We built this at a time when we were scaling our design team. We had all these great designers, we had a mission, we had values and goals, but we were all working independently and didn’t have a dependable ritual for giving and receiving team feedback on the more generative moments in our design process. We had a regular biweekly team meeting, but as we grew, it started to become less effective. The purpose was kind of nebulous, and it started to burn out. I thought if we could bring a clear purpose to this meeting up front, it would bring us together as a team, drive our work forward, and feed our need for feedback.

We believe that as designers a necessary skill is being able to talk through your process, how you are arriving at solutions, and clearly explaining why this matters. This meeting served as a stage for us to practice this skill together.

In a fully remote team setting, this critique meeting also served as a way for us to come together and use our brains as a team.

Our critique meetings were never mandatory. This made engagement our primary way of measuring the success of the format and how we evaluated whether changes were needed overtime. Our operating philosophy was that if the team was bought into this meeting’s format and it was serving us, participation would follow.

This was great when our team expanded and there were a lot of eyes in this room. Here we could ask, What are some really easy, quick wins that I can do to just elevate this work? What's the little elements of polish that I'm missing because I've been looking at this for so long, or I've been so involved in it? It’s a great way to put a bow on your work before you ship it.

These modes of critique weren’t in the original document. We got a new Design Manager, Tiffany Chen, who came from IDEO and brought this framework with her. Once we had this language, it opened up more possibilities for how we could approach our work in more innovative ways. Using the “Inspire mode” we stepped outside of our own work and shared how other companies and people were creating dynamic content. Someone even presented on Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show to ask, what made this performance engaging? What about it can be applied to our content? What are the overlaps? It was really incredible to see our possibilities open up when we looked far & wide.

Having a shared feedback language to align around enabled a culture of targeted feedback and coaching our team on what actionable feedback looks like.

As our meeting expanded to include non-designers, we found these frameworks helpful in organizing how team members thought of this meeting fitting into their creative process. We found it to be true that any kind of work can benefit from targeted feedback in an organized setting.

Justin Thrift

I developed this ritual to bring together my growing design team, drive their work forward, and feed their need for feedback.

 of a Design Critique is to unblock and ideate, 

 on the spot – that will fall on the individual to figure out post-meeting.

By presenting our work, we are challenged to think through how we arrived at solutions and learn how others approach the same problem from an alternative perspective. Design Critiques help us hone our presentation skills as designers, and challenge us to articulate the problem and our current solution. 

 is a skill that will continue to be critical in our careers.

To keep up on what the rest of the team is working on. Team Critiques force us to take a brief pause, and focus for a short while on a new subject. This can energize and inspire us while informing us on what our teammates are working on.

Seeing others explain their work (and use Figma) helps us all learn new ways of working. Team Critiques help us tighten the processes we all use and infuse new ideas into how we work individually.

Collaboration is not only beneficial for level-ing up our design skills but also for bringing us 

. We become stronger and more empathetic as a unit when we have these experiences as a group.

: Critiques for up to 3 people per meeting

: Pre-scheduled agendas where we take turns asking for feedback on specific pieces of work we want to discuss. Work can either be submitted in advance of meetings for the team to think through (example, Loom), or presented live to the group and then discussed. Each person will have 15 minutes for the team to focus on their work.

Running a Visual Design Critique at Reforge

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