Never criticize work of other designers in front of clients

What goes around, comes back around. If you go around criticizing the work of others, others will go around and criticize your work. And as we all make mistakes from time to time, there is always something that can be criticized about us.

Analyse other’s work to learn

If you analyse other people’s work, you can learn a lot from it. And you don’t only should analyse work that’s good, you should also analyse designs that are objectively bad. Analyses is important to understand why designs work and why they fail.

If I write about design and show you design examples that work (and don’t work) it is done for educational purposes. This is the only reason to voice public critique on designs.

Besides education, you should always be silent about other people’s work, especially in front of your clients.

Why you should be silent about other’s work

The simple reason is: You can’t win, you can only lose with criticizing other’s work.

Your clients aren’t interested in why their previous logos don’t work; they're interested in which designs would work. Your clients aren’t interested in how bad their last designers were; they’re only interested in how good you are.

Putting other designers down won’t lift you up. Become better and convince clients about how good you are by objectively being good, instead of just being better than another designer you put down.

Additionally, the design (and business) community is very small. If you go around bashing people, they will know it at some point – and they won’t forget. Next time you’re making a mistake, the community will not be very forgiving to you.

Who created and approved the work last time?

Let’s say you’ve got a client that is showing you the logo he has used for the last five years ... and it is awful. Criticizing the design is not only bashing the designer, but also the one who approved the design – which is very likely the client you want to work with.

If you insult the logo, you not only insult the designer and the design profession, but also the client who chose the designer and approved his work. How likely is it that such a client will want to work with you now?

Criticizing other designs is a good educational practice but doing it for any other reason is only creating negative effects. Don’t do it!