Welcome Josh
**“**Hey everybody! This is CDPS’ freshly unboxed visual designer, rounding out my first week with the weeknotes… which is also my first foray into working in the open.
I’ve been getting to grips with the processes at CDPS. While it’s still early days, the onboarding process has been really smooth – huge thanks to Edwina and the comms team, as well as Jon and Sarah for that. The culture seems profoundly welcoming, too.
Now that my kit and software are all set up the way I like them, you’ll start to see some changes in the visuals across all of our communications platforms. There’s a design backlog I’ll be working through which affects both internal and external comms. Super excited to get started!
Additionally, I’ve been learning about our ways of working. Weeknotes only form a small part of it. There are also show and tells across the organisation, team retrospectives, and plenty of others. It’s a lot to take in, but it’s all making sense so far.
I can’t wait to get stuck in to the bigger projects and work with the various teams across CDPS!”
Edwina and Josh in Pontypridd, enjoying an onboarding meeting in the sun.
Goodbye Simon
This is also Simon’s last week with us, as our permanent team takes shape.
As an experienced head of content and former Guardian journalist, Simon has helped set the team up for success and leaves a number of legacies:
Content production process: a visible Trello board, so we can see where any piece of content is at any given time. It includes stages such as content being written, ready to edit, sent off for comment or signoff, final edit, 2i, social media being written (including images and alt text), translation, uploaded and published.
Content design community of practice: This is now up and running, and they had their first proper meeting last week (see last week’s weeknotes for the write up). Simon has worked with the group on terms of reference, and the community will be using Trello to capture notes, post useful links and collectively work on a plain Welsh style guide.
They will also use Trello as a repository for examples of good content, to help others make the case for user centred content creation.
If you are a content designer and would like to join the community - email [email protected]
Why are communities needed? Last week, we published a blog post from delivery community lead, Darren McCormac about the importance of workplace communities and the communities of practice we’ve set up here at CDPS.
User centred content design - annual review 2021-22: If you’re a regular reader of our weeknotes, you’ll know that our annual review has gained lots of positive feedback. We wanted to do something innovative with the format, structure it like a microsite and use lots of multimedia content that could be reused. Simon led the project and ensured it was as accessible as possible by following the WCAG guidance for web content. He ensured we used plain English, that there was no jargon and all abbreviations were fully explained. It was published in HTML, so we could build everything on the website from the start. These are principles we’ll continue to use.
https://twitter.com/accessibleweb/status/1562368815132020736