Don’t freeze Up — How to deal with your inner self critique.
Most of the best designers I know tend to hate what they do. Believing you are not producing your best work is a common sentiment across creative folks. Each person deals with it in a different way and eventually that is what pushes every one of us to create better work.
Having gone through this experience many times as a designer I have developed my own strategy to overcome it and move on.
I have come to accept that first iterations are rough, normally not good and sometimes they flat out suck. Being critical with your own work is what will make you improve it so moving on quickly from that first sucky phase will always take you forward.
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With that said I don’t ditch that work right away. I like to keep it around and often times I found the core creative concept was already in the initial sketches besides the overall design being off. Sometimes your most naive and blue sky approach to a problem has elements that can be useful later on.
Feeling that your work is not as good as it should be is a positive thing, it requires strong criteria and the ability to distance yourself from your own craft. Being able to critic your own work is one of my favorites qualities in designers and I believe is an essential part of all good creatives from design interns to Executive Creative Directors. You never stop learning so acknowledging that is a good starting point. Knowing where your work stands and evaluating the quality of your outcomes will keep your feet on the ground.
However, realizing that your work sucks is not enough, is it? Now that I know that, what‘s next? I recommend you read:
Thanks for reading,
Claudio
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Twitter. Claudio Guglieri
Website. Guglieri.com
