Why Critical Thinking is Important as a Designer

Being a successful designer means being able to solve problems — critical thinking is an essential part of the design process, keep reading to find out why.

Why Critical Thinking is Important as a Designer

Creativity takes precedence above everything else when it comes to the innate talent necessary to be a designer. However, it isn’t the only thing that’s important. In fact, aside from the knowledge, skills, and creativity expected from a designer, the ability to think critically is perhaps one of the most fundamental processes involved in turning an ordinary designer into an extraordinary one.

Understanding and Interpreting Your Experiences

If you are in the profession, you most likely have the knowledge and the skills to get started, but it’s always going to be your mistakes and successes during the course of your career which will allow you to grow as a designer.

That growth, however, can only happen when you are capable of analyzing the experiences you are having on the job. Critical analysis is, therefore, extremely important towards understanding and interpreting your own professional experiences, so that you can actually learn from them to become a better designer in the future. A lack of it, on the other hand, will render most of the learning experiences meaningless for you, thus inhibiting your growth as a professional in the field.

Problem Detection

As a good designer, you will want to detect a theoretical or logical problem in any design, even before it actually gets the chance to become a real problem. Therefore, critical thinking is going to be key here, as it lets the designer think from different aspects and criticize the design from other points of view as well. Critical analysis provides vision beyond that of the first person.

Connecting Theory to Practice with Critical Thinking

Without the theoretical knowledge guiding you, any practical implementation would take a lot longer, as you would have to take the route of trial and error at every step.

On the other hand, unless you have really worked with the various concepts in designing and put them into effect with the help of your theoretical knowledge, the theory will have no meaning at all.

When you are able to utilize critical thinking to connect the gaps between theoretical education and the practical experience of web designing, you automatically become a better designer because it gives you the ability to improvise.

To explain how it is done, let us take the example of grids. When you observe an experienced designer build grids, you need to look at each and every step as a separate process and how each of those steps contributes towards the creation of the grid as a whole. It might take time and practice to understand and connect all the dots, but at the end of it, you will have understood the concepts clearly enough to improvise on the steps and even change them to work better in your own projects.

How Do You Learn to Think Critically?

Some people are natural critical thinkers, while others need to be taught, but both kinds of individuals will benefit from a specified course involving critical thinking.

When you are already a critical thinker, your mind will still need to be sharpened and fine-tuned. On the other hand, if you lack that innate ability to analyze, such a program will enable you to do so with increasing success.

An online BBA is one of the best courses to hone your critical thinking skills and it opens the door to better career opportunities with prospects of very high salaries.

Walsh University’s Online BBA in Management comes highly recommended if you want to learn how to see the many smaller pictures that ultimately make up the bigger picture. Not to mention, you will be earning a degree along the way that can land you with jobs which pay salaries close to the $100k mark!

Combine your abilities as a designer with everything you will learn during your BBA course, and the career path lying ahead of you will be a very bright one. Senior designers can even utilize such programs to gain the expertise necessary for launching their own web designing and animation firms.

Critical thinking can ultimately be divided into a number of smaller parts or steps, which may vary slightly, depending on the circumstances involved. In the field of design, though, it would involve observation, understanding questioning, concluding, and improvising.

A systematic approach via one of the programs discussed above will provide more clarity regarding the methods themselves, but even just by actively trying to observe and analyze every step while designing a website or watching someone else design it will definitely set you on the path to becoming a better designer in the near future.