Week 4 Discussion – Critique

Learning Objectives Covered

• LO 03.03 – Self-assess campaign deliverables and provide a rationale for your design solutions

Career Relevancy

In this discussion, we will discuss the process of critique and self-assessment. This is relevant to your professional career because as a designer you must have a critical eye and be able to self-assess all work you create. Self-assessment often includes providing a reason that each element in the design is important. Everything must be based on the target audience and the strategy for all the choices made in the campaign. The more you self-assess, the more critical you become with your work and the higher quality your work becomes.

Background

Critiques are not just for school. You will be critiqued by your employer, client, and everyone that sees your work. It is part of the design process.

As Cassie McDaniel states in her article (Links to an external site.)found on A List Apart’s website (Links to an external site.)“The critique is a corrective step in the process that allows different ways of thinking to reach common ground—for example, compromising on visual vs. technological requirements. Critiquing an unfinished design mitigates the risk of completely missing a project’s ultimate goals.”

Many times, especially if you freelance, you don’t have the advantage of bouncing your ideas off of other designers before you present your work to a client for feedback. So what do you do? First off, step away from your designs for a while and then when you come back to them look at it with “fresh” eyes and reverse engineer your project. This means look at the whole then pick it apart and write down the following:

• Why you included each item in the project and why you placed it where you did.
• Scrutinize the fonts you chose, the colors, the images and list why as well.
• If you didn’t have a reason and it was based on instinct, then say that.
• Then was the instinct based on something you learned about a principle of design? Or was it something else?

This may seem very cumbersome at first but the more you force yourself to self-critique, the better a designer you will become.

References

McDaniel, C. (2011, January 11). Design Criticism and the Creative Process. Retrieved from alistapart: https://alistapart.com/article/design-criticism-cr…

Prompt

For this discussion, follow the process of self-critiquing above and embed images of your campaign projects from Weeks 1-3 that will be going into your final campaign. Please do not link the images so your classmate has to download them. List at least five of your findings from your self-critique and discuss how you plan on improving your designs.

Your fellow classmates will then also critique your project(s) and give you constructive feedback. If you agree or like something they have done, then tell them why. If you have suggestions on improving their design, be respectful. Please give everyone a chance to receive feedback. When you go in to do your replies, if you see a post that hasn’t had feedback yet, help your fellow student out by giving them feedback.

This is a perfect opportunity to not just do the bare minimum to get a grade. Help each other out. What you may learn from the collaboration will make you stronger designers. Just because you are not all experts at design yet doesn’t mean you can’t learn from each other. With the guidance of your instructors and feedback from your classmates, you should come out of this course with potentially strong portfolio pieces.

For your citation, you might use articles that show examples of constructive criticism. You can also find articles from experts that suggest ways to interpret criticism positively and learn not how to take it as a personal attack.

Your initial and reply posts should work to develop a group understanding of this topic. Challenge each other. Build on each other. Always be respectful but discuss this and figure it out together.

Reply Requirements

Per the Due Dates and Participation Requirements for this course, you must submit 1 main post of 150+ words, 1 citation, and reference, as well as 2 follow-up posts of 50+ words. Responses can be addressed to both your initial thread and other threads but must be your own words (no copy and paste), each reply unique (no repeating something you already said), and substantial in nature. Remember that part of the discussion grade is submitting on time (20%) and using proper grammar, spelling, etc. (20% per post).

Remember that part of the discussion grade is submitting on time and using proper grammar, spelling, etc. You’re training to be a professional—write like it.

Click here for info on the Institution Writing Guidelines (IWG) if you have questions.

 

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