The last two days were quite excellent. First of all, it finally snows. Winter is not my favourite time of the year, but I don’t mind it and I like when the world is covered with a white blanket - so that’s good. And secondly, I got a lot of presents in the shape of compliments, followers, appreciations, likes and - the best of all - emails.
One big goal of my master thesis is “Bringing my work out there.” This is a side effect of my actual purpose to make my design better through feedback. And you need people for feedback, don’t you.
So in the last few days I’ve been thinking about this whole “showing your work” thing. I’ve always had a website; since I was 14 years old or so. I was fascinated by webdesign and what you can do with HTML and CSS. I’ve put my illustrations, some texts and photographies on different blogs and designed them. But never ever came anybody across these blog - and actually, I didn’t expect this to happen. I wanted to have a website just because it was a nice way of presenting my works - for me. I still like this aspect: Seeing your work on your website or Behance profile makes it look differently.
But of course, nowadays you want the attention. You want the acknowledgement and a lot of clicks on your “Appreciate it!” button. I think a lot of people use this as a nice and quite addictive way to boost their self-confidence; but a lot of people also think they “need” to do it because “everybody does it” and they will have “advantages” (whatsoever) when they’re applying for a job.
I think that’s not true. I think the advantages you have if your future boss already knows your work, are so marginal that it’s not worth sitting hours and days in front of the screen and trying to build a reputation. Or let’s say: I couldn’t take employers for serious if they hire the designer they know from a famous website instead of the designer who brings the better work on the table. (I don’t deny that reputation is important for freelancers - but for employees? I think it’s overrated.)
But I have to admit: Often that’s the same designer. Good designer don’t get famous overnight without doing anything, but if they start to show work, the audience will be there; appreciating, applauding, sharing. And Behance is great in showing you what “good” (or let’s say: widely appreciated) design actually is. I uploaded six projects to Behance, among others the one super big information design project I did in Oxford during my exchange semester and the internship documentation of my time at the Bloomberg Businessweek. I did the latter one in maybe 10 days: One spread every three to four hours. The typography is just bad. The magazine has no magazine-like structure or flow at all. In the information graphic, however, I put a lot of energy and consideration. And surprise: Apparently a lot more people on Behance like the Bloomberg Internship Documentation more than the info graphic.
Well, what does this tell me? It tells me that the preview pics on Behance and every other similar platform are so small and the attention span of the viewer is so short that…it doesn’t matter if you have high-end kerning. That the “big picture”, the quickly seen concept is much more important than details. And it demonstrates very nicely that Behance is not the best place to show magazine design: Nobody sees the structure. All the Behance user sees are images.
I feel like I have to decide: Do I want to produce nice, Behance-worthy magazine spreads; “images” that work well in my portfolio and convince the viewer quickly? Or do I want to learn how to make “real” magazines and spending my time with thinking about the flow and articles instead of the design? A compromise is possible - but I’m not sure if it’s the best possible solution.
But that the Bloomberg Internship Documentation is supposed to be my best work in the eyes of the Behance audience made me think, too: Is it just the form of presentation that leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance? Or - OMG - IS it maybe my best work and the allmighty, all-seeing, all-knowing Behance is right?
Suddenly I saw some beauty in the Internship Documentation that I haven’t seen before. (I bet that would have happened to any other project, too.) And I thought: Let’s try it. Let’s submit exactly this work to other platforms, too. So I did. I uploaded it to Design Made in Germany (as I mentioned two days ago) and got a lovely response. And this work will be published on Friday on the website of the magazine “Intern” in their “Talents” section. Which is great, because I like this (very young) magazine.
What I’ve learned in the last three days: The nicest part of bringing your work out there - and I didn’t expect this - is the conversation. When people come and talk to you about your work and you respond and talk about their work and you get some new insights out of the conversation.
In terms of my actual goal - to get people to give me feedback - this is great, because as soon as want feedback I will know some people who are willed to give me some. And it’s just nice to see when 160 people visit your website on one single day (which I, by the way, redesigned a tiny little bit). But it’s also damn time-consuming to prepare your work for the different platforms.