Design Communication

What can I help you with the most?Gut reactions are going to be informed by experience and expertise, but they aren’t going to be organized because they’re shooting out of your gut instincts. Asking this question helps me to organize my reactions into something designed to address the designer’s immediate stumbling block. Whether the feedback is so

What We Really Need Is Critical ThinkingCritical thinking is the process of taking a statement and determining if it is true or false. When we’re designing something, we’re doing so to meet or achieve some set of objectives. When looking for feedback on our designs, we should be working to understand whether we believe that what has been designed w

If something isn’t working, point it out and go into as much detail as possible as to why. Tie it to the goals we agreed to earlier in the project. Understanding your reasoning is critical to solving the problem. Being told to do something a certain way, or worse, getting a comp of it done that way only means we have to reverse-engineer the whole t

Talk about strengthsCritique isn’t just about what’s not working.We sometimes have a tendency to focus on negatives, the things that cause us problems, get in our way, and that we’d like to see changed. We often take the positive for granted. In our project meetings and design discussions it’s often no different. We spend the vast majority of time

Where are you in your process?This question reveals a designer’s intended fidelity of thinking. Everyone’s design process is different, and in many cases they vary from project to project. By understanding where a designer feels like he is in his own journey, I can tailor the language in my feedback to reflect that. Is something about to go to a cl

When you ask your designer to do something and they ask why, they’re doing their job. The ensuing conversation is invaluable in helping them solve the problem correctly. The two of you can probably come up with a better solution than either of you could have done individually.

The most crucial thing we discover is how you work as a team. We need to know how many people actively publish to or maintain the website, and how much time they commit to it. We also need to know their skill sets. Any decent design solution takes your resources into account.

So when a client says, “We want tons of big photos,” my next question is,

Imagine two chair shops across the street from each other. One shop takes the chair’s design into consideration from the start. They hire the best chair designer they can. The chair designer researches other chairs on the market to figure out where they’re lacking. They ask people what they like and dislike about their current chairs, research mate

Are those elements effective in achieving the objective?Now that we are thinking about specific objectives and the aspects of the design related to them, it’s time to ask whether we think those choices will work to achieve the objective. This is the crux of critical thinking.Why or why not?Finally, we need to think about the result that we think th