The advice I like to give young designers, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens.

But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case. Pull out your product and be creative with those materials and you will be inspired as you go.

Self-critic is good and appropriate but remember, there are hundreds of differences in the design world. Some you will resonate with and others you will abhor. So when you do your critique remember to:

a) focus on the style you work in and appreciate the others.

b) Watch out that critiquing does not become an obsession leading you to either hate –or love– your stuff. Allow your self to be proud –even when it could be made better. Also, remember that nothing is 100% perfect, always learn what you will do to make the next one a little better.

c) Don’t compare your work with the most accomplished designers out there. Criticizing yourself for not creating like Picasso is to be unfair and unreasonable to yourself. If you are going to compare your work to another artists’ work, then choose the work done by people at the same development nouveau that you are in.

Do not throw away our works. They are our only gauge to show our self how much we’ve improved over time!