The Importance of Design Critique

Growing through critique

When I was starting out as a designer, the toughest part of the job wasn’t the deadlines or the tools, it was the critique.

I remember how personal it felt. Someone would challenge a choice I made, and I’d rush to defend it with vague explanations like “It just feels right” or “I prefer this color.” I was emotionally tied to the work and hadn’t yet learned how to separate my preferences from the purpose of the design.

Over time, and with the help of great mentors, I learned that design critique wasn’t a personal attack. It was an opportunity to articulate my thought process, not my feelings. The more I leaned into this, the better my work became. Explaining the why behind my choices not only made me a stronger designer, it also gave my team a chance to understand the decisions being made. They felt included. They contributed. And with that, I started to earn something more valuable than approval: buy-in.

Eventually, I realized that even well-reasoned design arguments weren’t always enough. Some conversations needed more than logic or intuition. They needed data. Research became my ally. Interviews, usability tests, usage analytics, all of it helped strengthen my designs and address concerns before they even came up. With research in hand, I could show (not just tell) why a design worked.

Now we’re in a new era.

AI tools have lowered the barrier to creating a design. People with no formal training can spin up entire design systems in minutes. But what’s striking is how familiar their growing pains feel. Many of them are going through critique for the first time, and it stings. That same wave of self-doubt I remember so clearly as a junior designer is now washing over people stepping into the process with AI-generated ideas.

And instead of embracing critique as part of growth, some are trying to bypass it. I’ve heard stories of design reviews being replaced with more “conversational” feedback sessions, meant to ease discomfort. But skipping critique doesn’t improve a product. It just delays the hard conversations until after something has shipped, when it’s far more difficult to fix.

What’s getting lost in this rush is the iterative soul of good design. Real design isn’t about finding the first decent answer and shipping it. It’s about exploring the space, understanding the problem, testing ideas, and refining them until they’re right. AI can help generate ideas, but without critique, without research, without conversation, we risk launching work that hasn’t truly been designed. It’s just been drafted.

We don’t need to avoid critique, we need to protect it! That’s how we elevate ideas, build alignment, and ultimately ship better products.