Graphic design requires a certain amount of design ego that
has taken me 13 years to gain and learn to maintain. Ego begins with confidence and the confidence
required in a good designer must withstand harsh criticism, but a good designer
must keep in check the ego can grow like a weed from accolades.
Being a self-taught designer required me to think of my work as never being up to the standards of those designers who were formally educated. After a few years of making mistakes, some that earned me a good tongue lashing from my customers, I finally had confidence enough in my own work to lash back at some of the harsher critiques of my work. It is not easy putting your heart and soul into a design that is then torn to bits by someone else, most likely someone who has never used a design program and doesn’t know the difficulty in the task. Having confidence in your own work will keep your ego from being bruised too badly by the torn bits of a great design. I only recently gained that confidence, and now feel like I can withstand any critique of my work without crying myself to sleep that night.
My confidence came with one simple logo re-design. Twenty five versions of the logo later and my customer lost her sense of kindness. She started the conversation with “You must not have been doing this very long…” and I knew then that I was in for a long brutal talk. She lashed out at me for a while before ending her criticism with what has now become my favorite customer critique of all time. She said “You keep drawing in two dimensions and I only want one.”
I stopped speaking and thought for a minute about what exactly she was saying. I knew what she meant, but realized that based upon the sentence she had just spoken she had absolutely no basis for being so rude with her critique. I was astounded at the implications. I had always taken these rude critiques as being fully justifiable since I had no confidence in my work but with one simple misdirected sentence, my confidence had just broken out of the box I was keeping it in. I realized that it wasn’t worth my time to keep maintaining that working relationship and I politely ended the conversation. I haven’t taken another job from her since. Once my confidence was out of the box, it began to grow. I had to do some weeding since then because my confidence grew too bold at one point, but that is a story for another time.
Being a self-taught designer required me to think of my work as never being up to the standards of those designers who were formally educated. After a few years of making mistakes, some that earned me a good tongue lashing from my customers, I finally had confidence enough in my own work to lash back at some of the harsher critiques of my work. It is not easy putting your heart and soul into a design that is then torn to bits by someone else, most likely someone who has never used a design program and doesn’t know the difficulty in the task. Having confidence in your own work will keep your ego from being bruised too badly by the torn bits of a great design. I only recently gained that confidence, and now feel like I can withstand any critique of my work without crying myself to sleep that night.
My confidence came with one simple logo re-design. Twenty five versions of the logo later and my customer lost her sense of kindness. She started the conversation with “You must not have been doing this very long…” and I knew then that I was in for a long brutal talk. She lashed out at me for a while before ending her criticism with what has now become my favorite customer critique of all time. She said “You keep drawing in two dimensions and I only want one.”
I stopped speaking and thought for a minute about what exactly she was saying. I knew what she meant, but realized that based upon the sentence she had just spoken she had absolutely no basis for being so rude with her critique. I was astounded at the implications. I had always taken these rude critiques as being fully justifiable since I had no confidence in my work but with one simple misdirected sentence, my confidence had just broken out of the box I was keeping it in. I realized that it wasn’t worth my time to keep maintaining that working relationship and I politely ended the conversation. I haven’t taken another job from her since. Once my confidence was out of the box, it began to grow. I had to do some weeding since then because my confidence grew too bold at one point, but that is a story for another time.
There is very fine line a designer must walk, on one side is
the confidence to defend your work to those who seek to destroy it, and on the
other side is the extreme ego that seeks to destroy your working
relationships. I hope that my stories of
walking that line will help designers everywhere balance their design
confidence.
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