Making the Most of a Critique
For many freelancers, asking for a critique is easy. Getting useful information out of that critique is not nearly so easy. But critiques can be useful whether you’re looking for some outside input when you’re putting together marketing materials for yourself, getting a second opinion on a project for a client or generally just asking about your portfolio. A good critique can help you take a step back from your project and get objective feedback.
Making Use of Objectivity
When you ask for a critique, it’s crucial to seek out objectivity. Tempting as it may be to try to offer some context along with your project, the response you get back without it can be much more useful. After all, when the website or article or whatever your project happens to be goes out into the world, people who come across it will rarely have as much context as you hope or expect. If your message isn’t clear without that context, critique can be the only way to find that fact out. It’s easy to be too close to a project, especially when it comes to context.
To find someone who can be objective, it’s important to step out of the group of people who are already involved. That means that the client or anyone working for the client’s company is probably out. Ideally, you may have a friend in the target market for this particular project who you can ask. Otherwise, look for someone who just isn’t working with you on this project. Even a connection from an online forum can be a good bet.
Follow Up on Concerns
When you get a critique back, it’s easy to dismiss some sorts of suggestions. You can explain away a lot if you put your mind to it: ‘Oh, this will get fixed later,’ or ‘She didn’t know the context.’ Think about why you were given a particular piece of advice. If the issue is something like a lack of context for the reader, you may have to add that context. After all, a reader or visitor can easily wind up looking at your project with no context — especially if we’re talking about a website or marketing materials.
Furthermore, it’s important to come back to the criticism as the project moves along. Make sure you resolve any issues, even if the critique focuses more on a symptom that the particular problem. Sometimes you have to be like a doctor when you’re looking at a critique — you have to trace the issue back to it’s origin, rather than just treating the symptom.
Offer Up Some Critiques of Your Own
The more experience you have in both offering and receiving critiques, the better equipped you’ll be to make good use of those critiques you receive. That means offering up plenty of critiques of your own. As well as gaining experience, it doesn’t hurt that the folks that you help out with a critique now will be more inclined to help you out as well.
If you’re not sure how to offer your services as a critic, it’s generally worthwhile to take a look at places your fellow creative freelancers congregate. There are more than a few forums where you can’t go a day without seeing a post titled ‘Critique Please.’ While such opportunities aren’t always the easiest to be objective on — you are coming at the project from a creative mindset, rather than a reader’s mindset, after all — they do provide a way to start getting involved.
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You’ve left out one vital point in my opinion. Critics can be harsh. Sometimes very harsh. What you need to understand is that the person cares enough about whatever it is you are doing to put some of their time into reviewing your work/product. Put aside your ego and realize that criticism (feedback) is essential when it comes to raising your quality threshold. I prefer someone who slams me into the ground with proper argumentation than someone who feels sorry and decides that it is best to not possibly upset you. The following is not an exact quote, but Randy Pausch mentioned in his famous “Last Lecture” that someone from football told him once:
“As soon as people stop criticizing you, it means that they don’t care, that’s a place where you really don’t want to be.”
I completely agree with this. At first, for me it was really hard to accept criticism on my work because it was “MY” project. But now I see it as the other way around, I want someone to give their full opinion and ideas. Every project I do I submit to someone else to look at it. It’s good to submit it to different people for each project too. I like to get a new perspective from each person.
Thanks for this article, I always enjoy your posts!
This is a nice short, sweet, and to the point article. The tip about avoiding trying to give people context to view your work in is EXCELLENT. I also agree that you shouldn’t dismiss the details of the critique. If you don’t listen to the feedback, why did you ask for it in the first place?
Although I blog exclusively about design, I recently touched on this same topic. Perhaps your readers would enjoy continuing the conversation with this article:
“Design Essentials 3: Accepting Criticism”
Here’s the link->http://graphicdesignblender.com/web-graphic-design-essentials-3-accepting-criticism
Thanks for sharing!
When I was in grad school, a writing professor started the term with a little lecture about giving fellow writers critiques. “You’re not allowed to say off the bat, I didn’t like this, I didn’t get it” and leave it at that. Instead, even if we hated each other’s work, she told us to come up with very specific questions that would help us in the rewriting process and make our work even better. What happened by the end of the first year was we had developed enormous respect for one another, and some friendships have lasted since. I think we all became better writers as a result. Granted, this was a creative writing course, but the approach is one that I still use today when I’m reporting or copywriting.
Apt point, Arik’s. Any legitimate criticism (considering the source) is better than apathy.
The most immediately pressing form of a critique is a client who throws your work back at you and demands that you make it different or better.
And if you have any visibility at all, you will receive a LOT of unasked critiques. In other words, people tearing you down for sport.
But more generally, asking for a critique is a very subtle art form. I have found that the following two factors are really the most important ones in determining whether I should even pay attention to a given opinion about my work.
- Does the person giving the criticism *really* understand what they are talking about? Do they possess both the technical knowledge and the feeling for the product to give you input that is worth considering? Most laypeople do not have any idea what they should be attacking. Or, more commonly, they say everything’s OK because they don’t see themselves as qualified to comment.
- Does the person have a grudge, an attitude of rivalry, or in the other direction, some extremely pressing need to make you feel better? I have been ripped to shreds by people who are too cowardly to attempt the same things themselves in their own work or lives so they patronize everything I do as bush-league. I have also received sugar-coated crap from colleagues who really didn’t read the work and don’t care.
Either or both of these negative factors in play can make the criticism pretty much useless. Because most people’s opinions are far more about them than they are about an objective assessment.
A law of averages also can help. Several individual “spot” comments on particular aspects of a work that pop up repeatedly should be honored. If five different people have said the same thing about your work, it bears examination.
I believe that the most useful critiques, overall, come from successful senior practitioners in the same field, who fill a role as your coach and who personally want to see you succeed.
I think this is extremely credible, but only when the person you’re asking has a useful domain of knowledge involving design. It is true that getting an objective opinion on the project may shed light on areas you didn’t see before, but if the person you’re asking is an idiot as far as design and graphics go then you aren’t getting very useful advice.
Constructive critisism is an art in itself. And as writers, unless we develop this skills, we are not going to be able to improve the quality of our work.
Thanks for sharing!
Yeah, criticism can be tough to take but once you realize that it sometimes is the only way to give you a kick to get better …. then it gets easier to take it.
The main thing is to distinguish between criticism that is backed up with argumentation from one that is simply done to overreact after a bad day.