I think part of being a good designer is to constantly look back and analyze your habits: where or from whom they came from. Think back to the art director who taught me to do one more iteration. Or when I learned to create one more design that makes you uncomfortable. Most often I trace many things I do well back to my first year of architecture studio and the design habits that I carried forward from there.
Always be ready to present.
One of the habit instilled early on was to always be ready to present. period. A teacher will walk by your desk after you’ve been up all night, and in a casual manner, ask you what you’re working on. easy right? Not always. Sometimes it hardest to explain what’s seems to work in your head, much less have the “work” in a state where you can show it to others. There is always a very messy series of iterations before the final design starts to emerge. Failures are great to learn from, even if you suddenly need to present your failures to others.
These days, our design team works in an Agile software development environment. It’s loud and chaotic. And priorities shift daily, sometimes hourly. Staying focused is hard. Being able to switch gears and talk about a design to co-workers or a client is essential. Sometimes it’s a keynote presentation, or PDF post to basecamp. More often then not it’s walking a client or developers through a raw illustrator artboard. The process & the failures & where the final work is starting to emerge. I’ve been able to observe in our junior designers: it’s these agile, micro presentations that get you comfortable talking about your ideas in any audience.
Encourage feedback through presenting.
Showing your work should always have a goal – some question you’re looking to have answered a little more complex than “do you like it”. A goal to present “something” by close of business with the client/team helps keep you accountable. We use basecamp a lot for this. It keeps the process of presenting work informal & conversational. It also gets the designer out of their heads-down mode and forces communication. Most often designers would be happier without feedback. The simple act of posting a design is huge for both parties: For the client, it adds transparency and let’s them participate in the design process. For the designer, if gives them pause to collect their thoughts; A chance to articulate thoughts & “finish” something, if only for the day.
In the end, it doesn’t matter the state of the project, the size of the audience or how you deliver your thoughts. As you design, you should always be ready to present.
