It can be SO hard to communicate your reaction to something visual using words. Whether it's negative, or positive, the words many of us come up with are often not very useful for creative direction.  But it is possible, if you can remember just a few rules (8 of them, conveniently listed here), to get the very best outcome from the feedback you give the designers you work with.
     Very few people - including designers - give really good design feedback. Good feedback should be actionable, but not prescriptive. Good feedback will help the entire team participate in the design of a product, and share the responsibility of  success, without creating ‘design by committee,’ which is a common way designs get derailed. Feedback that is given and received well should improve the customer experience, while allowing each person to add valuable insight.

The 8 Rules for Better Design Feedback

If you are a creative who's curious and loves expanding your design horizons, you will probably really dig this podcast. Unless podcasts aren't your thing, but then you should give it a try, anyway. 

Debbie Millman has been creating her Design Matters podcast for 12 years, and her experience as an interviewer helps make this one of the best podcasts there is on the subject of creativity and design. There are 281 episodes available on the website (216 in iTunes). Debbie interviews top-shelf names in the large design world, plenty of recognizable names like Clement Mok or Jonathan Adler, but chances are that most of them are people you probably never heard of before, who are doing really interesting and creative things. It's also refreshing to hear a podcast with just as many talented women interviewed as men.

There is so much interesting content here to discover that I don't think I'll have a chance to run out any time soon. Check out the website or download on iTunes.

Tim Brown was one of IDEO's founders as well as one of the founders of the acclaimed D-School at Stanford. Some say they 'invented' Design Thinking, others call it a branded version of what many call 'User-centered design.' Regardless, for anyone who wants to get inspired and learn more about how Design Thinking could help them transform their organization, this book is a must.

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

If you have ideas, you like doing things with ideas, or you want to generate more ideas... You should read this book. Scott Berkun is a 'Maker' thinker... which makes this book feel tangibly helpful. Thinking is great, but making, that's where we find our magic. Yet it sometimes feels harder than it should be, this maker-thinker tight-rope that we balance on.

It's a fun read, 'guaranteed' cliché-free, and will give you ideas to improvise, be a genius, and stay motivated. BOOM!

If you're interested in getting more strategic with your UX, or helping your product or UX team get more strategic, you've got to read this book. Jaime Levy is an industry veteran who knows what the hell she's talking about. And that's putting it lightly!

In this book, Jaime walks you through the process she uses with her clients, beginning with customer discovery and competitive analysis techniques, identifying unique opportunities, running experiments using lean methodologies, and mapping user actions to meaningful metrics. These methods work for enterprise as well as start-ups, and anyone can glean valuable insights for creating better products - that people want.

Most designers will say they produce better designs when they have constraints. And yet, the guidelines we use to kick-off design thinking & innovation sessions typically encourage thinking outside the known constraints.

This article by Lisa Kay Solomon showcases a great tool to use for understanding 'loose' vs. 'tight' constraints, and how to frame those constraints so you get not only big ideas, but the most effective big ideas.

(From the award-winning designer Ayse Birsel)

• Think positively 
• Put yourself in the shoes of other people and see things from their perspective 
• See the big picture 
• Collaborate with others, as this makes the ideas so much richer
• Always ask yourself "what if?"

When Fast Company interviewed former apple designer Mark Kawano about his insights into why apple design is so great, the article went viral in the design community. His primary message was this — design can’t just belong to designers… for great product design, everyone throughout the product lifecycle has to want, understand, and contribute to great design. What Kawano was saying was so core to UX strategists and designers around the globe, why did it sound so novel, so different than the companies many designers work at, or products we produce? My experience is that it’s fairly uncommon to find UX really integrated with business and dev, especially at larger companies. If you have it, that’s something special (and I would love to meet you!).

‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality 
Designers like working in design teams, and developers like working in dev teams. PMs work in business teams, and marketers have their teams too. Having centralized functional teams can make for better morale, increased talent acquisition and retention, and can also help distribute specialization across workstreams...  
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