Teamwork – IMG.LY Blog

From Online Oasis to Coastal Celebration: Our Retreat in Montenegro

Neslihan — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 14:27:06 GMT

As a remote software company, IMG.LY thrives in an online oasis. Remote work brought flexibility for team members individually, working when and where you work best. For the company, it brought the best people across the world. Yet, it also left us craving more: stronger connections, open communication, and a sense of belonging.

The Online Oasis: Thriving or Drying Up?

The Remote Work Reality
Our team members are distributed across the globe, connected through screens and virtual meetings. This setup has enabled us to collaborate effectively and achieve remarkable outcomes, invite the best team members around the world without uprooting them from their communities, to move them to the company home. We’ve forged strong connections online and have crafted solutions together, that we are proud of.

However, even in our thriving digital setup, we believe there’s always room for improvement. We value connection, open communication, and a sense of belonging, so we’ve embarked on a journey to enhance these aspects. Our goal is not to see remote work as a second-best solution, but to make it even better by combining the strengths of our online collaboration with real-world experiences.

An Investment in Growth
For companies, a retreat isn’t just a getaway; it’s also an investment. It’s an opportunity to recharge creative energies, develop personal and professional development, and thus increase productivity. For us, this retreat serves as the cornerstone of a year-long framework, one built around a growth mindset that will guide us to our company goals, both individually and as a team.

The Journey to a Goal

Our destination: Montenegro, a coastal calm where the Adriatic Sea meets the stunning landscapes of Herceg Novi. In Montenegro, we didn’t aim at finding faults with remote work; it was about elevating the life at IMG.LY even more.

Mapping the Objectives
As we prepared for our retreat, we recognized the importance of setting objectives. These would serve as our guiding stars. Some spots in need of rehydration were: enhancing open communication, tackle zoom fatigue and propel engagement, promote skill sharing, and lastly, improving leadership skills.

Work & Play: Is a Fixed Schedule Relaxing?

With our objectives set, we outlined a clear balanced schedule, with check-ins in the morning, and a check-out in the evening, to give feedback on how things are going, readjust and be heard. The in-between period was shaped by workshops, free time in the cities and at the beach, and exciting group activities along the coast. This schedule ensures that no one feels lost and allows for easy connection with others, time for recuperation, or focused work.

Our retreat featured over 20 workshops by team members, each designed to address specific objectives. From improving communication skills to deepening our product knowledge, these workshops provided valuable insights and hands-on learning experiences.

To sharpen the saw, nurture the soft skills: This included workshops on tackling public speaking fears, to communication techniques for better feedback loops.

To forge the future, sharpen your vision: Our team offered talks on our product vision, understanding our engine, generative AI, learning tools, and much more. Of course, we couldn’t help but organize a public viewing of the Apple Keynote event, including a self-made bingo app, where we could make our guesses on which features will make it into their new products.

Of course, we also explored the city, including a fantastic boat trip, and visit the filming sets of Game of Thrones in Dubrovnik. One of my personal highlights was particularly learning improvisation games from our teammate Thierry at the beach. The clear schedule made it much easier to connect with everyone, without feeling lost.

End of One Journey, Beginning of Another

The retreat was not about escaping the digital world but embracing it fully, understanding its strengths, and enhancing them through real-world experiences. Our digital oasis had not withered away; it flourishes into something extraordinary. We know that for companies, a retreat is an investment, and we believe it’s worth it, especially when sailing out with clear objectives.

My First Company Retreat with a Remote Software Company

Neslihan — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 16:11:00 GMT

When I joined IMG.LY in 2020, we were all working in our then-sole office in Germany. Retreats had already taken place in the past. Only three months in, we transitioned to a remote-first team. As a newcomer, I initially worried that this transition would make it harder to connect with colleagues and fully understand our vision.

My main concern was learning about our solutions and streamlining my work to make my mark. Yet we all remember that year’s headlines. I was all too aware of the unexpected obstacles that other organizations were experiencing during the pandemic. Despite this, our team’s close-knit communication and connections with one another almost felt illicitly good, even amidst the turmoil. What seemed like sheer luck to me was due to the goal-setting and planning of my team, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Going from local to a global team — what has changed? And what do retreats even do for people who are apart most of the time anyway?

There’s No Old Normal

Even when we were all working in the same office, IMG.LY remained a tech-driven company, relying on digital tools for day-to-day operations. While this may be obvious for some, I can recall our People Experience Manager cringing in disbelief during my first weeks when I presented her with meeting notes and project outlines scribbled on paper, which I promptly discarded. Ensuring that information is easily accessible to both the team and the individual is essential, after all. In response to my antiquated approach, the company swiftly upgraded my laptop to a sleek MacBook Pro, allowing me to work more effectively. Everyone used online collaboration tools, communicated through Slack, documented with Notion, and relied on cloud services when necessary, helping to streamline and simplify our work processes.

When we were co-located, we embraced flexible working hours and trusted our team members to determine their optimal work schedule. However, we know that without clear boundaries, such as companies claiming to be “families,” work-life balance can quickly erode. That’s a no-no. We prioritize maintaining a healthy balance between work and personal life, which is why we strictly adhere to a policy of not exceeding regular working hours per day. We maintain communication by overlapping a minimum of our working hours with one another and updating our online status on Slack to indicate our availability. By setting boundaries and taking control over our schedules, we strive to create an environment where team members can thrive both professionally and personally.

Looking back, we were well-equipped to work from home from the beginning. However, we recognized that this was not a temporary situation, and we didn’t believe in returning to the “old normal.” We saw this as the start of the New Work era and embraced it fully. This new way of working enabled us to remove geographic barriers, allowing us to attract top talent from all over the world. As a growing company, we no longer need to rely on physical office spaces either.

While we initially started as a local German team with a few members working together in person for several years, we have since expanded our team to over 50 individuals across more than ten countries. While there certainly have been plenty of company originals who co-worked for years, many more teammates joined who have not met in person yet.

Better, Taller, Faster, Stronger

Hiring remotely can leave a sense of wish to meet colleagues in person. In 2022, our remote-first company took a leap and organized our first retreat in Lisbon, Portugal. We were all excited to finally put 4K faces to the names we had grown so accustomed to seeing on our screens. The initial ice-breaking moments were filled with laughs as we discovered that our preconceived notions about each other’s physical appearances were often wildly off-base. “I thought you were much taller!” — or one of our petite colleagues turned out to be a friendly giant standing at an impressive 6’4”, and effortlessly handed me my heavy luggage as if it were a feather. These moments of revelation went beyond our Zoom experiences, and we knew we were in for a memorable few days. We came together for dinner and drinks by the hotel pool, bonding over refreshing drinks and shared interests.

Work Smart, Play Hard

Our schedule afforded us a great blend of getting to know one another, sharing knowledge across teams, and the solidification of our grasp of our mission and vision.

Each day at 10 a.m., we convened in our hotel’s co-working space to explore our latest ideas and conduct workshops that would help us develop a more comprehensive understanding of our solutions, improve cross-team and client connections, and get to know each other better. Although virtual communication tools have facilitated remote work, they can fall short in establishing authentic connections. Meeting my colleagues in person provided an opportunity to observe their body language and expressions, giving me a deeper insight into their personalities and work styles that I can apply to our virtual communication. We also zeroed in on our goals, recognizing that working in tandem toward a common objective is essential to seamless cooperation and to keeping our focus on our work and purpose as a company.

After our daily team gatherings, we took advantage of our free time to explore the stunning beaches and coastal towns of Portugal, immersing ourselves in the rich culture and history of the region. Despite thinking we’d found the steepest street of Lisbon a few times, we were constantly surprised by the next one. Our group came together for sunset boat tours, working on that tan, neat games of Spikeball at the beach, and discovering secret rooftop bars and cozy venues around the city. Of course, we also made sure to carve out time for personal relaxation and self-care (I am always happy to go poof and recharge social batteries).

In the Same Boat

The retreat provided us with a new understanding of our colleagues that will translate well into our digital work. Additionally, the change of scenery helped refresh our mindset, leaving us feeling reinvigorated. For many of us, it was the first time meeting face-to-face, and we enjoyed the chance to take a break from our headsets and Slack Huddles.

While many things change over time, some things remain constant. Our commitment to our core values and mission to empower developers with powerful creative SDKs are among those constants. We recognize that success depends on staying at the forefront of innovation and understanding our customers’ unique needs. At IMG.LY, we believe in listening to their feedback, and delivering tailored solutions to meet their specific requirements. As we continue to adapt to an ever-evolving digital landscape, we commit to making stunning design accessible for everyone!

We are excited to plan our next retreat for this year, and are currently in the process of voting on the location. My trusted sources are saying we are heading to Montenegro.

Thanks for reading! Say hi on Twitter, or talk opportunities at IMG.LY over a coffee.

Designing a Photo Editor

Ludwig — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 12:30:00 GMT

Part 1: Design as a team

One designer on your team, in outright conviction that the current 2677FD can not be the right choice of blue, changes the color slightly to a more saturated 2676FB, unaware he again forgot to turn off flux. The next day Lisa is infuriated. The color she loved so much now looks terrible on her display. Aziz is furious. He was working on illustrations for the product website, nitpicking the right colors based on the original blue. Oh noes, what a mess…

Heard or seen that before? Bear with me, you´re not alone: Even though we are just a small team of three designers, the journey we had redesigning our product, the PhotoEditor SDK, left us with numerous insights about design collaboration. Most of those lessons were learned the hard way and many of the following suggestions are techniques that matured over the last year. The methods discussed below can be applied to any team, be it two or fifty designers. So, whether your team also struggles with the inability of Sketch to allow for real collaboration or if you’re just curious about how we dealt with the struggle, read on my fellow designer!

Use style guides early on

Right after the first screen is considered finished, sit together as a team of designers and discuss colors (don’t let the developers get wind of it). Schedule the whole thing so you have enough time to get finished while the sun is still out. Otherwise you will look at the interface the next day and have a really hard time reading the ten percent opacity labels.

The naming of colors/styles is crucial, they help to communicate with the developers and your fellow designers (we’ll get to that) and keeping a clean state of used styles.

As you can see, naming styles with a predefined set of simple rules, facilitates finding the style you are searching for. Especially since the colors that come into question for the given element are right by your selection. The prefix indicates the type of color: s for shadow, n for neutral, p for primary …

Why start counting at 100? Sketch doesn’t order styles by their absolute value, thus 10 comes before 1. This also gives you the flexibility to define several color ranges for one color type.

If your team defines their neutral colors in a dark spectrum, bright, neutral colors can then be defined as a detached unit by starting from the next hundreds.

Use Grids

I am from a really cozy Bavarian village, miles away from any accumulation of at least 12 houses (at least it felt that way in my youth, where the fastest transport we could use was the new lawn mower from the neighbours). To visit my friends in the next village, walking across an area of meadows, cow shit and finally woodland was the fastest path to take. There was no real pathway so everyone took a slightly different route to uber between the villages, which was just fine during the summer. However, come winter, not so much.

Every year it took us a few weeks, a lot wet socks and thus angry mom’s, to settle for one path. Ultimately, one of us took the courage to create the path of truth by preparing a trail with really tiny steps. By this time the snow usually hit the 30 cm mark.

I encountered a similar situation 10 years later. I started in a team that did give zero fucks about any type of layout or grid. Basically, every member took his own route. Switching out a specific component was often accompanied by the change of multiple components on the project since the perception of equal spacing between each one wasn’t given anymore.

Nowadays, I use grids everywhere, no matter how small the project, alone or in a team — and if you don’t already, I encourage you to start now! It makes it easier to let your creation feel coherent, speeds up the design process and helps any possible future collaborator to navigate trough and comprehend your design philosophy.

**Tip**: choose an easy to reach shortcut for show grid and show rulers or make a macro to show and hide both (mine is one of the mouse buttons).

For the photo editor we chose a primary grid of 8pt and a secondary one of 4pt. All components are aligned on the primary grid and fonts on the secondary. Designing isolated components based on the grid helps to keep things evenly spaced, even if components get switched out or rearranged.

We used a lot of different icon dimensions across all platforms (iOS, Android, HTML5), to guarantee a coherent look across them. It was essential to specify a layout and predefined rules for them as well. I will discuss the creation of icons in a future post, where I will also delve into finding a style that is unique and fits your project. So stay tuned!

If you haven’t started yet, create grids from the start on in every component of the project! It will probably get your feet wet at first, but your moms will be happy, I promise.

Keep your symbols organized

Keeping all the components ordered and close to each other is, again, great for consistency. After defining a component once in the page view, you will most likely return to the symbols page for future refinements. Now you can easily compare the component to every other used across the app. It will also make you slightly more liked by developers, something you should strive for as a designer at every time (to increase the chances of your next masonry grid not to get waived off as: “to time consuming to implement in the current release — and the release after”). Framing the cooperation between the two parties as smooth as possible is paramount at all steps of the product cycle.

And also, defining grids on both, the parent artboard and the components. This way pixel imperfections and inconsistencies will be visible immediately.

Also now, all elements inside a component share similar rules about placement and margins. They are easily interchangeable and allow for fast prototyping and iteration even at the final design stage.

One of the hardest things to accomplish while working day in day out on a project like this was keeping everything neatly organized while more and more components were created and added from different parties. In the sprints before an upcoming release, we often were sloppy keeping the symbols page organized, which in turn did cost us a lot of time later on. As a solution, we created a plugin, that lints your symbols page on safe.

What’s next?

The project is far from being finished and we will most likely change things here and there, building upon the methods discussed above. We are on an exciting journey crafting, designing, redefining a creative editor that is already used by hundreds of customers with millions of users. So expect more insights and learnings from our team in future articles!

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