One of the most valuable aspects of a classroom environment, or working as a team, is the peer review and critique process. When each designer uses their personal experience to interpret the subject they bring a potentially unique view or technique to resolve the design problem. Each designer bring solutions that the other designers may not have considered. As a team reviewing these unique solutions each designer can draw on the experience and take away a much broader perspective on design.
Once you leave academia or start freelancing you are deprived the opportunity to gain this infusion of experience from your peers. This requires a new approach to continue growing as a designer. Most times this comes in the form of reviewing similar projects, studying designs, reading reference materials, and discovering inspiration from as many sources as you can find.
One of the skills that I am looking to improve is my photography. For example; I know that I take good pictures; good composition, lighting, visual interest. But I want to take truly amazing pictures. Photographs that make people stop and stare. Because I am learning on my own, I need to discover or create ways to critique my work and gain a better understanding of the medium.
Recently I was presented with just such an opportunity when I shot my friends’ wedding, and a professional photographer, Allyson Magda, was shooting the same event. Now I had an opportunity to compare two sets of photographs of the same subject and take a critical review of each work. Allyson’s photographs look fantastic. Comparing the two sets I could start to piece together what factors were influencing the end result. We were using similar equipment (Canon DSLR), but I was clearly using different techniques and obtaining different results. Now I can review the depth of field, where she focused, whether or not she changed saturation or sharpness, exposure, etc. Combining what I can see as improvements over my results and researching how to create those differences I should be able to learn a great deal.
I think every designer can learn from this method. The key to advancing is that critical insight, really taking the time, and making opportunities to review your work and make adjustments to produce better work. In art it’s usually accomplished with critiques, in programming it’s finding better examples, in sports its learning more specific ways to train. So if an opportunity is presented to you to work with another designer, or even shadow an artist, take it your work will only benefit from being critiqued.