Build Design Systems With Penpot Components
Penpot's new component system for building scalable design systems, emphasizing designer-developer collaboration.

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Trying to be thoughtful. Design Lead at YouTube. Chrome, Expa, Lookout before that.
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Critiques are a time-proven way of pushing design ideas forward. Art and design schools have used them as key teaching venues for decades. And while common in corporate teams, I suspect they’re often underutilized.
To start, it’s worth pointing that critiques (“crits”):
Critiques are iterative sessions, where the design team comes together to comment on work in progress. It’s an opportunity to enrich solutions between the divergent/generative beginning and the convergent/decisive end of a design cycle.
Some of the advantages of having critiques sessions are obvious.
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
– Ken Blanchard
First of all, you get better results. The more capable, dedicated people look a problem, better the chances of finding an elegant solution.
Critiques also increase the chance of cross-pollination. When designers from different sub-teams or who are tackling different problems meet, they create opportunities to spot patterns in their problems and solutions and to rethink their approaches based on the big picture. Along the same lines, critiques allow organic consistency to emerge: if your product lacks a comprehensive style guide, they help ensure consistent patterns are used.
But what excites me the most about crits are how they can help a design team grow, both as a group and as individuals.
By having to quickly articulate a problem, its constraints and proposed solutions, designers exercise their presentation skills. By doing so regularly and in a safe space, they get better at it. And since crits are about gathering feedback, designers must be able to effectively articulate what feedback is valuable and handle it well.
Designers often feel frustrated by seemingly off-topic or untimely feedback when presenting to other functions (product, engineering, marketing, etc). What they often don’t realize is that it’s their own fault. It’s a designers responsibility to set up the conversation so the scope of feedback is valuable to them at a given point in time. Critiques force designers to do so, but in a safer space than an evaluative presentation.
It can also be hard to handle criticism in cross-functional presentations, especially after spending tons of energy. Critiques can help designers foresee objections, strengthening their designs, and develop the ability to handle them with grace.
It would be silly to say there’s one best way of running critiques. The art school model tends to be pretty brutal, and promote growth through negative reinforcement. Some teams love rules, some teams less so. But I’ve observed over time that successful critiques share a few attribute, which I recommend here.
Critiques surely work best when the entire team is in the same room, standing up, looking at the same screen or print-out. It’s hard to recreate that same dynamic for distributed teams, especially across time zones.
One definite requirement is a great video-conferencing system and screens large enough for people’s expressions to be captured. Good cameras where sticky notes can be shown are also important. And facilitators must pay extra attention to ensure everyone participates especially if there’s a significant difference in number of people between HQ and other locations.
To summarize, my recommendations are to:
And treat critiques like any design project: ideate, test, iterate. Don’t settle for this model, and don’t give up if things don’t flow right away. Find the model which works for your team, and you’ll be harvesting benefits for a long time.
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