[No. 124]
Design
Sixth Inktober, done.
I'm particularly proud of this year's outcome. A big reason is that I've been able to apply more than my artistic skills compared to previous years.
Things like my design process, print knowledge, website adaptation and storytelling through presentation all contributed to this project. It lowkey frustrates me that I didn’t figure this out sooner.
What did I learn and how can you apply it?
A business problem I've been trying to solve over the last few months was to showcase my professional expertise without being super generic. It has honestly been very challenging to achieve. On one hand, I want to be professionally relatable, and on the other, I want to be unapologetically myself. It's a balance I'm still figuring out, but this project made me reassess my decisions.
When October came, I took it as an opportunity to test a new approach: unapologetically myself through art, brutally professional through design. I learned 3 lessons.
Make it real ASAP
A piece of advice I picked up from connecting with a pragmatic founder was that "in business, ideas are basically useless unless someone decides to buy in, and for someone to buy in, they need proof."
I didn't understand it at first, but I later learned that proof comes in different forms. For example, is it a final product? A unique way of thinking? Your social credibility? Or maybe a foolproof workflow? The more variations of proof you have, the greater your leverage in persuasion.
That was my aha moment, because if I had followed my past actions from Inktober, I would have completed only a final product and gained nothing else. Instead, I decided to make my idea as real as possible, as quickly as possible. It's why I've created:
3 different prototypes (product)
1 YouTube video (thinking/social proof)
1 website adaptation (skill showcase) — I'll share this soon!
31 artworks with time-lapses (workflow)
The thing is that doing all of the above within a month can be really overwhelming, especially when you've got 10 other things to do. Finishing what's needed, then documenting everything at the end might sound like the simplest solution – I used to do that but there's a better way.
Document your milestones
The problem with documenting everything at the end of the project is that unless you're an elephant in disguise, you're probably going to forget the stories and decisions that led to the outcome. On top of that, procrastination's real. The temptation to skip it by the end of the project becomes more and more irresistible.
Therefore, I highly recommend documenting through your process. This year, I did it once every two weeks. Once at the start of the month, and another in the middle. Both times were exhausting, but it allowed me to practice with low stakes and batch edit multiple videos for consistent content creation.
In addition to that, I would do a quick summary whenever I hit a checkpoint for the project. Some of which I've shared online, some of which I've kept for myself. All of which serve as a reminder of my progress as I continued on the project. Each time I did this, I would summarise the idea with fewer and simpler words which subconsciously reinforced my understanding of the card game concept.
It felt redundant at first, but I found a chance to share it with my friends at a party last weekend and I definitely stuttered less. As a result, I was able to share more about my project from different angles, and listen to their feedback without boring them with unnecessary details.
Nothing beats real time feedback
I've been sharing my project publicly for the last month. On average, it has received 8 likes per post with some outliers depending on the platform. And yet, the most productive amount of feedback I received happened in thirty minutes at a house party.
People seem to be more comfortable with providing feedback in person than online, which made it much easier to respond to their queries in rapid-fire. It was also really amazing to watch their expressions as they waved their favourite cards while explaining why.
Favourite cards by votes include:
Obstacle: Reality Rift (2)
Potion: Hope Fuel (2)
Wolf: Wisdom (1)
Location: Blink's Yatai (1)
Vice: Lust (1)
Aesthetics aside, I received valuable feedback on the game and its mechanics. Reality Rift and Envy seem to be the most overpowered (OP) cards of all, while others looked confused when I talked about the Location cards, cost of Materials (water, hay, wood, brick) to build Assets (houses) and Trial cards (push ups, pull ups and squats). One thing's for sure, almost everyone asked about the playability of the game, which made me feel more confident about further developing the concept.
Tldr; if you’re building something, show it to different people you know while you share it online. The best feedback might come from a familiar face, and thirty minutes of face-to-face reactions told me more than a month of likes.
Did it work?
On a personal level, yes. The art stayed mine, the design work gave it a professional backbone, and I now have four kinds of proof to point to: a product, my thinking, a skill showcase and a workflow. On a business level, I can’t tell whether it'll attract clients yet. That’s what I’ll have to test next.
What's next?
I'll be uploading a YouTube video about Yamageddon by the end of this week (it's almost done). Beyond that, my gut instinct is to let it marinate while I keep my client work going, so stay tuned for some project breakdowns and design videos.