My one (verbose) suggestion:

When critiquing, DO Provide problems, DON’T provide solutions. Instead of saying “replace the font with Arial” let us know what you are trying to accomplish from that. Does the current font or logo feel too formal? Let us know the problems, and we’ll find you a solution that really works. It’s what we do.

I would add to the Don´t something i always tell my clients:
If you anyway took it to the committee, don´t collect all the comments in one e-mail and send it to us before you first read trough them yourself. More often than not comment number 6 from the chief engineer will be in direct conflict of comment number 2 from the PR-departement.

And to the Do´s something vital (imho):
If you are not sure what you think of the design, sleep over it and take a second look tomorrow morning. This is better than to reply in 30 min with one message and then change everything with another message tomorrow.

@Able: Thanks for bringing that post to our attention. I’ve linked it up as further reading. Great site btw! And your company name is absolutely right on - I can tell you’re all probably smart asses just like us!

@Omar: You’re suggestions are great! I think we’ll definitely start using them for our guidelines.

@John: You’re cracking us up over here! Obviously we’d never say anything like that to our clients but it sure is funny.

@Geoff: Thanks for the compliment and feel free to spread the word!

@David: Thanks man! On your OT, we installed Live Comment Preview - its pretty nice but we need to tweak the styles a little bit. Do you know what the comments plugin is that you used?

Off-topic (sorry), how do you get that real-time comment preview to appear? Pretty neat.

One tip is to include the ’subscribe to comments’ plugin for WordPress. It’s definitely one of my ‘can’t do without’ additions.

David Aireys last blog post..Creative roundup 19 May 2008

If you don’t mind, I will adopt a few of these ideas in our processes.

http://www.lifecaptureinc.com/blog/

- For christ’s sake, please, for the love of god, say “Can we make the logo bigger”

This is a great! I think design critique guidelines for clients are long overdue. My clients are exclusively internal; they’re project managers who are engineers and scientist, and often have no clue about design and don’t really know how to critique a design using a language that a graphic designer could understand. Furthermore they broker the design work for their clients who are in the same boat. The end result is much heart-ache, back and forth and a much watered down design.

I think the guidelines can help steer the client and designer towards the goal of communicating with the target audience.

I would suggest to add to the list of Dos:
Do determine if the design communicates your message/brand idea clearly; jot down your impressions and discuss them with the designer.

To the list of Don’ts:
Don’t make major formatting/design changes that you think might ‘fix’ the design if the draft makes you unhappy. While you should trust the designer’s ability to properly execute the idea, it’s more important to determine if the work is getting your message to your audience or not and to describe why or why not as best you can.

(in so many words)