Great design teams work with a full field of vision. Without places to collect notes for a product feature spec or from a weekly standup with engineering, important decision-making context might as well live on the backside of a napkin, easily lost and impossible to reference.

The real key is having a system that bakes documentation into everything you do. That prompts you to build knowledge over time so you're always getting better together.

Here, we'll walk you through building two note-taking systems tailored specifically to designers in Notion — one for meetings and one for all your documents. As we've seen across dozens of companies using this approach, they'll help your team save time, lead to more in-sync work, and result in a more thoughtfully-designed end product.

In this piece, you'll learn:

• To create databases for Meeting Notes and Docs, and to use them to unite your team
• To organize these databases with tags so you can quickly find what you need
• Best practices from the Notion design team for high-impact note-taking

Soon, you'll be able to create documentation for your design system that looks like this:

Your design team needs documentation

Design decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Your Meeting Notes and Docs systems become arenas where you'll share notes and ideas, so that information is transparent, learnings compound, and handoffs are seamless.

In Notion, your design team's Meeting Notes and Docs systems can organize:

• Notes from every meeting — standups, project syncs and breakouts for smaller groups can be tagged and organized however's best for your team.
• Project proposals — share detailed thoughts on how to build a new feature and get fast, written feedback from your team
• Memos, plans and processes — if you're updating team structure or augmenting a design process, your team knows exactly where to go to get this information. Think about how you kick off projects for example, you can make sure each one is approached thoughtfully.

How does this help your team?

• Increased transparency — even if someone wasn't in the room (or the same time zone) for a meeting, they'll feel included and get the context they need to contribute from the notes.
• More effective collaboration — understand decision rationales (either from a meeting or for a project), save time, and stay aligned because everyone has the "why" behind the "how."