I wasn’t particularly nervous entering this course. I was excited to learn more about type but mostly I was very confident because I had been the only designer in my GRA 217 course and was celebrate for it. After class this week where I saw my incredibly talented type posters, I was a little intimidated. “I can’t do that!” I thought to myself. And then I came across this piece of advice: “Use your peers as tools, not as competition.” The best tool I have at my disposal is my classmates’ critiques and advice. In the future they will become my professional contacts, and we should all be dedicated to making each other the best designers we can be. On that note, another piece of advice that stood out to me was, “Don’t be so quick to say “I like that” or “I don’t like that” when critiquing your or others’ design. It’s a disservice to the art form itself. Rather than rejecting a design, think about how to improve it. Rather than praising a design, think about what you can take away from it.” No design is very rarely perfect. There’s always little improvements you can make. When giving feed back, be sure to identify what specifically worked and didn’t. By identifying your specific mistakes, you can be sure not to make them again.
In the greater scheme of things, building community is always more important than the work itself. People over things.