This last week we began creating our second item and all the while working on critiquing our peers’ work. From a design perspective, this week brought on the new challenge of creating Letterhead for our organization and drafting a letter to be placed in the letterhead. To communicate our organization’s message on wedding design and to continue to branding image of flowers, I utilized transparency to add small accents around the border of our letterhead. More importantly, this project contained a lot more background work than drafting a business card. A business card is a small entity requiring a lot of research to make sure our company’s mission and vision are communicated subconsciously. A letterhead project requires the same amount of work to design an emotion-inducing product, but, in addition, a comparatively large amount of content must be created.
Contrasting design creation, is design critique. We had the opportunity to do our first round of peer critiques and this added a different aspect to our class environment. Rather than just attending class with other students, they quickly became an additional source of information for the class. I have had the opportunity to critique other’s work in the past; however, the anonymity of this assignment gave me additional confidence to speak how I truly felt about the design without feeling like I am offending the creator. This feeling was strange because I never wrote overly critical responses to other’s work, but the sense of namelessness gave me a sense of strength when critiquing work.
Overall, the process of critiquing work, looking for ideas and mistakes in other designers’ work gave me a new sense of focus on mine. I was able to recognize mistakes within my own work because I had a fresh perspective on others. I am excited to continue doing these kind of projects to not only provide insight to others but also make my work better.
