From a blog written by Joe Roberson for Catalyst in 2021:
Find out how to search for and use things that will help your organisation's digital work.
Design assets are…
Things made by a digital project - from research insights, to lists of user needs, to journey maps, to code used to build a solution.
Free to use
Yes, they are free to use. You do not need to ask for permission. All the work is licensed under a ‘Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License’. This is an international standard in sharing material and is used across all sectors and industries. Its terms also include attributing credit where you have reused something.
Created by 122 charities and agencies on Catalyst programmes
All assets were created between November 2020 and May 2021 by charities and agencies funded to run digital projects. They were funded by the Catalyst and National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Response fund. Making their work open for others to reuse was a condition specified by the funder.
Open working and reuse are part of a big push we have made at Catalyst to improve how charities share their work. Open working has benefits for everyone.
Types of design assets
- Playback decks - overview of the project, including different things they did, learned or made along the way
- Specific design outputs - like personas and user need statements, even some prototypes you can try or use
- Writing about their work - what they did and what they learnt, written in real time. Lots of people did this on the Catalyst Medium publication (there were 184 weeknotes published between February and May 2021)
- Programme delivery assets - created by digital agencies working with groups of charities
You can copy, reuse and remix
It’s up to you how you use the things others made. You might build on it for your own service, use it to move faster on your project, or give it to your digital partner as a starting point for discussion.
You can use all of something or just part of it.
If you publish it, please give credit to who made it.
How to find and search assets
Search this Airtable spreadsheet of all assets. [Please note: this is an historic list, and so some links may have expired; if the asset you need is unavailable, please email [email protected] and we will try and source it for you.]