We've started doing public critique in our Slack channel with a hosted one every week.

Dann Petty's actually hosting one today. Might be what you're looking for.

What's your approach to building a focused product? I feel like we always hear people wishing that all their tools were combined into some kind of Swiss Army Franken-tool.

How do you keep Wake focused when people (myself included) are always asking for more features?

1. I feel like we see an article with some form of "Hamburger = Bad" as the title every day.

2. Only two examples list statistics. One of those examples has an unlabeled Y axis, which makes me skeptical. Everything else is an un-cited "this worked well for them", "this didn't work well for them".

In.

I don't by any means think I'm a great designer, but I know that I've grown most when I built things and put them out in public. Whether or not they were actual products or just images I wanted to make. Putting them out in public garnered feedback and constructive criticism that helped me change the way I think and improve over time. I've also been lucky to get to know some really awesome designers and have learned a ton from them. Reaching out to people you look up to is vastly underrated.

We do something similar, but our team isn't all in the same place. So, I upload everything to Wake and it posts to a special Slack channel dedicated to design feedback.

Wake has been really awesome for us. It's like everything dribbble was supposed to be (show and tell, meaningful constructive criticism) but internally. On a team w/ only one designer, it also helps keep the critique focused - even with people who don't have any experience with design critiques.

I guess you could say I'm a big fan.

The biggest problem with this piece appears to be that the writer is using very broad terms to encompass all of "design" and all of "art". While I would define almost every example given as "art" ("modern art", specifically), Simon is drawing a very broad venn diagram which gives the two terms a lot of room to overlap. He says that "the handbook explicitly mentions that design is a combination of art, science, and mathematics", but I never was able to discover which "handbook" he was speaking of.

My concern is based on the fact that this broad generalization is what drives the people who hire designers to think of them purely in a visual sense - someone to slap a coat of paint onto a set of gears put in place by someone generating the real content.

The design I like to believe that I practice is composed almost entirely of the science and math portions of his definition - as much objectively-defined problem solving as possible. Then, after as much research and reason as possible is applied to the problem, is anything subjective injected into the matter. Ideally, this would be user research-driven and entirely based on the market that is being targeted, thus making it as objective as possible.

From where I see it, art is personal and very expression-driven. Design is impersonal and focused on solving a given problem for as many people as possible.

Maybe he pulled it out, but he used to have a little note about using your phone like a reasonable human or something.

Turn it sideways on your phone. Just do it.