At work, [ yanks the soapbox from under mboncher - gimmie that :P ] I get to train people pretty frequently. Rather then critizing their work, I often get into explaining to them... here's what I tend to do, and here is why...

I almost never say I like, or I dislike... Constructive criticisam is not so much about personal likes and dislikes, as it is about technique and art theory etc... Sure, part of art theory is your general human psychological response to certain imagery, BUT... that's very general, middle of the road.

There are so many individual variations in individuals psychological makeup, that personal likes and dislikes of a single individual are not necesarrily constructive critique.

Also, a goal of a certain image, or a message needs to be considered too. If the image is suppoesed to be (happy halloween) scary, gloomy, ominous... it's likely to invoke negative emotions in the viewer, and a viewer may criticize it and say, I don't like it, just because they are experiencing negative feelings. Well... if the viewer is experiencing negative feelings, and that was the intention of the artist, then the image is a success.

What I'm getting at, when critiquing someone's work, the critic needs to be able to put a lot of their own personal likes and dislikes aside, and criticize someone's work based on whether it's conveying the intended message, and whether it's hitting the intended level of technical difficulty.

Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to put together some sort of guidelines on how to ask and how to offer critique... this may avoid too many hurt feelings and misunderstandings??? Sort of like rules/guidelines of the engagement? [yeah ... I watched the pirates of the caribbean, again, last night]

DRAC! [where did that fella go?], I hereby put you in charge of assembling the rules of engagement! May the force be with you!

Hi, my namez: "NO, Bad Kitteh, NO!"  Whaz yurs?
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