Discussing Design

Foreword

Critique requires an investment.

This investment certainly comes from the person who provides the critique; he has an obligation upon accepting the request to provide you with an ability to act and/or react to his input. (There is a bit of beauty here in that you get to decide how to act and/or react to his input, and that can be to do nothing with it. You should, of course, be prepared to explain why you did nothing with it.)

Your investment (and your responsibility), however, is much, much greater. It is you who are obligated to set up your audience to provide you the critique that you want and need through a structured request. It is you who needs to provide people a proper context—the scope and goals for the critique—to set the proper expectations and to frame the critique that allow you to explore possible improvements.

This might sound simple enough; however, the reality is that most people don’t operate under any formal rules of critique. Instead, a lot of times designs are shared over email, through project management software or other design-sharing services, in chat, or through other rather narrow communication channels. Reactions and responses turn up in Reply All bullet points, fragments of disjointed and combined discussion threads, and even worse, piecemeal over a period of time.

Indeed, hell can be other people.

In many cases, we’re to blame.

Designers have to not only respond and react, they also have to try to organize and coordinate discussions, thoughts, and debates and then try to iterate. And then, the process is repeated again (and sometimes again, and again) as a new draft is sent around again, bereft of context or explanation of what’s been updated.

This is time consuming and fraught with potential mistakes and out-of-scope requests. And, for the love of all things holy, think of the timelines and budgets!

Unfortunately, this really isn’t uncommon. It’s possible that you were just nodding your head in agreement while you were reading that, thinking of that one project that was such a tremendous pain at that one employer where the client, the boss, and everyone else were so impossible to work with. I get it. I’ve been there in the thick of that trap, and I’ve perpetuated it, too.

It doesn’t have to be any of these ways, and picking up this book is your first step toward ensuring that those vicious cycles stop happening around—or worse, because of—you. The most successful designers know that good, structured critique guides them through the design process and helps them to produce their best work. They know that they bear the burden of ensuring they get what they need from others involved in the project in order to make a design work, and they know that this helps make it a lot easier to sell their work to their clients.

Read this book. Read every last page of its critique-detailing goodness. And then apply it to your design practice. You’ll make some mistakes along the way; however, you’ll also find yourself improving at critique from your very first attempt. Before you know it, you won’t consider any other way to create your best work.

Adam and Aaron are two of the best designers I know, and this is largely due to their focus on unlocking the vault that holds all the secrets to good, structured critique. They’re not only great designers, they’re also kind and generous souls who are sharing all that they’ve learned with us so that we, too, can be better designers and serve our clients and our purpose as best as we can.

I’ve been lucky—I’ve been able to witness Aaron and Adam as they’ve gone through the exploration of critique. What started as a joint presentation turned into a website. That then turned into workshops at some of the best-known conferences around the globe, which then turned into a detailed book proposal, which finally turned into the book you’re holding in your hands. I’ve learned so much along the way, and I’ve improved my own practices and approach to design critique along the way. I’ve been able to work with teams where we invested a very small percentage of our time in critique and in turn felt that the investment was returned incrementally. I’ve put their practices into use in the practice of design and also in content creation, presentations, teaching, and more.

This critique stuff works.

This book is a lot like reliving Adam and Aaron’s journey for me, and it’s a reminder of all the things that I can still do better through the practice of proper critique. I look forward to hearing your stories about how critique has helped change and improve all that you do, too.

—RUSS UNGER

JANUARY 2015