At the place where i work, we do a Design Breakfast™️ every month. Most times we talk about process instead of giving design feedback. I often find this more helpful as my colleagues are happy to give design feedback on the fly whenever I need it. Topics tend to circle around challenges we want to get past, tricky stakeholders, presentation techniques, tips on design related books to read, tips on tools to try out, and so on. Sometimes if any of us did something cool/special/new/weird they tell us about the thoughts behind what they did.

We used to do a 'Snowball' project as part of a monthly meeting which was good fun. Basically, one person starts and has to do a small piece of work that enables them to learn something new outside of their day to day work. They then present it and nominate someone else. That someone has to do the same but it must follow on from the person before them in some way. By the end you either have loosely related work where everyone has learnt something new, or you can make a decision to direct it in a more cohesive way so that you end up with an app (for example) where everyone's done a small piece of the work.

I work at one of the major banks in the Netherlands. We have around 45 active designers, excluding copywriters. As one of the lead designers, I hold weekly feedback sessions to talk about design and or proces with the designers in my 'cluster' (8 designers). We have a monthly meet-up with all designers, including copywriters to talk about vision, new stuff, anything design related or for instance legislation (PSD2, GDPR are current hot topics).

As your team grows monthly probably won't cut it anymore for design feedback, too many opinions. My advice would be, don't count on everyone gathering information for this monthly meeting. We tried trello, e-mail, slack to get subjects or topics. In the end we have 1 person making an agenda and gathering topics that might be interesting for the monthly.

Good luck

I set up something called 'Design Ingredients' at the agency I used to work at.

Starter: small introduction to something new, like 'what makes a good icon' (5-15mins) Main course: hands on, getting everyone to do something.. could be linked to the starter such as 'now, make me an icon' (20-40mins) Pudding: I would invite someone to talk about something they've found interesting over the last couple of weeks/month. (5-15mins)

Worked pretty well, we were flexible with what we spoke about and if there was a project the team would rather speak about, we applied the same structure to that :).

For feedback I introduced short design critiques here. And we have an unwritten rule that each project should at least have had one of those sessions. We limit it to 15 minutes, in which it's 5 minutes of explaining the project/design decisions. Than all questions and feedback need to be written down (to prevent group thinking), and after that we go over the points.

Sounds like a great idea. Though I'd consider doing this more frequently. Perhaps once a week. Maybe go around each person where they explain what they're working on and doing a little Q/A with each person?

I wish we had this at my company. Like a mini workshop or “designathon” so people can create something around a selected topic in groups and then present it to the others, who could clarify doubts and get inspired. Would be awesome.