series

Steampunk's design practice spans UX/UI, service design, change management, and instructional design. Each discipline brings its own methods, vocabulary, and habits, and designers often join federal projects with different ideas of how design should show up on a delivery team. The practice had agreed on a set of design and strategy best practices, but they lived in documents, not in how people actually worked. New and experienced designers alike needed a quick, practical way to learn them and put them to use.

I led the first series in PunkU's Design & Strategy school: ten short videos, one per best practice, built for every designer in the practice regardless of discipline. I turned the approved guidance into conversational two-person scripts with suggested graphics. Each episode opens the same way, framing the practice around delivering quality at speed, then walks through what the practice is, why it's valuable, how to put it into action, and the pitfalls to avoid. Episodes run about four and a half minutes, with a calm, conversational tone, minimal animation, and a single-shot format that mirrors the Design Intelligence Essentials videos. I co-hosted each episode with a different practitioner, so the practices come from people doing the work, not a single voice.

The series starts where projects do. Episode 1, "Start Smart by Baselining Before You Begin," covers the context to understand before designing. Episode 2, "Treat Discovery as an Ongoing Process and a Team Sport," covers why discovery doesn't stop after kickoff. Episode 3, "Co-Define Success and Work Cross-Functionally to Achieve It," covers making sure design helps define success alongside technical partners. Each release was paired with a short internal post to drive viewing and conversation.

• A shared language across disciplines. UX, service design, change management, and instructional design practitioners now learn the same practices, framed around the same outcome of quality at speed.
• Best practices people can actually absorb. Short, focused episodes turned a static list into something designers can watch between meetings and apply the same week.
• A repeatable production model. The standard intro, script structure, and two-speaker format made each episode faster to produce and gave the series a consistent feel.
• Practitioner voices, not just leadership. Rotating co-hosts put practice members in front of the camera and built ownership of the practices across the team.
• A foundation for the school. As the first of four planned series in the Design & Strategy school, it set the format and standards for the series that follow.

• Episode Scripts (10)
• Series Intro & Episode Structure
• Production Guidelines
• Promotional Posts
• Published Episodes on PunkU

• Content Strategy
• Instructional Design
• Scriptwriting
• Internal Communications