designer thinks hes too good
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- cannonball19780
remind him that at the end of the day he's designing banner ads, not the queen's jewels.
- monNom0
I think you hit it on the head. There's no substitute for experience. If he's not capable yet of experimenting and expanding his horizons (likely due to not knowing the medium all that well), then even with some constructive feedback, it's going to take serious time to get him producing more interesting work. He likely has a good eye, but doesn't have the design vocabulary to push his boundaries and accomplish better work yet. Figure 2-3 years, ie: the period between junior/intermediate and senior designer.
In the mean time, you either need to be more involved with his projects and push the design for him. Or If that's not how your company is set up (ie: you are mostly working on your own projects instead of managing others), then you probably need a senior-level designer who can capably handle the demands of the job.
And I think everyone starts out thinking they're hot-shit. You don't realize how much you sucked until you're in it for a while. and probably 10 years from now you'll look back on your work and feel a bit the same way. There's a bit of a combination of hard-headed confidence combined with introspective self-consciousness involved in being a designer. You need to be confident enough to put your work out for rejection, and at the same time never be truly satisfied with the results and always push to improve. It may be expressed differently from generation to generation, but ultimately I think it's a personality type and not something you'll ever get away from.
- 2-3 years sheesh! im in for a hard time then lol
trooperbill - yeah lol "2-3 years" try 5-10cannonball1978
- 2-3 years sheesh! im in for a hard time then lol
- vaxorcist0
Print designers who switch to web have to get used to being less powerful, less important, less perfectionist, and less treated like the emporer...
They also have to admit they have a lot to learn....
and they have to deal with the web designers who might have wished they were print designers when print budgets were big.....
- Designers in general have been made less important by a number or other marketing types.qTime
- lvl_130
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- trooperbill0
i just need a route to aproch this subject with him without him getting all high horsey about it.
- Continuity0
Really, one of the easiest ways to get the ball rolling with getting his work up to scratch is to simply start telling him you're not showing his work to the client. You have a responsibility to this, actually; if you're showing what you consider to be mediocre work, it reflects badly on the whole shop. So, if you keep pushing him, he'll respect you and his own work more.
If that doesn't work, hire Gordon Ramsay as his CD.
- Yes.
Channel your inner Gordon whenever in charge of people. Gordon's fucking ace.mikotondria3
- Yes.
- dobre0
trooperbill, if you were his superior you have all the rights to trash his works & demand him to redo regardless his feelings, if he didnt deliver whats expected. why worry about him getting all horsey about it? thats his responsibility & its yours to get him delivers. is he the owner's son? as a designer i had my months worth of dummy literally thrown to the bin just like that by my then CD & got to redo in whole diff direction within 2 weeks, even when it wasnt my fault. stuff like that happens. be good if was delivered in a nicer way, but its just a job. if he cant even take directions & crits, he'll have it worst later. if you weren't his superior, shut your mouth ;).
- Josev0
Without seeing this person work it's hard to comment on this. We're only hearing one side of the story. Instead of bitching on an internet forum why don't you try find a way to educate him on what is it that you feel is lacking in his work. Maybe if you present it as "well, I understand what you're trying to achieve, but we're looking at it from this perspective..."
- mikotondria30
It does just sound like a maturity issue on his behalf, and an authority issue on yours.
What you need is a subtle but firm hand. The guy obviously enjoys putting in the concentration and time to achieve a good result, has pride in weaving in the details, but lacks the experience to conceptually step back and see the wider picture. At least he's doing it in the right order; what you need to do for him is map out the wider concepts of usability and demonstrate that detail and a crisp finish are the icing on a multi-layered cake and there are many other aspects to design, wherein design is a solution to a problem, in web page design the problem needing the solution is to communicate the client's vision as succinctly, transparently and effortlessly as possible. Try to find things other than web pages that he appreciates the design of. Cars are something almost everyone in his demographic has a deep attachment to - ask him what distinguishes a Korean compact from a Bentley - both are pretty crisp, one has poise and sophistication built in, with detail overlaid, the other doesn't. You need to locate that point in his vision where he loses focus and firmly and clearly take him beyond that. Don't take any shit - once he can see you're teaching him things he doesn't know, it should be easier sailing. Best of luck.
- omg0
Human behavior is so self destructive. It seems as if one of the solutions to work with your co-workers is to take their self confidence and crush it. Not everyone can channel their zen to match your own, or to one that fits your needs. And while were on the topic of personality clashes, there's also a job to be done.
- vaxorcist0
This print-to-web-designer's wake-up call has to come from somewhere else, as the local yokels are not believed when the ego is like his....
A huge issue with web and mobile projects is "premature finish" where somebody new is "polishing the fenders of a car that's a prototype", but "that car may suddenly have to become a jeep" and now "all that polishing is worthless".... or sometimes worse than worthless, as they may try to figuratively bolt those polished car fenders onto a jeep in order to save their "hard work" .... i.e. being invested in visual perfection when the underlying platform is in flux is suicide.
This is not so much a
- vaxorcist0
.. this not so much a matter of "pure skill" and "good taste" as it is of management!
.... who assigned this guy to work on web and mobile projects? Can he be re-assigned to work on the print ads/posters/publicity to sell these projects?
- Jimbo820
I keep checking this thread in the hope that the guy you're talking about finds this thread, signs up and starts defending himself.
- moldero0
- why does 80% of the tech world look like this assholecannonball1978
- I thought they mostly had red hair and goateesqoob
- CanHasQBN0
vandalize his car.
- moldero0
swap 2 of his keyboard keys out every other day
- kona0
i used to work with a guy like this as well. he was about 6 years into the company i had just been hired into. he was a sr designer/developer. i was an art director. he'd preach pixel perfect PSDs and make it a point to call out any design that wasn't. like in photoshop when using the ellipse tool, sometimes if zoomed in you'd get that fuzzy extra bit of pixels on one or more of the edges. he'd call you out mid-pitch and say "did you mean for this to be 121px, like as shown with the extra fuzz or 120px?" i let him act a fool for 2 months until he finally got to show the finished site he had developed off of the PSD. that's when i brought out firefox's pixel perfect tool. boy was his work off. and, i knew more than enough css code to kindly critique that as well. i said with this type of end result it wouldn't matter if the PSDs were pixel perfect, as he couldn't build it pixel perfect anyways.
that ended that.
short story long he disliked me from the beginning because he worked there for 6 years and i came in off the street as an art director above him. he held it against me from the beginning. he was later fired for posting his work, in progress on facebook, which was against policy and he'd also friended the owner of the company.
- nylon0
The geezer sounds like a bit of a cunt.
He'll realise in 7 years time that he still talks bollox, still thinks he's pixel perfect, still works til midnight every night, still on a shit wage and still on the lookout for a girlfriend...