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Posted 14 Jun 2009 - 2 Gratefully received comments

A big part of design and any creative job is the generation of ideas and then developing them through showing others for their thoughts and criticism.
In the past I have fallen in the trap of seclusion. I’ve mostly worked in small companies where I have been the only “creative,” so the back and forth of a design crit can become stilted and difficult, especially if you are showing concepts to the same people day in day out.
In this situation, I realised I might fall into the trap of thinking my initial ideas might not have to be pushed further, or I ‘d pushed them as far as I could. However, I saw the danger in this and decided I needed to find other people that might be in a similar situation to me, or at least be open to discuss their own work. I believed without this kind of interaction I would begin to find the whole design process more of a struggle than it needed to be.
This was all particularly pertinent as I was developing my new identity and website concepts at the time. Like many other designers I’ve always found doing self-promotional work to be very difficult, so some outside input would be critical if I was to produce a solution that I could be proud of.

With these thoughts flickering in my mind I stumbled across Design Forums. After a little bit of lurking trying to figure out if his was the place I was looking for, I decided to register and get stuck in. After a while I discovered that it was exactly what I needed.

The site was created by Greg Findley, who also moderates it and keeps things running very smoothly. Of course Greg can be lauded as it’s creator but the thing that really makes it work is the community that has formed around it. In fact DF has just recently attracted it’s 1000th member!
The members come from many different creative industries, so there is a wealth of collective knowledge there waiting to be tapped (including my own meagre contributions!). The atmosphere is very professional when it needs to be, but there is plenty of fun to be had in other parts of the forum too.

I’ll take this opportunity to thank everyone over at DF for their input while I was developing my portfolio and website. In fact it’s thanks to DF that I found Andy, who coded this website for me, too.
I’m very pleased that I have a place I can go when I feel uninspired about a brief, or feel the need to get a bit of a kicking when I know what I’ve done just isn’t good enough yet.

So if you find yourself feeling alone in your creative thinking, or you’re stuck with some technical problem that seems insurmountable, or you just need a good piece of criticism to push your project to it’s full potential, go and have a look. Hopefully we can help.

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