Why our design team is bringing back Friday cool-downs, how this week’s calacas and costumes session worked, and what to borrow if you want to run one with your own team.
Cool-down Fridays are back on our design team’s calendar. We used to hold one every Friday outside of summer, when most of us have Fridays off, and the idea has always been simple: a space where we stop thinking about work and do something fun together instead. Some weeks that’s getting to know each other in breakout rooms, and some weeks it’s a demo of something fun someone has been tinkering with on the side. It’s a place for us in design to hang out and do something a little different.
This week’s session was one I called calacas and costumes. A calaca is a lively, personified skeleton you see around Día de los Muertos, dressed up as anything from an animal to a clown, and the point of one is to celebrate a person’s legacy or the impact they’ve had. So instead of designing for a clinician, everyone on the team designed a calaca for a colleague.
A calaca celebrates a person’s legacy or the impact they’ve had, so this week everyone on the team designed one for a colleague.
Here’s how it ran, in case you want to borrow it.
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The pairings weren’t random. I picked who would design whom ahead of time, and each person’s slide carried a brief to read carefully before starting. My example brief asked someone to dress me as a Catrín, someone very fancy in their full Sunday best, and I already know my own quick version of it needed a bigger hat.
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The closet came stocked. The last slides of the deck held costume pieces to raid, and anything else was fair game: the internet, Figma, an AI tool, your own drawings, or a different photo of your person if you had a better one.
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The clock stayed short. We kept the work block to 30 minutes, cameras off and music playing, and I posted the deck in our design channel so anyone who missed the call could still take part over the day.
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The judges sit outside the team. There are 6 categories with a small gift card for each, and the votes will come from my daughter and her 8 preteen friends, who are going trick-or-treating together this weekend. Aiming your calaca at one category on purpose is a perfectly good strategy.
It’s a small thing, and it’s the kind of thing I want to keep on the calendar: the same team that spends the week designing for clinicians spending half an hour designing for each other, with a brief, a deadline and a crowd of preteen critics waiting at the end.
Happy Halloween and happy Día de los Muertos to everyone who celebrates. I’ll share the winners once the judges have spoken, including whichever entry they decide is the most cursed.