Join an Open Design Critique with Facebook
One of the most reliable ways to strengthen our work as designers is by sharing it with others.
Extra eyes help us agree on the problems we’re solving, ensure our proposed solutions are understood and challenge our hypotheses. Showing work early and often empowers us to resolve potential complications before they become unwieldy problems.
Yet, despite the benefits, many designers struggle to share their work. We hide designs out of fear they’ll be unfairly evaluated or that we’ll receive unhelpful and subjective feedback. Or worry about being told we’re on the wrong path entirely and have to reorient ourselves.
While the fears around sharing work are reasonable, the vulnerability we experience as a result of sharing also presents us with a unique opportunity to dramatically improve—not only to improve the work itself, but how we work as well. This is particularly true when critique is done well.
Not only does the work improve when we share it with our peers, our processes can also benefit.
Sharing the ways we work points a spotlight onto everything that’s effective in our processes. It also brings to light any pitfalls we otherwise may not be able to see, which is why we at Facebook Design want to try something with your help.
You’re Invited
At Facebook, our mission is to make the world more open and connected. So we want to share our design critique process with you in an open and transparent way.
Consider this an invitation to share some of your latest design work with us in the form of a Medium post. Specifically, we’re asking you to share any visual components of a recent project you worked on, along with:
- Information around what problem you’re solving
- Who the design is for
- Known constraints
- The specific area you’d like feedback on
A good format to intro your work is: “I am showing [early/mid/late] work around [the problem], because [why it’s a problem]. And am looking for feedback around [specific focus for feedback].”
When publishing your post tag it with: #FacebookDesignCrit.
Once a few posts are up, we’ll look through submitted work and conduct an in-house critique, sharing our critique process and feedback in a follow-up Medium post. In our post, we’ll show your work (and link to your original post) while also outlining comments and feedback from our critique. We’re also inviting anyone to share feedback with us regarding our critique along the way.
We’re certainly not the authority when it comes to critique, and we understand the limitations of this approach, but this exercise will allow designers like you to better understand how we work at Facebook. We want to share our strategies and tactics when it comes to help spotlight what works and what doesn’t. You get behind-the-scenes look at our processes and a bit of exposure for your work, while we get a chance to improve our own methods.
Looking forward to seeing what you have to share!
