Last time this was raised, Koiyu made a good point that there are already plenty of critique sites (with a selection of examples), and we should avoid duplicating them. So, when we do critiques, we should know what our unique niche is in the world of places where people can get stuff critiqued:
Our unique advantages:
- Better format for practical problem-solving and finding discrete answers
- More analytical culture, format that supports detailed answers
Our unique disadvantages:
- Format not well suited to open-ended, rambly or evolving discussions
- (currently, hopefully this will change) Less eyeballs
Therefore...
...playing to our strengths and away from our weaknesses, we can realistically aim to be the best place to turn for critiques that are:
- Focussed on solving a problem. Other critique sites often have a showcasing/self-promotion/gallery element to them as well as learning. People often put their best work up in hope of praise and recognition as much as practical criticism, and a large portion of them. Work with known faults gets shared too, but is not the majority and a bit against the grain. Eye-candy-hungry readers would skim or skip any line that said "The problem I want help with here is...". Here, however, such cases are an ideal fit.
- Looking for detailed practical criticism. Other critique sites tend to be focussed on the work, with people looking for inspiration or trend-spotting as much as to offer advice. Comments tend to be a bit shallow - lots of "Oooh nice!" comments with the occasional narrow comment like "Bad kerning between 'X' and 'Z' on subheading 3", or vague/personal/taste-led comments like "Nice, but I don't like those colours" or "I don't get it". Shallow content like that, here, would be neatly unobtrusively tucked out of the way in comments. Here, the culture is all about giving and finding answers. Our critiques are detailed; people look at critique questions because they want to give detailed critiques.
So, if you're generally happy with a piece, if you're looking for general open-ended feedback, or if you want to see how people respond to it in general, stick it on a site like dribbble with a basic summary and see what happens. Expect minor comments, and to need to read between the lines ("Only 6 people said 'Love it!!!'? And they're all people who work in my sector? Clearly it's not good enough yet... I wonder why...").*
If, however, you know you're not satisfied with something, you've tried fixing it and you have enough thoughts that can be articulated on why you think you're not satisfied that you can make a question of it that can be answered, put it here, with details that show that you've done some research and thinking already. If it catches on, we could reach the unthinkable but awesome position of being able to google some specific pure-design problem, like "cluttered report pages lots of charts design critique" and see an example of someone with a similar problem to ours receiving sage timeless expert advice that is relevant to us... and the internet will be a better place...
**(I'm sure there are probably beginner-friendly open-ended critique sites out there: since we get a lot of beginners looking for open-ended critiques, it might be a good idea to find a few, particularly ones that are web or UI orientated, and link to them somewhere (FAQ maybe?). This will make life easier for us and for them: we can just close such questions with a friendly link to somewhere more suitable for the asker's problem)*