Hi Everyone,
I am looking for some feedback on my student work for areas of greatest weakness. I want to find which areas to focus on to improve my skill. My next assignment has 5 different briefs that focus on different skill areas so I wanted to request professional feedback of my skills to see what to focus on for improvement. Thanks to all that reply!
Your illustration skills seem good. I’d recommend focusing on typography for aesthetics and readability. Also, this would be easier to determine if you showed the briefs, but perhaps working on communicating the right feeling, if you will, could maybe use some improvement.
Your work’s pretty good.
When you make the transition from student to employed professional, you’ll find your work needs to be more than good-looking — in general, it will need to effectively communicate with and engage identified target audiences in ways that help address specific business problems.
In other words, it’s a shift from the end goal of making nice-looking things to one where your recently developed skills will be used in the service of something else, like helping employers and clients to achieve business objectives.
Just as an example, if I were commissioned to design a poster for an art exhibition, I might put lots of effort into making the coolest, best-looking, most innovative poster imaginable. I might be totally happy with the way it turned out, but unless it served the purpose of enticing more people to attend the exhibition, no matter how good-looking it might be, it would still be a failed effort.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that it might be time to starting thinking along the lines of using your design skills to help accomplish realistic business objectives.
If you were in carpentry school, I might say something like, "You’ve learned how to use the tools, you’ve learned how to frame, you’ve learned the significance of load-bearing walls, and you’ve learned how to measure correctly and make great mitre cuts. Now comes the harder task of using what you’ve learned to help build a house in which a family will live, raise their kids and make into their home.
Hey,
Thanks for the reply! Yes, typography has always been where I’ve struggled the most I think. I really appreciate the reply!
Hey thanks so much for the in-depth response. I know what you mean, taking the work and making the objective be it sales, brand awareness ect. be the focus. I think in school we get caught up on making things ‘pretty’. Really appreciate the feedback and I’ll try and focus more on the business objective and real-world situation of the projects while I still have the safety net of school. Cheers!