Critique
On elevating craft through critical thinking.
Photo by Seiji Seiji
“The trouble with most of us is that we'd rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”
➪ Norman Vincent Peale
A tool to improve design effectiveness
A design critique is a structured, collaborative session where designers, peers, and stakeholders evaluate a design artifact to provide constructive feedback and improve the design's effectiveness, quality, and alignment with user needs and business objectives. A good design critique is never about personal taste and should always strive to be as objective as possible.
Critiques as necessary collisions
A critique is not a governance mechanism, nor is it a group brainstorming session. It's a necessary collision. It’s the intentional application of adversarial thought to something that isn't finished yet. Its sole purpose is to pressure-test the underlying assumptions. Ultimately, critiques are about injecting constructive doubt into a designer's premature certainty before they build too much or go too far.
Necessarily friction, necessarily collisions (Photo source)
Not a review, not a jam
Unlike a Design Review (checkpoint focused on business alignment and binary pass/fail standards), critiques seek friction to elevate the craft and integrity of the solution itself. A critique is not a Design Jam either, which is a co-creation activity focused on shared ownership. This might all sound like semantics, but it's not. It's crucial to get everyone on the same page about what kind of meeting this is before they even walk in. Start with the meeting invite.
Crits are a powerful training ground
Aside from leaving the room full of ideas on how to improve the designs, the benefits of critiques extend far beyond the work itself. A good critique helps designers build organizational capital and executive presence. Think of it as the cheapest, safest stage for a high-stakes failure. It forces the designer to instantly look past the thing they made and focus on the collective goal we're all trying to hit. It's a recurring workout: articulating business value and defending assumptions under friendly fire. That exercise strengthens a designer's ability to communicate conviction and absorb feedback without crumbling. Designers who do this often are the ones who get to drive high-level decisions later on.
Crits help designers decouple from artifacts
The palpable terror felt by junior designers during critique is a direct result of an identity crisis: they are yet to fully decouple the design artifact from the self. To them, the design is a proxy for their professional legitimacy, and feedback is not data but a judgment of their worth. Maturity hits the moment a designer realizes that the critique isn't an exam they have to pass, or a place to get pats on the back. Mature designers look forward to the "hard edges" of feedback because they understand that a critique session is like a controlled burn: it preemptively eliminates costly, hidden flaws in private, allowing them to harden the solution and move toward production with stronger confidence.
A well-facilitated crit is essential to extract value
The critique’s success is measured by the specificity of the resulting feedback, which all rides on the facilitator's ability to control the cognitive load of the room, facilitate the discussion, and follow up. This demands some rigor: setting expectations and the right context, defining the scope, and specifying the type of feedback that would be the most helpful at this stage in the design lifecycle. Whether this is done by the presenter or a third person, a well-facilitated crit is essential to extract value of that time.
Tireless iteration is a feature, not a bug (Photo source)
A critique is a space for questions, not decisions
The greatest threat to a good critique is the designer's impulse to start premature solutioning—or, even worse, defending their personal investment in the thing they made. The session shouldn’t be a place for anyone to prove they are "right." Your job is to absorb the feedback, seek deeper understanding, document the conflict, and display intellectual detachment from the artifact. If you jump into immediate solutioning, you'll starve the room of future input.
“Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.”
➪ Freeman Thomas
Highlighting what works is as important as calling out what doesn’t
Effective feedback must begin by anchoring success and highlighting what works in the work being presented, as it validates the team's shared definition of “good” and dictates which design patterns should be scaled versus those that shouldn’t. Without that initial anchoring, the critique devolves into a reactive, negative-only exercise. You end up wasting resources fixing only what's broken, without the strategic recognition needed to replicate and leverage what's already proven
Bring the good and the bad
Don't overcurate the work. Resist the temptation to only bring the ideas that are already destined for success—the ones that make you look good in front of the team. A critique is not a place for a victory lap. It's a low-cost lab for trying new things. Make sure to show the artifacts you are most stuck on or afraid of. This act of deliberate vulnerability is strategic candor: it de-risks the organization by pushing ambiguity into the light when the cost of change is still quite low.
“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
➪ Neil Gaiman
Know when to move on
Failure is not the rejection of an idea, but stubborn insistence on the wrong ones. The better response to a failed idea is to archive the learnings collectively (documenting why it failed now) and move on. Accepting that a design is not solving the problem is, paradoxically, the fastest route to future growth.
Avoid participation theater
Few things kill a critique faster than the inevitable intrusion of low-leverage tactical feedback. "But is the color contrast AA accessible?" is rarely genuine curiosity. This form of what-aboutism is often a form of participation theater, a reflexive urge to demonstrate basic competency when the true strategic friction is too uncomfortable to touch or hard to articulate. This type of intellectual vanity ends up wasting the most expensive hour of cross-functional time on issues that can and should be automated, delegated to async review, or resolved through other mechanisms. Get the easy stuff out of the way and focus on the hard questions to be solved.
Discomfort is a good thing
If you enter a critique feeling entirely comfortable, it means one of two things: the work is not bold enough, or the artifact is being presented so late in the cycle that any major course correction is now painful. Feeling slightly exposed means you are operating at the edge of the team’s risk tolerance. If you are comfortable, you are not trying hard enough.
Bold enough (National Congress of Brazil by Oscar Niemeyer, photo by Gonzalo Viramonte)
Crits are like human firewalls
In the age of AI, the human critique session becomes even more important. LLMs can generate ideas in 5 seconds, but stress-testing them with contextual knowledge, taste, and vision, is something that you should be better at. As AI accelerates the production of “technically correct” and “aesthetically optimized” work, relying on just AI creates the risks of mediocrity. AI is trained to be predictable; crits are all about friction: political, organizational, or strategic.
Crits are how we get better
Critiques develop critical thinking, not just improve designs. Each session should build on previous ones; it’s an opportunity to assess everyone’s skillsets and broaden our understanding of design. If people are attending a critique just to share their thoughts, they are not improving their way of thinking. You should only join a crit if you’re open to the new—ideas from others, ways of framing the problem, and paths to personal growth. A crit is a space to reflect on the design, but also reflect on how we think about design.