Design is about Critique

*Logo copyright of Starbucks Coffee Company. Image take from Wikipedia.

My last two blogs have dealt with the design process and how to get the process started, but what happens when you get done with that process and you have a product? In design and in art the next steps go together, critique and doing. Critique is an important way for the artist or designer to re-evaluate his/her work, and get different opinions and feedback from a teacher, professor or colleague. It is also a way to determine whether a given project was successful and what aspects make it successful. Davis A. Lauer talks about this process in his book Design Basics mentioned in a previous blog. He adds that a critique could also be self initiated, where the artist could write about their work in a journal.

Lauer lays out a model for critiquing that involves beginning with description, analysis and finally interpretation. Each aspect can give the artist/designer valuable information that they can use to either to build on their work or start another work. A lot of times in critiques you as the artist get to see your own artwork through other people’s eyes, and they notice jewels or faults in your artwork that you would have never noticed before. This type of fruitful critiquing can take you back to the process of doing.

I claimed earlier that critiquing and doing go hand in hand because many times after a critique the artist is motivated to go back to work. I know from my critiques in both painting and graphics classes that I am filled with so many different ideas that I can skip the thinking and looking step and just get to the doing step. Sometimes that doing can mean re-doing a piece or project with an understanding of what went wrong and what needs to be fixed. Artists such as Jackson Pollack used the method of self critique and would start a painting over again if after the critique they didn’t feel it served its purpose or if they “lost contact with it”. This is true even for designers who can go back into the program their working in and erase, add, subtract, multiply or even divide to rework a piece. Design is a process, so many times when you think you’re done in actuality you have just begun!