Last night, I finished Mike Monteiro’s book, Design Is A Job. The book ends with a tough discussion about working with others. As I read, I realized I can be difficult to work with(Not all the time but sometimes). Being a designer is about wrestling with material and wrestling with your character. How I work with people is part of perfecting my craft. It’s part of making great products.

Designers are similar to lawyers. We string together pieces of a story, with enough believability, rationale, and charisma, to convince people we are right. If we practice well, our language is accepted. Just as young lawyers struggle to make an impression on their bosses, designers work to be known as an indispensable assets of the studio. For keen juniors, the smaller the company, the greater the pressure to become indispensable. This drive for perfection is a road of pain because faults lead to insecurities, which encourage a defensive attitude about work. If all work is a measurement of someone’s value to the team, the impulse when making is to hide until something has been created to ‘wow’ the director. By this point, the designer may have painted him/herself into a corner with technical assumptions. There are a lot of beautiful paintings in the Musée du Louvre but none of them were created in a collaborative process like building software, websites, or complicated printed materials.

Great design is not made by one person. It is a collaborative effort and the people involved need to be confident enough in their abilities to know the vision for a project and how each member of the team will work to accomplish the goal of making great design. Monteiro writes:

Working with designers that disagree with you is better than those who agree. They will make you fight over every decision you make! Which means you’ll learn to come up with some really tight rationales and really good work. If you can’t get your work past another designer sitting right next to you … you’re not going to get it past a demanding client. — Mike Monteiro, Design Is A Job

Over time, we become less willing to take critique. When in an academic environment, with a hunger to learn, there is less pressure to ‘make’ things work. What do I loose if I don’t finish my homework? If I don’t do my job, I will loose my job, and possibly my career(Depending on how far the word travels about my shitty performance). Monteiro reminds us that if we remain in a critical environment, our critical thinking skills will become sharp like knifes. If we shut down the collective thought process, our skills will slide. How do we keep our minds open and the studio in a healthy state of dialogue? Mike compiled a few lists for us to keep in mind.

Mike’s Ground Rules For Critique

1. Everyone must have the best interests of the project and the designer in mind.
2. Clearly define goals. The goal is to get it right.
3. The designer needs to realize the feedback is not personal, it’s about the work.

Mike’s Rules For Working With Other Designers

1. Getting good at doing what you love means having the confidence to recognize what you know, the humility to recognize what you don’t, and the courage to extend our respect to those who make our faults more visible.
2. Establish clear roles and decide who owns what. Help each other get the work done.
3. “Who’s idea was it? Who cares, if it’s a good idea.
4. Never step on another designer’s work. Anything you say about that firm’s work will be used against them.

One of the sharpest truths in Design Is A Job is:

A young designer who believes they’re better than they actually are won’t be as open to your direction. They’ll fight you and get defensive. Rather than being open-minded about the problem you’re currently pointing out, they’ll be wondering why you see a problem at all.

When we screw up and don’t manage critique gracefully, it’s best to put our pride aside and admit we don’t know it all. Who wants to work with a ‘know it all’? The work isn’t being made in a vacuum. We need the help of our colleagues to make things great. When you step on someone’s toes, say you’re sorry. At that point, this is the only remedy to make the situation better. Good communication needs to go both ways. Art directors need to know how to approach their designers so things don’t come out of left field and someone feels taken for-granted.