Four piles of cards, each with a different color.

Facilitator Cards

I partnered with Meg Bolger, an educator, course creator and facilitator. We iterated on the design of Facilitator Cards, a set of 56 cards designed to improve any meeting, brainstorm, or workshop.

Four piles of cards, each with a different color.

Facilitator cards is a set of 56 unique, practical, and impactful activities to jumpstart your thinking and boost your confidence in every session you lead. You can buy the cards at shop.facilitator.cards

Meeting Meg

At the time, at PopStage we were trying to improve the experience of virtual workshops, and we were looking for a design partner.

Somebody that would bring all their facilitation expertise to the table, and give us early feedback on PopStage. Somebody that could help us discover what it takes to create a rich virtual experience, mimicking the analog experience.

This is when I met Meg. Meg Bolger is a facilitation geek passionate about social justice, teaching facilitation, and creating resources for a more beautiful world.

An opportunity for improvements

While working together, I got introduced to Meg’s main project, Facilitator Cards. A deck of cards aiming to improve facilitation. A simple tool to plan, structure, and facilitate engaging meetings.

An open deck box with the old cards spilling out

Right away, I was super excited by the concept. I love cards in general. I love having something tangible in front of me that I can scramble, pile, sort, reorder very quickly. This felt like the right tool to think about meetings holistically and create rhythm.

I, of course, had a lot of feedback on the design of the cards themselves. This became for us the opportunity to work on a completely new, redesigned version of the deck.

Side by side comparison of the previous design and the new. Hopefully, the new design is much clearer and more readable.

Here are some areas where the original design could be improved:

There were also improvements Meg wanted to add for a while:

A grid of some of the glyphs (monochromatic icons) created for the project

Building a card builder

Designing 50-something cards was a daunting task. I wanted to find a way to generate the cards programmatically, both to give Meg as much control as possible over the content of the card, but also for me to iterate quickly on the design.

The new design introduced new, clearer icons, and added short labels so you don’t have to remember them. Color contrast ratio issues were fixed, typography was improved, and we found room to add extra information: a short link and a time estimate.

I devised a system where we could read every string and metadata directly from Airtable, then generate printable tests and the production files on the fly.

A web application showing the list of cards in a sidebar, and a render of 4 cards on the right

This allowed us to quickly iterate on the layout, typeface, copy, iconography, and more.

Learning from Meg

I learned a lot from Meg. I learned about facilitation of course. But facilitation is really about communication. How to deal with (or preempt) a conflict, how to answer (or not answer!) a teasing question, make a participant feel seen, and so much more.

Together, we transformed Meg’s great methodology into something truly empowering for facilitators. The process wasn’t just about redesigning cards; it was about reimagining how people interact in group settings.

4 of the new cards, each of a different focus, so each card is a different color.

Working with Laurent on the redesign of Facilitator Cards is one of the most fun and gratifying experiences I’ve had in my career.

It started off with a challenge. With Laurent saying, “I love your cards, but they could be designed better,” and me replying with, “I… don’t think so.” I was skeptical and didn’t think they needed improving.

As soon as I saw Laurent’s design it opened up a whole new set of possibilities for me and made me rethink user experience of the card entirely. It leads to not just a redesign of the card but an overhaul everything, it felt like a whole new product because the design had been so dramatically improved. Truthfully it made me want to stop selling the first generation of the cards immediately because I knew how much more user-friendly and beautiful the redesign was.

Laurent’s investigative questions helped me better understand the product that I’d already been selling for years in a new light and helped me better understand how to create something for others, not just the product that worked well for me.

In facilitation it’s the small things that often make the difference and while the information on the old cards and the new cards is very similar, the experience of using the cards isn’t. People are going to have fundamentally better experiences using Facilitator Cards because of Laurent’s design. I’m so glad that Laurent proved me wrong when I said they couldn’t be improved, and I’m so proud to share these with the world.

Meg Bolger

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