Updated 2026-07-27
Booking an hour with someone to look at your work is an odd purchase. You cannot see what you are buying beforehand, and "feedback" could mean anything from a pat on the head to a wasted afternoon.
So here is exactly what the hour consists of, what you should bring, and — honestly — when you should not book one at all.
Before: what to bring
Anything visual you are working on or stuck with. A logo, a full website, a portfolio, a poster, a pitch deck, a 3D render, a video edit. Work in progress is better than finished work, because there is still time to act on what comes out of it.
Bring it in the form it will really exist in — the live URL rather than screenshots, the logo at the size it will actually be used, the portfolio as the link you send to people. Half of all design problems are only visible in context.
- One sentence on what the thing is for and who sees it. That single sentence changes what "good" even means.
- The specific bit you are unsure about, if you know it. Most people do.
- Any constraints that cannot move: a fixed colour, a client demand, a technical limit.
The first ten minutes: reaction before explanation
You show the work and say as little as possible about it. The point is to get an honest first read from someone who has not been staring at it for three weeks — because that is the same read your customers will have, and it is the only version of it you can never get yourself.
Then you explain what it is meant to do, and we compare that against what actually landed. The gap between those two is usually where the whole session lives.
The middle: diagnosis, not decoration
Most of the hour goes into naming what is actually wrong, in the order that matters. Structural problems first — is the hierarchy right, does it communicate, does it work at the size and on the device where it lives. Craft problems after — spacing, type, colour, alignment.
This ordering matters and it is where a session differs most from asking a forum. Fixing kerning on a page that does not say what your business does is polishing a locked door. Good critique tells you what to fix first, and just as importantly, what to leave alone.
The last stretch: what to actually change
A critique that ends at "here is what is wrong" has done half the job. The rest of the hour turns the diagnosis into specific changes you could make the same afternoon: this heading twice the size, these five spacing values instead of eleven, this section deleted entirely, this photograph replaced.
You also get told what is working and why — not as reassurance, but because you have to know which parts to protect while you change everything around them. People routinely fix a design by deleting the one thing that was carrying it.
What you leave with
- A ranked list of what to change, most important first.
- The reasoning behind each one, so you can apply the same judgement to the next project without booking anything.
- A clear read on which problems are craft (fixable in an hour) and which are structural (a rethink).
- Honest calibration on where the work stands — useful whether you are pricing yourself, applying for jobs, or deciding whether to launch.
When not to book one
If you want reassurance rather than critique, this will be an unpleasant hour and you should save your money. If the work is finished, approved and already printed, there is nothing left to act on. And if you have not yet decided what the thing is supposed to achieve, spend that hour deciding instead — no critique can substitute for a goal.
If you have something visual, a real decision to make about it, and the appetite to hear what is not working — that is exactly the hour this is for.