RESEARCH POINT - Critiquing your work

How do you approach being self-critical? What issues does it raise? Do you have friends, family, colleagues or a group who will critique your work for you?

I find it very difficult to critique my own work as I tend to be either very critical or too lenient. It is also difficult for others to critique my work because we, as people, are conditioned to be polite and not say anything rude and to be positive etc. When critiquing my own work, I try to see myself as a person who is not the creator of the work but the person who is looking at the work from a different, objective perspective or angle.

When I have been working on a piece for a long time, I find that looking at the work the next day or on a different medium helps me take the emotion out of the work. If, for example I have been working on a project that is all computer based, I find if I print out the document, I'm able to find mistakes or change my direction, colour or the layout of my project.

When looking objectively at my work, I have found that with a few of my pieces of work I had to change the direction completely. As an example, I'm living in South Africa where the culture is very different from the UK. I'm designing projects and work that would appeal to the South African culture but if I send this to the UK, many idioms, sayings and much of the language would be completely misunderstood and wouldn't make sense to anyone who hasn't been to South Africa. At the same time I want to showcase what an amazing country South Africa is.

There are many people who will happily critique my work for me. However, the people who do critique for me are non-designers, so sometimes people critiquing will say "Yes, I love the colours in this poster", when in reality it may have far too many colours, or they will suggest things that I know won't work. It does help having people critique my work as it helps me to correct any mistakes or typos I may have made. They will tell me if something doesn't make sense to them. The critique of others helps me to gauge if they think the target audience would respond to the design.

My fears of critique are that people will hate the design and I would have to go back to re-design the project. I need to remember that critique is not always a negative and most of the time many positives come out of the critique from which I can learn much.